The Wild Honey

I have two cousins in Salto Oriental, men now, who at the age of twelve, and as a consequence of deep readings of Jules Verne, hit upon the rich enterprise of abandoning their home to go live in the woods. These lie two leagues from the city. There they would live primitively on hunting and fishing. It is true that the two boys had not particularly remembered to bring shotguns or fishhooks; but anyway the forest was there, with its freedom as a source of joy, and its dangers as a charm.

Unfortunately, on the second day they were found by those who were looking for them. They were still quite stunned, not a little weak, and to the great astonishment of their younger brothers—also initiated into Jules Verne—they still knew how to walk on two feet and remembered speech.

Perhaps, however, the adventure of the two Robinsons would have been more proper had its stage been a less Sunday-fied forest. Escapades here in Misiones lead to unforeseen limits, and to such an extreme did the pride of his strom-boot drag Gabriel Benincasa.

Benincasa, having concluded his studies in public accounting, felt a fulminating desire to know the life of the jungle. Not that his temperament was such, for rather he was a peaceful, chubby boy with a uniformly rosy face, by reason of great well-being. Consequently, sane enough to prefer tea with milk and pastries to who knows what fortuitous and hellish forest meal. But just as the bachelor who was always sensible believes it his duty, on the eve of his wedding, to say goodbye to free life with a night of debauchery in company with his friends, in the same way Benincasa wanted to honor his well-oiled life with two or three clashes of intense living. And for this reason he was going up the Paraná as far as a logging camp, with his famous strom-boots.

Hardly out of Corrientes, he had laced on his strong boots, for the caimans on the bank were already warming up the landscape. But despite this, the public accountant took great care of his footwear, sparing it scratches and dirty contacts.

In this way he reached his godfather’s logging camp, and within the hour the latter had to check the boldness of his godson.

“Where are you going now?” he had asked him, surprised.

“To the woods; I want to look around a bit,” replied Benincasa, who had just slung the Winchester over his shoulder.

“Why, you wretch! You won’t be able to take a step. Follow the trail, if you want... Or better yet, leave that weapon and tomorrow I’ll have a peon accompany you.”

Benincasa gave up. Nevertheless, he went to the edge of the forest and stopped. He vaguely attempted a step inside, and stayed still. He put his hands in his pockets, and looked closely at that inextricable tangle, whistling faintly truncated tunes. After observing the forest again on one side and the other, he returned quite disillusioned.

The next day, however, he walked the central trail for the space of a league, and although his rifle returned profoundly dormant, Benincasa did not deplore the stroll. The beasts would arrive little by little.

These arrived on the second night—although of a singular character.

He was sleeping soundly when he was awakened by his godfather.

“Hey, sleepyhead! Get up or they’re going to eat you alive.”

Benincasa sat up abruptly in bed, dazzled by the light of the three hurricane lanterns moving back and forth in the room. His godfather and two peons were drenching the floor.

“What is it, what is it?” he asked, throwing himself onto the floor.

“Nothing... mind your feet; look sharp.”

Benincasa had already been informed of the curious ants we call corrección. They are small, black, shiny, and march swiftly in more or less wide rivers. They are essentially carnivorous. They advance devouring everything they find in their path: spiders, crickets, scorpions, toads, vipers, and any creature that cannot resist them. There is no animal, no matter how big and strong, that does not flee from them. Their entry into a house supposes the absolute extermination of every living being, for there is no nook or deep hole where the devouring river does not rush. The dogs howl, the oxen bellow, and it is mandatory to abandon the house to them, at the risk of being gnawed down to the skeleton in ten hours. They remain in the place one, two, up to five days, depending on its wealth of insects, meat, or grease. Once everything is devoured, they leave.

They do not resist creolin or a similar drug, however, and as there was an abundance of it at the logging camp, in less than an hour it was free of the correction.

Benincasa watched very closely on his feet the livid patch of the bite.

“They sting very hard, really,” he said, surprised, raising his head to his godfather.

The latter, for whom the observation no longer had any value, did not answer, congratulating himself instead on having checked the invasion in time. Benincasa resumed his sleep, although startled all night by tropical nightmares.

The next day he went into the woods, this time with a machete, for he had ended up understanding that such an expedient would be much more useful to him in the forest than the rifle. It is true that his pulse was not wonderful and his aim, much less. But anyway he managed to chop branches, whip his face, and cut his boots, all in one.

