Tierra del Fuego (12 page)

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 if 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.

 

 

 

 

 

T
he 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.

“When I left there, I had to make a massive effort to open a book again and to rouse that light inside me that only appears within the four walls of a house. As if we could take civilization to nature and nature to civilization! Oh, you have no idea what it means to find a hot stove inside four walls in the middle of that solitude!”

Clifton and I had known each other since we were children in Punta Arenas, and had later worked together on a ranch in the east of Tierra de Fuego. The way he talked was the way he lived his life—suddenly taking the most unexpected path without the least idea where it would lead. There was also that peculiar habit he had of talking as if what he knew, everyone knew. That was why I had to cut him short and bring him back to the original topic, which he seemed to have forgotten.

“But what about the man in the valley and his strange dog?”

“Oh, what happened to old Vidal is more than just a ‘disintegration!'” he continued, muttering the word with a certain irony—to me, too, it sounded more insipid each time he said it. “The thing about the dog I can't explain. In the Salesian Museum in Punta Arenas there's a reconstruction of a horse with a hide exactly the same as a guanaco's, it's a genuine cross between a horse and a guanaco, but I don't think a cross between a seal and a dog is possible—though that freak certainly looks like one. Just as Lake Fagnano changed my way of thinking, it could well be that this landscape, where even God seems to have changed, has transformed generations of dogs to produce that curious pedigree! Speaking of which, I remember once, on an island in the Moraleda Channel, finding a pack of mice that threw themselves in the sea to find fish and shellfish and coiled their tails around the trees in order to hunt for birds. Their tails had grown very long and their paws were like flippers. How did those mice get there? No one knows, just as no one knows how the Yaghan Indians got as far as the Beagle Channel! If, as people say, they were carried along in a canoe from Oceania to Cape Horn, then the mice could well have arrived on that inhospitable island in the Moraleda in a paraffin crate cast into the sea during some shipwreck in the Gulf of Corcovado! And besides, there are scientists who claim that the elephant seal, the leopard seal and the sea cow are descended from similar creatures on land that disintegrated and then reintegrated in the sea. In a forgotten valley like this, it wouldn't be so strange to find the kind of marine horse that some claim to have seen riding the waves. In this country anything can happen, and there have already been a few German expeditions that have gone up the Baker River searching for the plesiosaurus they say still live there.”

It was obvious that Clifton had completely forgotten the topic of conversation again, and that in the vast field of his mind numberless paths had presented themselves, down which he quite happily set off in search of others, and then others still, which seemed to proliferate like branches in a forest. As he was clearly about to become entangled yet again, I had to pull him out once more, even if a little roughly this time.

“That's all very well,” I said, “but you still haven't explained what happened to the man we met in the valley!”

“Oh, yes . . .” Clifton said. “Old Vidal . . . He worked in Patagonia for many years, and always dreamed of one day being independent and owning his own land. But, as you know perfectly well, there isn't a patch of decent land in the whole of the far south of Chile that hasn't been bought up by the big cattle companies!

“Vidal heard about a valley that had been found by some cypress cutters upriver on the Baker, and, after surveying it, he took the savings he'd made in all those years of struggle and invested them in sheep and facilities for a small ranch of eight to ten thousand animals.

“After much effort, he managed to bring the first flock and set up the ranch. There was plenty of grass. Things looked good. He brought his wife and four children out and, along with the six or seven farmhands and shepherds, they formed a little colony. They lived in houses with red roofs that looked like matchboxes in the middle of all that grass.

“He had found his ‘promised land.' He took the wool upriver on the backs of mules, and from there transported it to Aysén or Comodoro Rivadavia. One of his plans was to use wood from the cypresses on the north bank of the river to build big barges, in order to take his produce to the Messier Channel and connect with the boats that sail along it from the Straits of Magellan to the Gulf of Penas.

“He never managed to build his barges of cypress wood. If he had, he might not have changed into what he is today.

“What happened was that, one year, the weather was unusually hot for the region, so hot that even snow that had been there since the ice age melted.