Tierra del Fuego

by Francisco Coloane

  One of the divers from the flotilla of boats, for example, was unable to work without his two quetros, which he had trained to follow him underwater. The quetro is a grayish-blue sea duck, the size of a goose, which cannot fly. It is so heavy that its wings can barely lift it above the ground, but it flaps its wings rapidly and kicks the water with its feet, leaving a churning wake like that of a steamboat—hence its other name, “steam duck.”

  This diver had raised them since they were chicks and, whenever he went down, so would they. They would move in front of the eyes of glass, looking in at their master and friend, he would give them a few little fish from the rocks, and then they would come back up to the surface to frisk. And so they went on, diving and frisking, until the diver came up from the bottom, bringing them some tidbits, and the quetros would lift their big orange bills to the sky and eat. When the diver got off the boat, the quetros would follow him to his zinc house on the coast and stay with him like two big farmyard ducks. “They bring me luck,” he would say, and never excluded them from his work.

  In the same way, the lamb had also brought luck to the Huamblín. During the four months they plied those waters, they had not suffered any mishaps, and the owner of this unusual mascot, the cook Villegas, had been transformed with time into a different man, a good shipmate.

  He would often be seen walking up and down the deck, followed by the lamb. Sometimes they would play, the man squatting and the two of them jostling each other, as if they were two lambs, or two children . . . The men on the boats stopped giving the lamb greedy looks, even though it was ready for roasting by now. They considered it the true mascot of the Huamblín.

  Villegas was another man who had come down in the world. Some had known him when he was a cook on the great cattle ranches of Patagonia, where a head cook is the best paid of all the workers. It was rumored that he could never again work on a ranch because he had been an informer during one of the many violent strikes that took place in the region and the workers had vowed revenge. But others said that he had always been a bad character, and that he wasn’t going back to Magallanes because he had killed a man, throwing a kitchen knife at his back. The fact was, Villegas didn’t want to be on the Huamblín. He felt that it demeaned his profession to be working in that little kitchen in the bow of the ship and serving that kind of crew. There was something disdainful and aristocratic about his pallor and thinness and, even though his character had changed, he still looked down on the others.

  All the same, the change in him was so obvious, he barely recognized himself . . . What had happened to the man? Could that little animal, huddled against his chest that night in the middle of the bleak Desertores islands, have brought out the tenderness that had been lacking in his hard heart? Or had some instinct for preserving that new life been awakened when he had cut the throat of the mother that had given birth to it? Whatever the reason, the young animal had established a kind of communication between this man who had always been surly and unsociable and the rest of the crew . . . When a stranger strokes a child, doesn’t he also stroke the father a little? Something like this had happened with the lamb!

  But not even Villegas knew what had really motivated that transformation . . . It was one of those inexplicable things, like a stone cracking open to reveal a seed inside!

  All that winter, the Huamblín sailed up and down the coast through the most remote creeks, fjords and channels, where the little boats were fishing for mussels. Sometimes, she passed through that huge cleft in sea and river, the mouth of the Baker, in the middle of the Patagonian Andes. The mussels were put into sacks and taken in her holds to Puerto Edén, where they were loaded onto the coasters that would take them north.

  The great oceanic depressions that come rolling in from the edges of the Pacific Ocean crash with their full force against those foothills of the Andes, which stand there defying the sea, furrowed with coves and navigable channels. There are frequent storms, and the wind howls across the coastal shelves, and sometimes roars as if enraged at being prevented from continuing to roll over the surface of the sea. In spite of its fury, the waters are relatively calm between the walls of rock, but sometimes a squall comes down in the form of a snowstorm and takes a cruel revenge on them, too. Then trees and native huts and even blocks of ice go flying through the air.

  It was one of these depressions that brought about the inevitable destruction of what had flourished on board the Huamblín.

