Tierra del Fuego (2 page)

Spiro now also looked at Schaeffer's wound, blinking as if something about it troubled his vision. Suddenly, the three men all looked at each other—or rather, Spiro and Novak looked at Schaeffer, and Schaeffer looked back at both of them from the ground. Then they all looked away, as if they had made a mistake, but their gazes united again to look down at the bloody wound. They stared at the flesh through which the bullet had passed, thinking perhaps that instead of a leg it could easily have been one of their three fugitive hearts.

“Don't worry about me . . .” Schaeffer said again, in a stronger but colder voice. “Just keep moving.”

Spiro and Novak looked at each other out of the corners of their eyes.

“We have to find somewhere as far as possible from the road to spend the night,” Novak said.

“If you want, I'll go take a look over that side,” Spiro said in a low voice.

Novak looked down at him from his great height, his gray eyes boring into him.

“No,” he said, “of the three horses, mine is in the best shape. You stay here and look after Schaeffer, and I'll go. I'll be back.”

Those two black flies of Spiro's blinked at Novak. Then he gave a sly smile, and his eyes slithered across the grass to the German's heels.

“All right, then,” he said. “Go . . .”

Novak mounted and set off at a fast trot, bent over his horse.

The Fuegian twilight slowly began to descend from the opaque sky, making Schaeffer's face even paler and emphasizing Spiro's whiteness. Spiro watched until Novak was out of sight between the low ridges, then turned to look at Schaeffer. The old man seemed to have fallen asleep again.

“I'm going up the hill to keep watch and make sure nobody's following us,” he said in a voice as soft as velvet, as if trying not to wake him.

“Don't worry about me,” the old man replied, surprisingly alert, and added, looking straight at him, “Just take your horse and get out of here!”

“It's just that—”

“Nothing . . . Novak's not coming back. Catch him up.”

“Is that what you think?”

“He got away before you did.”

“Why are you like that, Schaeffer? You really don't think he's coming back?” And in a voice as subdued as the dying afternoon, he added, “How can I leave you here? You'll die of hunger and cold!”

“I'll shoot myself before that happens,” Schaeffer replied, and added dispassionately, “Pass me the rifle, in case . . . Don't worry, it's not to stop you getting away. I may need it later.”

“What do you mean, getting away?”

“No point in hiding it . . . You're going to follow Novak.”

“No, Schaeffer, I'm not giving you the rifle . . .”

“Why not?”

“You might do something stupid . . . you have to hold on . . . So you don't think Novak's coming back?”

“Why are you so worried about Novak? Worry about yourself!”

“It's just that sometimes, you know, Schaeffer . . . there are circumstances . . . If a man knew when things were going to go wrong, he'd behave differently.”

“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.”