Suddenly the rain came down in sheets, and streamed through the dense foliage. Francis gave me his gun, ran to a tooroo palm, a species which has no stem but sends its leaves, fern-like, from a base level with the earth. He cut off five stalks with as many blows of his knife, brought them to me and stuck them upright in the fork of a low branch. We stood under them for half an hour and never a drop came through, although three inches out in any direction the rain was falling in torrents. It was a wonderful example of a waterproof shelter put up in about thirty seconds. Can we blame these Indians for a general lack of industry, when game is as easy to obtain as we found it, and when one may build a house in a half a minute with a few knife strokes! During the entire downpour we saw only a Long-tailed Hummingbird[75] which unconcernedly searched the undersides of leaves for insects. Francis said its nest was hung on the side of the tip of a tooroo frond. A fluted tree of large size near us he called ballicusan, saying it was used for making paddles like ruruli. A section would look something like this: [Illustration: FIG. 133. SECTION OF PADDLE-WOOD TREE.] The folds when cut off are so thin that a very little additional shaping forms them into blades. As we were walking along after the shower, several twigs fell on us, which would have been unnoticed by me, as leaves and even branches are continually dropping in these forests. But Francis looked up at once and whispering “Baboon” pointed to where a great male red howler (_Mycetes seniculus_) was walking slowly along a branch overhead. A carefully aimed shot brought it to earth, stone dead. It was a magnificent specimen weighing just twenty pounds and the hyoid bone protruded like an exaggerated Adam’s apple.[I] These howling monkeys are of course not really baboons, as these latter monkeys live only in the Old World and have short tails; while the howlers are members of the American family Cebidæ. They are of a low type of intelligence and will not live long in captivity, being morose and sullen, very unlike other smaller South American primates. The hyoid bones in the throat are enlarged to form a great thin-walled bony drum, which is the chief instrument in the production of their wonderful voice. There were two females and a smaller male in this party, but I got no clear sight of the others after I shot the old one. As in the case of the deer, tiny burying beetles began coming within two minutes after the blood of the baboon had been splashed on the leaves. We had walked for ten or fifteen minutes after shooting the monkey when we heard an infantile roar from the remaining male. This the old one would never have allowed, so we had an interesting example of the almost immediate usurping of the leadership by a young animal, at the death of presumably its parent.