  The storm suddenly broke around midnight. The wind must have been tearing along at ninety miles an hour, howling in the jagged peaks. With the instinct of an experienced sailor, Dámaso Ramírez woke when the initial massive blow struck, and his first thought was to cast off. But, by the time he went up on deck, the storm was so strong that the ship was already dragging anchor, and there was an imminent risk that she would run aground on the rocky coast.

  Everyone rushed up on deck, but even when the engineer pushed the engine to its limit, the schooner did not respond and continued dragging anchor toward the rocks, which were barely visible through the darkness and the snow.

  Seaman Alvarez tried to hoist the foresail to help them to maneuver, but the little sail tore like a piece of old rag. Taking a bold decision, which put the schooner and their lives at risk, the skipper turned the ship all the way around so that the wind was at her stern, and set her course toward a narrow channel he glimpsed between the rocks, putting himself at God’s mercy. The ship did not sink, but somehow, miraculously, managed to squeeze through the gap into the channel. Once the danger was over, she sailed between the islands until she found another anchorage.

  During the night, the only sounds that anyone had heard were the roar of the storm and the skipper shouting commands over it, but no sooner had the Huamblín dropped anchor in a safe place than a desperate cry was heard from below deck.

  “My laaaaaamb!” Villegas was yelling, running up and down the ship from stem to stern.

  Everyone was upset by the loss of the animal but, given how small the ship was, they realized after searching for a while that the sea must have swept it away, without anyone noticing, in the middle of that desperate attempt to save the schooner and their lives.

  The next morning was so translucent that Puerto Edén lived up to its biblical name. There was not a breath of wind on the immobile, snow-capped peaks. The sea, with that ineffable innocence that always follows its ravages, was playing like a child between the islands, gliding silently through the narrows of the Paso del Indio toward other worlds.

  Villegas spent the whole day lying on his bunk, not speaking to anyone. The engineer and the seaman had to cook for themselves and the skipper. The cook would not touch anything they gave him, and stayed on his bunk all that night and all the following day, with his face turned to the dark wall.

  No sooner had the second night fallen than a muffled cry was heard below deck. The skipper woke with a start, grabbed a ship’s lantern, and ran to the cramped compartment where the bunks were to see what had happened.

  “He was the one who threw the lamb in the water!” the cook said in a strange voice, as the skipper’s lantern lit up the cramped area beside the stern post.

  Seaman Alvarez lay in a pool of blood, breathing his last, a kitchen knife stuck in his chest. The engineer Almonacid was half sitting on his bunk, with his back against the wall, staring at the tragic scene with eyes like a sleepwalker’s.

  “Help me to tie this man up!” the skipper ordered, handing him the lantern and grabbing Villegas with both hands from behind.

  The cook made no attempt to resist when the skipper tied his hands together with a solid sailors’ knot. He sat there with his head down, as if crushed. Only when the skipper put him in the kitchen and padlocked the door did he start moaning and weeping.

  Two days later, a boat arrived to load mussels, and along with the cargo the skipper handed the cook Villegas over to the captain for killing Seaman Ruperto Alvarez while he was asleep.

  “I don’t know i
f the man is crazy or just evil inside!” Dámaso Ramírez said, telling the captain of the boat all about that strange act of violence, and added, “Apparently it was all because of a lamb that fell in the water!”

  It was because of the lamb, too, that the authorities in Puerto Montt, in the course of investigating the murder, unearthed the theft of the sheep from the Desertores Islands, and, while the cook ended up in prison for murder, Dámaso Ramírez, the former whaling master who had lost his faith in men, also lost his position as skipper of the Huamblín.

  On one of the small islands opposite the shallows of Puerto Edén, like a marker warning sailors of the dangers of the sandbanks, kindly hands placed a rough cross to mark the final resting place of Seaman Ruperto Alvarez. It consisted simply of two branches from a stunted oak tied together with a sailor’s knot. By now it must have fallen to pieces, or been uprooted by a sudden storm.

