LOWER DOWN the slope, the cedars and pitch pines gave way to hoolie trees — chiclets and sapodillas. They were full of gummy juice and they reminded me of our rubber making in Jeronimo, the boiling-sulphur smell and the sheets we had wrapped around the ice blocks. It seemed wasteful to pass by without slashing them. Many of the trees in this jungly part of the slope were usable — there were monkey-pot trees and palms and bamboos and even finger bananas growing among some deserted palm-leaf huts. But we kept walking through the high jungle. I saw it all with my Jeronimo eyes. We could have stopped anywhere and called it home and started hacking.
Father said, "I have no urge to do anything here. Those hoolies? I feel no temptation whatsoever to lacerate them and cook up pairs of matching galoshes. Spare those trees — let them multiply and become abundant. Yes, before I might have stopped here and done a little tinkering. But I have had an experience."
The path was a gully of dust, then pebbles and bigger stones. We heard a squawk behind us: the voom of a curassow. Mr. Haddy had beaned it with a club and stood there wringing its neck. He carried the big black hen by its feet, swinging it like a lunch bag. He said he would pluck it and roast it on a stick when we got to the river.
"Figgy hasn't changed," Father said. "But I'm a changed man, Mother. A man who refuses to change is doomed. I've had a satisfactory experience."
He talked about his Experience as he had once talked about his Hole.
"I had a breakdown back there. A breakdown isn't bad. It's an Experience. I'm stronger than ever."
Mother said, in a different voice, as if she wanted to change the subject, "I hope we find some water soon."
"You can go seven days without water."
"Not hiking like this, I can't."
"Pass Mother the jug, Charlie."
Giving Mother a drink, I asked her if Father had changed, and what did it mean? She said it was nothing — if he really had changed, he would not be talking so much about it. She said he was trying to keep our spirits up.
Father was still talking, but the thicker foliage muffled his voice and prevented any echo. This was real jungle, not mountain scrub anymore. The bamboo was dense. We were kept cool by the damp trees along the gully path. There were gnats and butterflies on the plants, which were like parlor plants but grown to enormous size — ferns and rubber trees and figs with spotted leaves, and some red and striped with black, and with a suffocating hairiness, as if they were growing in a bottle.
"Before my Experience, I wouldn't have thought of doing this. Listen, consider what we're attempting! It's staggering, really. I have nothing up my sleeve, and look" — he turned to face us on the path, and pulled out his limp white pockets—"nothing there!"
We stumbled along behind him, through the seams of green light. As always, his talk made the time pass. Mr. Haddy said if it wasn't downhill he wouldn't be going at all, and "We gung eat me bird."
Father said, "Why, I used to fix Polski's pumps and set out for the fields in the morning with more in my pockets than I have now. Or go into Northampton. Burdened with material things. Wallet full of money."
Clover said, "Don't we have any money, Dad?"
"What can you buy with money here?" Father said.
Jerry whispered, "We're poor. We're done for. We should have stayed at the Acre."
"Money is useless. I've proved that."
April said plainly, "I think we're going to die."
Father said, "Don't you love these clear skies, Mother?"
High empty skies, burning blue, and our tiny path beneath. It was stonier, and now bouldery — we were climbing over them, they were so big. Then it was not a path at all but a dry creek bed. The boulders had been sucked smooth by running water.
"This is the true test of ingenuity," Father said. "We are trusting to brains and experience. I'm glad Jeronimo was destroyed!"
Mother said, "Those three men might have been harmless."
"Scavengers!"
We looked up and expected to see vultures. But he meant the men.
"This is the way the first family faced things," Father said. "That's it, Mother. We are the first family on earth, walking down the glory road empty-handed."
"I'd hate to die that way," Mother said. She was still thinking about the men.
"There's a worse way," Father said. "The way they would have killed us. A scavenger takes his time."
The undersides of the boulders were mossy and damp. Here was a mud puddle, our first sight of natural water since leaving Jeronimo. Father said, "Water has a smell around here, just like everything else." But this water smelted stagnant, and dead insects floated in it like tea leaves. More was leaking from beneath the smooth boulders, and smears of it bubbled out of the bank and gave the clay edges of the path the texture of peanut butter. It drained on, became a trickle, and there was enough of it to have a sound like slow boiling in a pot. The water had a sickening smell of decay, but its plopping sound was hopeful, like a simple song. And there were animals and birds here — monkeys midway up the trees, and little agoutis beneath, and pava birds with crazy shrieks, and more curassows. If they could live here, so could we. In a dangerous place, all wild animals gave us hope.
We walked beside the creek for a while. The land was broken by level terraces. Father said, "This is how a river is born. You're seeing it with your own eyes. You didn't have to get it out of a book. This is the source of oceans."
It was as if Father had created the stream with his speeches, as if he had talked it into existence with the racket and magic of his voice. From will power alone, so it seemed, he had made the pleasant valley appear. We were in the open, under a strong sun. In the jungle I had not felt exposed. There were so many different kinds of tree cover. But this valley felt like outdoors — bushy walls on both sides. The stream, shrunken in the dry season, was a green vein running through the middle of a wide rocky riverbed.
"This is satisfactory," Mr. Haddy said, borrowing one of Father's words. "We can have a lanch here. Or one of them pipanto things."
There was a flat-bottomed boat in the shallow stream. It was a wooden trough, and a man was standing in its stern and poling it to a sandbank under some buttonwoods.
Father said, "I think I can take credit for inventing that boat."
"That a pipanto," Mr. Haddy said. "That a pitpan."
Father said that the fact that it was used by the Zambus and Miskitos made no difference. He had dreamed it up as the best design for our river, and he was pleased that the same design was used here.
"It took these people a thousand years or more to invent this boat. How long did it take me, Figgy?"
"We're being watched," Mother said.
The man had drawn his boat up to the sandbank. He stood there like a heron, with one leg drawn up, staring at us. He was very thin, not as dark as a Zambu, and had choppy teeth.
"Naksaa," Father said. It was the most friendly all-purpose word, meaning hello, how are you, good day, thank you, and all the rest.
Mr. Haddy gave the man his dead curassow and made it seem as if we had left Jeronimo and walked all that way and camped on the slope especially to deliver this present.
"He look a little hungry," Mr. Haddy said.
The man was examining Father with shining eyes. He said, "Mr. Parks."
Then we knew he was a Miskito, because Miskitos could not pronounce F.
Father said, "He knows me. Which is surprising, because I've changed." He smiled. "I guess I have a reputation around here."
Mr. Haddy said to the Miskito, "Yep, that is Mr. Farkis."
The Miskito spoke excitedly to Mother. "This man give me my garden!" He began to recommend Father to us. He pointed past the buttonwoods to a hut and some tall cornstalks. "Big one right there. Big tomatoes, like this one" — he made a fist.