With my friend, Hope, an honest forger, I went on far ahead and laid the course for the jungle. In especially dense parts we climbed to the summit of great jungle stumps and stretched a white sheet to guide the oncoming trail cutters. Day after day the score of convicts returned with their guards and at last we saw the path unite with an old game and Indian trail in the cool shade of the jungle, and Kalacoon was in direct contact with the great tropical forest itself. I have passed lightly over the really frightful pain and exhaustion which we experienced in the initial part of this work, and which emphasized the tremendous difference between the age-old jungle untouched by man, and the terrible tangle which springs after he has destroyed the primeval vegetation. After this came our reward, and never a day passed but the trail yielded many wonderful facts. The creatures of the wilderness soon found this wide swath, and used it by day and night, making it an exciting thing for us to peer around a corner, to see what strange beings were sitting or feeding in our little street. Before the trail was quite completed, it yielded one of the most exciting hunts of our trip--the noosing of a giant bushmaster--the most deadly serpent of the tropics. Nupee--my Akawai Indian hunter, two nestling trogons and Easter eve--these things led to the capture of the Master of the Bush: For nothing in the tropics is direct, premeditated. My thoughts were far from poisonous serpents when Nupee came into our Kalacoon laboratory late on a Saturday afternoon. Outdoors he had deposited the coarser game intended for the mess, consisting, today, of a small deer, a tinamou or maam and two agoutis. But now with his quiet smile, he held out his lesser booty, which he always brought in to me, offering in his slender, effeminate hands his contribution to science. Usually this was a bird of brilliant plumage, or a nestful of maam's eggs with shells like great spheres of burnished emeralds. These he would carry in a basket so cunningly woven from a single palm frond that it shared our interest in its contents. Today, he presented two nestling trogons, and this was against rules. For we desired only to know where such nests were, there to go and study and photograph. "Nupee,--listen! You sabe we no want bird here. Must go and show nest, eh?" "Me sabe." Accompanied by one of us, off he started again, without a murmur. In the slanting rays of the sun he walked lightly down the trail from Kalacoon as if he had not been hunting since early dawn. An hour passed and the sun swung still lower when a panting voice gasped out: "Huge labaria, yards long! Big as leg!"