Tierra del Fuego

by Francisco Coloane

  “Just go, and leave me the rifle . . . Novak won’t be back, so give it to me.”

  “So, you say he won’t be back, Schaeffer? I’m sure he will! I’m not giving you the rifle, I don’t want you doing anything stupid . . .”

  “Let me sleep, then!” the old man said, somewhat plaintively, and he rolled onto his good leg and made himself comfortable.

  Short as they are, November nights in Tierra del Fuego are pitch black, especially when a curtain of clouds casts its shadow over the earth. Schaeffer fell into a sleep as heavy as the night.

  He was woken by Novak shaking him by the shoulder and asking after Cosme Spiro. But Spiro was nowhere to be found. He was gone, and although he had left the rifle with the sawn-off barrel next to the old man, he’d taken his horse, saddle and all.

  Novak had found a decent shelter amid a group of volcanic rocks near the coast, and that same night he took Schaeffer there. The rocks had formed a kind of cave, and the horse dung inside it indicated that the peasants used it as a shelter when the weather was bad.

  “It’s all the same . . . whether he stayed or ran away like a coward,” Schaeffer said a few days later, discussing Spiro’s escape with Novak.

  “It did matter,” Novak replied. “The sooner you discover a traitor, the better.”

  “I had my doubts about you, too,” the old man said calmly, “but I was sure Spiro was going to run away. You just have to look in people’s eyes. He didn’t fool me. The only thing that bothers me is that he took Molly. How am I going to manage without my horse when I get better?”

  “We’ll see . . .” Novak said.

  Before long, Schaeffer had recovered fairly well. Novak had found a rock encrusted with sea salt on the nearby shore, and he had used the salt not only to cook the birds he killed but also to disinfect the old man’s wound, which was healing ­nicely thanks to the sun and the sea air.

  “Why’s he so worried about me?” Schaeffer wondered more than once, not realizing that, as a former artillery sergeant, the German had been trained to help men wounded in battle. Fritz Novak was a soldier through and through, and the reason he had led the fight against Popper was because the man had behaved like a feudal despot toward the troops under Novak’s command.

  Schaeffer, on the other hand, had led a life full of bitterness, ever since he had had to abandon his native puszta as a child to emigrate to America, and it had left him hardened to the behavior of his fellow men. To him, all men were pretty much the same, especially those who joined in the herd-like rush for gold. You could expect both good and bad from anyone, it all depended on circumstances. That was what life had taught him, and that was the way it had to be. He himself was just the same—he never thought of himself as either better or worse than anyone else—and that was why he was intrigued by Novak’s behavior. In his heart of hearts, Schaeffer considered Spiro’s behavior more logical. The man had run away from danger, leaving him his rifle in case he wanted to kill himself, but stealing the horse that might have helped him escape.

  Novak, on the other hand, who had been harsh and even cruel as the commander of Julius Popper’s private army, had put him on his horse, made sure he was securely attached so that he didn’t lose too much blood, and brought him to this cave in the rocks. He remembered the whining of the seagulls and the cawing of the cormorants, which had guided them to the coast in the middle of the night. The next day, Novak had found the source of the bird noises. Between the cliff edge where the pampa ended and the high-tide line lay an extensive shelf of tuff, and here thousands of seagulls had built their nests, laying their eggs in the holes the wind had hollowed in the tuff. Novak brought him a decent stock of eggs, carrying them in his neckerchief, and proceeded to boil them in the mess tin. These seagull and cormorant eggs were Schaeffer’s salvation. “Maybe that’s why he didn’t leave,” the old man thought. “Because he found food!”

  One morning, Novak hunted and killed a fine-looking female guanaco, with its baby. They roasted and ate the young animal, which was as tender as a lamb, and from the mother they made jerky, which they dried on the rocks in the sun and the sea air. It was turning out to be an easy life for the two men in their shelter behind Cape San Martín.