  FORGOTTEN LAND

  The farther inland we moved, the darker and more disturbing the landscape became. The grimness of some of the passes sent a chill through us, and even the horses pinned back their ears, frightened by something that could not be seen, but which was there, as alive as the bare rock.

  From time to time our path took us along the edge of a ravine and, at the sight of the raging river coursing deep below us, we hung there—men and beasts—for a few moments, trying to lean back against the wall of rock that was pushing us with such force toward the void. It was if we were nothing. All we could do was press a little more firmly into the stirrups and hold tight to the reins, and of their own accord the horses kept moving forward relentlessly over the arid rock.

  At a bend, with the slope of the mountain rearing up beside us, we caught our last glimpse of the sea. It was as if we had lost something . . . something we would never get back.

  Now we understood the reason for the overwhelming sense of anxiety we felt as we advanced into that desolate landscape. The sea, jealous and violent when you were in the middle of it, seemed from that distance like an immense companion, a vast, peaceful plain, and the very sight of it instilled not only calm but a vague, indefinable feeling of hope.

  There are landscapes, just as there are moments in your life, that you can never get out of your mind, and that constantly well up inside you, each time with greater intensity. That last look at the sea was one of them, and we kept turning our heads, trying not to lose sight of that hope before we plunged into this forgotten land.

  Our route, parallel to the Baker River, was suddenly interrupted by a sheer drop, and there before our astonished eyes was a magnificent valley, its pastures ruffled by the caged wind like the fine coat of an otter being breathed on by a furrier. It was a huge slash cut through the heart of the mountains by a massive glacier, one of those age-old, long-vanished rivers of ice, leaving a bed of clay that had made the valley fertile.

  We had to stop riding parallel to the river and turn south, along the edge of this other dried-up river, in search of another way down. Only after a few hours did the terrain begin to level off and we caught sight of the bottom of the valley, like a deep gorge in the middle of the mountains. There was not much light in the sky, but we could make out two things that increased our curiosity. One was that the valley ended in a thick wall of ice, wedged between it and the mountains. The other was a small, dark, rusty shack that stood beside a thicket of stunted, dwarfish oaks on top of the first promontory on the way down into the valley, like something the wind had blown there, which had somehow held on in this godforsaken fissure in the earth.

  We rode down and started to make our way across the plain, where the high grass came up to our stirrups. But a place which, for a few moments, seen from the heights, had seemed like an oasis of rest was now starting to overwhelm us with its grimness and solitude. The grass was abundant, as thick as if this was arable land, but not a single bird or deer or even snake broke the silence, which was only interrupted from time to time by the whirring of the caged wind.

  We remembered seeing something similar in the hollow left by a huge glacier in Yendegaia Bay, on the Beagle Channel. There, too, there were still traces of the age-old ice, but the difference was that man had brought life and noise to the place, and twelve thousand sheep grazed on its plains.

  We rode toward the shack. The silence became ever more deathly. Occasionally, as before, the howling wind tore through the hollows of the valley, then silence fell again . . . until . . .

  A plaintive howl startled us like a thunderclap and the ­horses leaped in terror, almost throwing us. We managed to keep them under control with the reins and the spurs, but—the horse being the animal most easily frightened by what it does not know—their nostrils throbbed, their eyes flashed and their legs trembled in a way they had not done on the edge of the ravine.

  Patting them on the neck, we managed to calm them down. But not a minute had passed before we heard the howling again, this time not as sharp or penetrating, more like the whining of a sick or injured wolf. It only took a few tugs at the reins to control the horses again.

  We stopped and waited. The silence was as heavy as the leaden sky.

