Raimundo left the house before the sky had begun to lighten.
He took his lamp from the hook by the door and checked the fuel — the reservoir was full, enough for three hours — and he lit it with the matches he kept on the shelf above the hook. The flame caught and he adjusted the wick until the light was steady. He hung the lamp on the cord at his wrist and went down the steps into the yard.
He had been doing this for thirty-seven years. In that time the routine had simplified itself to its essential steps, the unnecessary parts worn away by repetition until only what was needed remained. He lit the lamp, checked the knife, took the canvas bag from the nail by the door, and went. There was nothing else required.
The canvas bag held the spare cups he carried in case a cup had been lost or damaged overnight. He had a set of one hundred and thirty small tin cups, ten more than the number of trees, and he kept the ten spares in the bag for the mornings when an animal — a capybara, sometimes, or a tayra — had knocked a cup from its wire during the night. The cups were simple things, pressed tin with a folded-wire bracket at the back that hooked onto the support wire he stretched below each cut. He had made most of them himself at the workbench behind the smoking shed.