  More and more frequently, Schaeffer would drag himself out of the cave and use his whip to keep the vultures away from the meat of the guanacos that Novak, fine marksman that he was, killed from time to time. He gathered black scrub to make fire and took care of other chores in the cave while Novak went out to stock up on food—not a difficult thing to do, as this was the most fertile part of the spring in Tierra del Fuego.

  Bustards and wild geese as big as the domestic variety ­started arriving in their thousands. They had migrated from the north to breed in Tierra del Fuego, and later, when winter came, they would return with their young to milder climes. Pink flamingos and various kinds of duck also filled the lagoons and the streams that snaked across the pampas between the smooth ridges of tall, thick tussock grass.

  Like a butterfly abandoning the now useless cocoon in which it has been a chrysalis, Schaeffer’s spirit was emerging from years of bitterness and abuse and discovering that life in this desolate land wasn’t so bad at all. Both men had everything they wanted, and exchanged only the few words necessary to live companionably. Tierra del Fuego itself was changing, too, in tune with their spirits, as it emerged from winter, which is another kind of defeat, and a hard one, beneath its thick crust of snow and ice. The tussock grass, the only grass whose metabolism allows it to survive under snow, had reappeared and provided food for the guanacos, swans, bustards, ducks and wild geese. On the coast, there were seagull eggs the size of a hen’s, speckled brown and sky blue, like porcelain flowers on the dark tuff, and herds of seals started to swarm over the rocks and sands with their fine-looking pups born in the breeding grounds of Cape Horn.

  But every now and again, during those calm, idle days, Novak and Schaeffer would raise their eyes from the rocks where they had taken refuge and look around them like a pair of suspicious seals. They still feared the King of the Páramo.

  And they knew this wasn’t going to last forever. One day, winter would return to crush the earth, the wild geese and bustards would fly home, and even the guanacos would be few and far between. Where would they go then? Where could they fly to? On what wings?

  “Snail, snail, come out of your shell!” Schaeffer would say every time the weather was fine and he could offer up his wound to the earth’s eternal healer.

  Walking as best he could, using his rifle as a stick, he would head for the beach, to breathe in the sea air. One morning, he took a long walk to the north, across the dunes than run along the edge of the pampa before you get to the cape. There was another promontory between the pampa and the sea, rising in the middle of the wide beach of sand and gravel like a solitary medieval castle, with black scrub on top and bushes and flowers tumbling down its sides like creepers. To test how well his leg had healed, he walked all the way to the foot of the promontory and then all the way up. From the top, he could see the breakwater of the Páramo, and, to the south, the sandy beach that curves toward the cliff of Cape Domingo. The South Atlantic lay before him like a gray-green plain stretching away to the Antarctic, just as the pampa was a greenish-yellow plain extending as far as the blue mountains of the Carmen Sylva. These two vast expanses were garlanded on the one side with gray dunes, and on the other with white foam flecking the waves that unfolded on the wide gravel beach like roses.

  Suddenly, as his eyes moved from the ocean to the land, they encountered something else white in the middle of the gray beach, something that looked like the shell of a ship that had run aground. But he was puzzled by the shape of it and, taking another look, he realized that it was the skeleton of a huge whale, bleached white by the elements.

  Once more he looked out toward the limits of the Antarctic sea, where the whale’s country was, and then moved his eyes back again, as if following the route the cetacean had taken, to the
framework of bones embedded in the wide gravel beach. Then he looked at the surrounding pampas, the wall of clay rising toward the cape, the dunes like a calmer sea, and the promontory beneath his feet. “My bones could end up like that, too, cast up on the rim of the world!” he thought, with a touch of unease, as he turned back toward the cave.

  A refreshing breath of humanity, such as neither man had known for a long time, was gradually entering their lives in that remote corner of the eastern edge of Tierra del Fuego.

  Often they went together to hunt the fur seals that were arriving with their pups from the southern sea. After killing them with a single blow on the head with a stick, they used the skins for coats and the flesh of the pups for food.