  But, just as we were about to set off again through the pasture, a strange animal appeared. It looked like a spaniel but with a touch of greyhound, only a greyhound with a flat face, lips like a wolf’s and with long, thick, stiff fur on the sides, like that of a fur seal. It was an unusual mixture, as repulsive as a hyena, with very long forelegs that seemed to drag the rest of the body along with it as it walked. It had appeared very close to where I was and, afraid that it would pounce on my horse, I grabbed my rifle and took aim, but immediately Clifton, my traveling companion, took hold of the barrel and pushed it aside. At that very moment, a man appeared, walking through the grass. He took the dog—if we can call it that—by the ear and stood beside it, looking at us.

  Clifton walked up to him and said something I could not hear. The man replied in an unintelligible guttural growl and pointed to the bottom of the valley, as if directing us on our way.

  We moved on, and he walked behind us, still holding the dog by its ear, as far as the edge of the hill at the top of which his shack stood, but he didn’t let us get to it. He came and stood in front us, again said something in that guttural growl, and, as if threatening us with the dog, pointed at the nearby spur.

  We rode in the direction he had indicated, while he watched us from the slope. When we were out of his range of vision, we heard the dog’s bloodcurdling howl again. The strange animal was running toward us, but, just as it was about to reach us, another guttural growl came from the man, and the dog got up on its two hind legs, walked menacingly around the horses, then lifted its nose, let out another howl, and ran back to its master.

  After a while, as we were starting to climb the spur, we heard another howl, not as sharp but deeper, and we shuddered. But the man and the animal were a long way behind us now, and what we had heard was the howling of the wind across the dark flood plain.

  The first shadows of night were starting to creep up on us, and gradually everything became as dark and compact as a heart—the stony heart of that landscape that was crushing the last vestige of humanity in its age-old desolation.

  Clifton, to whose small ranch upriver we were headed, never willingly explained or pointed out anything. He let things explain themselves, and only when that didn’t happen did he intervene and say what he knew about the lake, the animal, the mountain we had just passed. I don’t know if it was wisdom or temperament that made him do this, but the fact was, you learned things better that way and remembered them more easily.

  By the time we had crossed the first spur and reached a broad slope where the forest of stunted oaks began, it was so dark that we decided to spend the night.

  Accustomed to surviving in the mountains, Clifton lit a decent fire, and we settled down to eat the jerky we carried with us.

  As we were making coffee in our tin cups, he suddenly said, “How do you account for the state of the man we
met in the valley?”

  Clifton had that habit of always coming straight to the point, as if we were already in mid-conversation and all that was left was the conclusion.

  “A kind of disintegration brought on by nature!” I replied, trying to be as precise as I could, but, realizing that it had come out sounding pedantic, I added, by way of excuse, “I once spent three days on some rocks, and, when they found me, I was virtually crawling around like a crab!”

  “I’ve also experienced what you call ‘disintegration,’” Clifton went on, saying the word as if chewing something tasteless. “Nature first ‘disintegrates’ you, then she ‘integrates’ you as one of her elements. In the first stage, you feel as if you’re about to disappear—and in fact, some don’t survive—but in the second stage you’re born again with renewed vigor. Maybe it’s her way of selecting what she needs and getting rid of what she doesn’t. It happened to me when I was young and spent three years alone as a shepherd in Tierra del Fuego, near Lake Fagnano. It was almost as if I’d stopped being myself. I ­started by losing the habit of reading. The subjects of the books seemed empty, unimportant. I preferred the rustle of a leaf to the most profound idea of Plato’s. Next, I stopped thinking about things, almost stopped thinking altogether. I was in a kind of daze. It was a cruel fate. Then I realized that the thoughts that had gone out of my mind were being replaced by others, and I started to recover, but my faculties had undergone a fundamental transformation. Things started to acquire a certain mysterious value. Moss, for example, was no longer just a greenish-black herb that grew on the earth’s crust, but something of more value that kept me company in my life like my dog or my horse. From the vague fear of the dark that I started to feel to the joy of dawn, which before I’d only experienced through birdsong—everything was there, in nature, and all I needed were my eyes and senses and mind, in order to see, hear and reflect.