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130 j C H A P T E R S I X T Y The Interpreters Return from Seeing the Xarayes Indians These Xaray Indians find themselves the possessors of great fisheries with their rivers and lakes. They also have good deer hunting .The Spaniards were with their chief all day. They gave him a number of trade goods and trinkets as well as the scarlet bonnet the Governor had sent along. The bonnet made him very happy, and he received it with an air of tranquility that was a marvel to behold. The chief sent for a quantity of headdresses of macaw feathers and of othertypesandgavethemalltotheChristianstotakebacktotheGovernor. These were dapper indeed. The Spaniards took their leave of this Camire so as to return to Puerto Reyes, and the chief sent along twenty of his warriors to accompany them. So, our men left, and the chief’s men went along with them until they got to the towns of the Artanés Indians, where they went back to their own country. ButtheguidewhomCamirehadgiventhemstayedwiththeSpaniards, and the Governor welcomed him with warm affection. With his interpreters from among the Guaranis, he began to question this Indian to see if he knew the way to the settlements of the interior. He asked what tribe he belonged to and of what part of that country he was a native. The man said that he was a Guarani and a native of Itati, which is on the Río Paraguay. When he was very young, the people of his tribe had sent out a broad call for a meeting of the Indians from all across his country , and they afterward traveled into the interior. He went along with his father and his relatives to make war against the natives of the place, and they had robbed those people of the plates of gold and silver and jewels set in the same that they had. AftertheGuaranisgottothefirstsettlementsoftheinterior,theybegan fighting with the locals and killed a lot of those Indians. They depopulated Interpreters Return from Seeing the Xarayes Indians j 131 quite a few towns whose residents fled to some settlements even deeper in the interior for refuge. But all the tribes of the interior eventually collected themselves to fight the Guaranis, and they scattered and destroyed a large number of them. The Guaranis fled in different directions, and their enemies followed them, capturing the passes over which they were fleeing and killing them all. The man from Itati made signs that some two hundred of those Guarani Indians who had swarmed around the battlefields never escaped. Among those who got away, he had been saved. The greater part of the escapees had stayed in the mountains through which they had fled, and they still lived there. They didn’t dare leave because they were afraid that the Guaxarapos and Guatos and other tribes who stood in their way would kill them. The man from Itati hadn’t wanted to stay in those hills, and he had gone back toward his own land with some men of his party who had wanted to press on. They had been surprised by hostile tribesmen as they went along their way, and one night his party engaged some of them and was slaughtered. The man from Itati had escaped into the thick undergrowth of the mountains. Traveling through them, he had come to the land of the Xarayes, who kept him under their control and nurtured him for quite some time. They ended up loving him dearly, and he them, and he eventually married a woman of their tribe. He was asked if he had a good knowledge of the road he and his fellow tribesmen had followed to the settlements of the interior. He replied, “It’s been a very long time since I passed that way.” When he and the others of his tribe had gone along that route, they had to open up the path: they cut down trees and leveled the ground, which was uneven and rough. “Now,” he thought, “the paths would all be closed in again by brush and undergrowth. I’ve never gone back to look at them or walk along them. However, it seems to me that if I started along that way again everything might come back to me.” He would know where to go. You could make out this path from a high, round mountain that was within view of Puerto Reyes. We asked him how long it might take to reach the...

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