Amazon Nights: Classic Adventure Tales From the Pulps by Arthur O. Friel

Author:Arthur O. Friel [Friel, Arthur O.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780809511990
Amazon: 0809511991
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2005-04-21T04:00:00+00:00

THE BOUTO

NO, SENHOR, that loud snort which sounded from the river just now was not made by an alligator. I do not wonder that you thought so, for this upper Amazon is full of alligators big and small—jacaré uassú, jacaré tinga, jacaré curúa, and others not so common—and the alligator, like other beasts, has his night call. But the sound which you heard was made by a river animal far more graceful and less dangerous—a dolphin.

Look! Over there you can see its back fin glisten in the moonlight. Ah, it is gone. It has dived, and by the time it rises again this steamer will be so far downstream that we shall see it no more.

What is that? You would like to take a shot at one? If you will pardon me, I would urge you to do no such thing. You might be so unfortunate as to kill it with your heavy bullet. Have not you and your companion learned, while exploring our Amazon headwaters, that to kill a bouto is bad luck?

Indeed it is true, senhores. Everyone on the river knows that. If you do not believe it, tell some Indian that you want dolphin oil to burn in your lantern and that you will pay him well to harpoon one for you. He will answer that blindness creeps on those who use the oil of the bouto for light, and that even worse fortune falls on him who slays the fish.

He may tell you, too, the legend of the Bouto Woman, which you perhaps have heard before. No? At our river towns the tale is told that sometimes the bouto turns itself into a handsome girl whose hair is so long that it sweeps on the ground behind her when she walks. Leaving the water at night, she strolls about until she meets a man. She smiles on him and coaxes him to walk down to the riverside, saying that there they will be alone. And if he goes with her he goes to death. For at the edge of the water she seizes him around the body and leaps with him into the flood, and he is gone for all time.

Yes, it is an odd tale, as you say. But, senhores, an odd story is not always untrue. I will not say that I believe the bouto itself does this, yet—well, you North Americans have a saying, have you not, that “where there is smoke there is fire"? And queer things sometimes come about on this Amazon of ours and on the jungle rivers which flow into it—happenings which the great world outside never knows. I myself, a rubber-worker of the Javary region, have seen some such things. And now that we speak of the Bouto Woman I can tell you of something which I saw not very long ago.

The great annual flood, which turns nearly one-third of our Brazil into a vast tree-choked sea, was nearly at its end. Indeed, the flood itself was long past, and in many places the wet land had risen once more above the water.

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