Word: motilones
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Dates: during 1947-1947
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...jungle valleys, back from the southwest shore of Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela, live the world's most determined isolationists: the celebrated Motilon Indians. They are naked, few in number and disunited. Airplanes fly over their territory; the modern machines of U.S. and British oil companies clank around their borders. But the Motilones, not budging an inch, go right on in the old ways: slipping through the tangled jungle, invisible as the wind, silent as their heavy arrows that can slam through a grown man's chest and out the other side...
...Holders circled the Motilon territory, visiting towns in Venezuela and Colombia which had been close and nervous neighbors of the Motilones for several hundred years. heard enough Indian tales to fill a dozen pulp magazines, but they could not find a single "acultural individual." The Spanish-speaking frontiersmen, many of them outlaws, are tough characters themselves. But none had been tough enough to take up life among the Indians. No Motilon deserter to the out side world was ever found...
Deep in the jungle on the southern fringe of Motilon territory, Holder did find one Indian who lived with an old woman, presumably his mother. His house was of hardwood poles with attic loopholes for last-ditch defense. Around it were three concentric palisades. Holder crawled through small holes in the defenses and interviewed the Indian, who was friendly enough not to shoot...
...anthropologist learned ten words of an unknown tongue, but concluded that his host was not a genuine Motilon...