  As the time for hatching approached, there were fewer edible seagull eggs, and the seagulls themselves became more aggressive in defense of their nests. While one of the two men made off with the eggs, the other had to use a whip or a stick to defend himself from the birds, which threw themselves at the robbers in angry groups. There were thousands of birds, and the sky was full of their squawking and the beating of their wings. They sometimes became such a threat that the two men had to stop collecting eggs and stand together, shoulder to shoulder, to defend themselves with their whips against the birds’ beaks.

  But the bustards and wild geese were ample replacement for the seagulls. They also arrived by the thousands, and the tussock grasslands were soon strewn with nests, with twenty or more eggs in each one. The wild goose eggs were the same size as ordinary goose eggs, the bustard eggs the size of hen’s eggs, and the taste was the same. The wild geese were easy to hunt—they let you get close to them if you were on horseback, but not if you were on foot.

  A piece of jerky shared by the fire, the horse they both used . . . everything was drawing the two men closer together. At other times, they wandered the shores and cliffs, keeping their eyes peeled, with that instinct that never leaves a gold prospector, on the rocks and the clay and the sand.

  “The other day I saw a whale’s skeleton on the beach near the cape,” Schaeffer said, slowly. “It struck me I could fetch a few of the ribs and make a shelter from the wind in front of this cave. We could even put them inside the entrance, with a few hides on top, to keep out the wind and rain.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Novak said. “But are you planning to spend your whole life in this cave?”

  “As long as there’s something to eat, I think we’re better off here . . .”

  “I don’t want to end up like an Ona Indian in a sealskin tent.”

  “I think we have to stay here.”

  “And do what?”

  “Look for gold.”

  Novak looked up. It was the first time the word “gold” had been mentioned since they had arrived, and it struck him as odd that Schaeffer had uttered it.

  “Well, maybe, but in another part of the island. Popper has taken over the whole of this coast and is planning another expedition further south . . . To think that, ever since we first crossed the island together, killing Indians, I’ve been watching his back! And now I’m hiding out like a cornered rat, hoping he won’t find me and hang me from a post!”

  “We should never have gone against him,” Schaeffer said, poking the few coals still alight among the ashes. “You have to howl with the wolf, never against the wolf.”

  “I howled plenty with the wolf. I commanded his army so that other men could wash his gold. Almost half a ton of gold in two years, in nuggets and dust! And in the end he said, ‘This is what I owe you for being my commander,’ and threw me a few coins he’d minted himself!”

  “At least they were solid gold and were worth what they weighed, not like those the governments make.”

  “But who authorized him to mint his own coins and pay his men with them? And put his portrait on the postage stamps he invented? And make arbitrary laws and have a private army as if he were a real king? Who gave him that authority?”

  “You did . . .” Schaeffer said, smiling sarcastically. “You liked being in command, just like when you were a sergeant. You liked putting men in uniform and hearing them call you commander. You felt like a general.”

  “I did it to make the Indians respect us.”

  “And after the Indians, we were next, so that we’d work for him without making demands. You helped him in that damned business because you thought he was going to give you a good cut, and then when you didn’t get it, you went against him—and got me caught up in it, too. And to think he duped us with the same rag dolls you invented! . . .”

  Schaeffer was referring to the colorful ruse utilized by the King of the Páramo to make his army appear much bigger than it was to the natives and the bands of men who were always prowling the Páramo in search of gold. Novak himself had manufactured a few straw dolls, dressed them in uniforms and tied them to the saddles of the horses. Then they were led in file by a single rider around the borders of his dominions, with wooden rifles over their shoulders. From a distance they looked like real cavalrymen, with the advantage that if they were shot they didn’t fall . . . “Those soldiers look sick . . .” said a man who saw them from a distance and later came to work in the Páramo gold deposits. “Why are their faces all one color?”

  So Popper had masks painted, with tufts of tussock grass stuck on them. Schaeffer smiled to himself bitterly, remembering the many times when, by order of the “commander,” he’d had to strap the dolls to the horses and send them trotting to make them look more alive.