The twilight and silent forest soon tired him. It gave him the impression—exact for that matter—of a stage seen by day. Of the seething tropical life, there is nothing left but the frozen theater; not an animal, not a bird, hardly a sound. Benincasa was returning when a dull buzzing called his attention. Ten meters from him, in a hollow trunk, tiny bees haloed the entrance of the hole. He approached with caution, and saw at the bottom of the opening ten or twelve dark balls, the size of an egg.

“This is honey,” the public accountant told himself with secret greediness. “They must be little wax balls, full of honey...”

But between him, Benincasa, and the little bags, were the bees. After a moment of disenchantment, he thought of fire: he would raise a good cloud of smoke. Luck would have it that while the thief cautiously brought the damp dead leaves closer, four or five bees landed on his hand, without stinging him. Benincasa caught one right away, and squeezing its abdomen verified that it had no stinger. His saliva, already thin, clarified in wondrous abundance. Wonderful and good little animals!

In an instant the accountant detached the wax bags, and moving a good distance away to escape the sticky contact of the bees, he sat down on a tree stump. Of the twelve balls, seven contained pollen. But the remaining ones were full of honey, a dark honey, of gloomy transparency, which Benincasa tasted greedily. It tasted distinctly of something. Of what? The accountant could not specify. Perhaps fruit tree or eucalyptus resin. And for the same reason, the dense honey had a vague harsh aftertaste. But what a perfume, on the other hand!

Benincasa, once quite sure that only five little bags would be useful to him, began. His idea was simple: to keep the dripping honeycomb suspended over his mouth. But since the honey was thick, he had to enlarge the hole, after having remained half a minute with his mouth uselessly open. Then the honey appeared, thinning into a heavy thread down to the accountant’s tongue.

One after another, the five honeycombs emptied thus into Benincasa’s mouth. It was useless for him to prolong the suspension and much more so to go over the exhausted globes; he had to resign himself.

Meanwhile, the sustained position of his head held high had made him a little dizzy. Heavy with honey, still and his eyes wide open, Benincasa looked at the twilight forest again. The trees and the ground assumed excessively oblique postures, and his head accompanied the swaying of the landscape.

“What a curious dizziness...” thought the accountant, “and the worst thing is...”

Upon getting up and attempting to take a step, he had been forced to fall back down onto the trunk. He felt his body made of lead, especially his legs, as if they were immensely swollen. And his feet and hands tingled.

“It’s very strange, very strange, very strange!” Benincasa repeated stupidly, without, however, investigating the cause of that strangeness. “As if it had ants... the proofreading,” he concluded.

And suddenly his breathing cut off short, with terror.

“It must be the honey!... It’s poisonous!... I’m poisoned!”

And at a second effort to sit up, his hair bristled with terror; he had not even been able to move. Now the leaden sensation and tingling were creeping up to his waist. For a while the horror of dying there, miserably alone, far from his mother and his friends, paralyzed every means of defense.

“I’m going to die now!... In a little while I’m going to die!... I can’t move my hand anymore!...”

In his panic, however, he noted that he had neither fever nor a burning throat, and his heart and lungs maintained their normal rhythm. His anguish changed its form.

“I’m paralyzed, it’s paralysis! And they’re not going to find me!...”

But an invincible drowsiness began to take hold of him, leaving his faculties intact, while the dizziness accelerated. Thus he fancied he noticed that the oscillating ground was turning black and stirring vertiginously. Once more the memory of the army ants rose to his mind, and the possibility that this blackness invading the ground fixed itself in his thought as a supreme anguish...

He still had the strength to tear himself away from that last dread, and suddenly he let out a cry, a true shriek in which a man’s voice recovers the tone of a terrified child: up his legs climbed a rushing river of black ants. All around him the devouring army of ants darkened the ground, and the accountant felt beneath his trousers the river of carnivorous ants climbing upward.

Two days later his godfather finally found Benincasa’s skeleton, covered in clothing, without the slightest particle of flesh. The army ants still prowling about there, and the little wax bags, enlightened him sufficiently.

It is not common for wild honey to have such narcotic or paralyzing properties, but it is found. Flowers with a similar character abound in the tropics, and the taste of the honey itself denounces its condition in the majority of cases—such as the hint of eucalyptus resin that Benincasa had fancied he tasted.