nd of headquarters
from which I made several long excursions in various directions. Thanks
to my pack and riding mules I could take along, as barter, corn, glass
beads, tobacco, and cotton cloth, and bring back collections made on
the road. I was accompanied by a couple of Mexicans from this part
of the country and some Indians who acted as carriers. Of course,
whenever I went down into the barrancas, I had to leave my mules
and cargo in some safe place on the highlands and take along only
the most necessary stores as we proceeded on foot. On such trips I
had to depend entirely on the natives; they secured the food, and
selected the cave or rock shelter, or the tree under which we slept.

Our bill of fare was made up mainly of corn and beans, with an
occasional sheep or goat, and some herbs and roots as relishes. Corn
was prepared in the styles known to the Indians, either as corn-cakes
(tortillas) or, more often, by simply toasting the grains on a piece
of crockery over the fire. The dish is easy enough to prepare and
does not taste at all bad, but it is hard work for one's teeth to
make a meal of it, as the kernels assume the consistency of little
pebbles, and many months of such a diet lengthens your dentist's
bill at about the same ratio as that in which it shortens your
molars. You will ask why I did not carry provisions along with
me. Simply because preserved food is, as a rule, heavy to carry,
to say nothing of its being next to impossible to secure more when
the supply is exhausted. Some chocolate and condensed milk which I
ordered from Chihuahua did not reach me until seven months after the
date of the order. Besides, the Indians are not complaisant carriers,
least of all in this exceedingly rough country.

For over a year I thus continued to travel around among the
Tarahumares, visiting them on their ranches and in their caves, on
the highlands and in the barrancas. There are few valleys into which
I did not go in this central part of the Tarahumare country, that is,
from the Barranca de Batopilas and Carichic in the north toward the
regions of the mining place Guadalupe y Calvo in the south. By and by I
also found a suitable lenguaraz, Don Nabor, who lived a day's journey
from Guachochic. He was a tall, lank, healthy-looking fellow, some
fifty years old, very poor and blessed with a large family of sons and
daughters, some of them full grown. All his life he had been intimate
with the Indians; he spoke thei