  What most haunted Novak’s memory was that the same rag dolls he had invented had been used later to defeat his own forces during the skirmish in the Beta arroyo. Being familiar with the ruse, he had neglected his front and reinforced his rear, but, instead of the straw dolls, Julius Popper himself had approached from in front with all his men, while the dolls had appeared on his flanks. Thrown into confusion, Novak’s men had retreated, and defeat had ensued.

  The following day, Schaeffer saddled the horse they both used, and headed for the shore to realize his idea of making a shelter of whale ribs against the wind and rain.

  As he rode toward the skeleton, the horse began to snort, suspicious of that strange white frame. Closer still, it drew up and refused to move. Schaeffer dug in his spurs, and the animal jumped to the side, almost throwing him. He dismounted, hobbled the horse, and walked up to the skeleton.

  From close up, the size of the skeleton was even more impressive. The shape of the great cetacean, which must have been at least a hundred feet across, had been preserved intact. The bones of the head looked like a huge Roman chariot, the thorax like the hull of a boat, and the vertebrae of the tail like a monstrous snake buried in the sand.

  Schaeffer walked for a while inside the arch of bones, stretching his arms up, calculating the dimensions of the animal, which were remarkable, even though the vertebrae were half buried in the gravel and sand. He looked at the ribs one by one, and then, coming back out from inside the skeleton, began to shake them, as a first step toward carrying out his plan. They were firmly embedded, but one of them yielded as he moved it from side to side. The motion of the sharp edges gradually made a hole in the ground. By hanging from one end, he finally managed to get the rib free. He wiped the sweat from his brow, placed the rib on the sand like a curved bench, and sat down on it. He thought he would rest a while and take the rib to where he had hobbled his horse. If he couldn’t carry it over the saddle, he’d tie it to the horse and drag it to the cave. One rib one day, another rib the next day, until the shelter was done.

  He looked at his leather coat, which he had taken off and thrown on the ground to work on the rib. Frayed at the edges, its brown color faded, it was more like a piece of his own skin, which, in that wasteland, had become equally discolored and cracked by the elements. “If only we could get rid of our bodies,” he thought, “and grow new ones!”

  All at once, his eyes narrowed like those of a cat glimpsing a mouse’s tail. He rubbed them, as if trying to wake from a v
ision, and getting stealthily to his feet—again like a cat—he crept closer, as if hypnotized by what he saw on his frayed ­jacket. It was black sand, apparently thrown up from the bottom of the hole when he had pulled the whalebone out.

  He took it in his trembling fingers and combed through it. He couldn’t believe his eyes, but his fingers told him it was true—it was iron oxide, the thin black sand typically found where there is gold. To Schaeffer, that bleak, remote area suddenly became the most beautiful, most attractive place on earth.

  Stroking the black sand in the hollow of his hand, he approached the hole from which it had come. The sand and gravel had already covered it over again, and he started scrabbling at the ground with both hands, as if trying to force his way through to the center of the earth.

  Reaching the bottom, his hands stopped as if they had grasped the world. With his fingers, he felt carefully below the ground, and recognized the velvety smoothness of the black sand. It was iron oxide all right, a substance so magnetic it had disoriented the compasses of the Nassau fleet, the first boats to drop anchor behind Cape Horn.

  Schaeffer sank his hand in as far as it would go, until he touched the edge of the vertebra from which he had freed the rib and, using his hand like a pickax, went on extracting the evocative substance. He tipped some of it into the palm of his hand, and started moving it around religiously, as if his hand were a small pan. He meticulously examined every last grain of sand, but there was no gold, it was pure iron oxide. With lethargic gestures, as if he did not want to let even that sand escape, he half opened his fingers and let the grains run through them, to be blown away on the breeze. Around him, the area was once again desolate, the beach turned grayer, the choppy sea grew hostile, and the sky, in spite of the flashes of light through the wind-torn clouds, was like a merciless eye staring down at the scene.