 4 I remember, better than any orchard, grove, or wood I had ever entered, or would I ever entered, or seen? Do I remember that shady oasis of trees at my new home on the ill-embittable grassy plain? Up till now I had never lived with trees, except in those twenty-five I have told about, and that other one which was called Ellariball, because it was the only tree of its kind in all the land. Here there were hundreds, thousands of trees, and to my childish unaccustomed eyes, it was like a great unexplored forest. There were no pines, fares, nor eucalyptus, unknown in the country then, nor evergreens of any kind. The trees, being all decidious, were leafless in the midwinter, but even so, it was to me a wonderful experience to be among them, to feel and smell their rough moist bark, stained green with moss, and to look up at the blue sky through the network of interlacing twigs, and spring, with foliage and blossom, would be with us by and by in a month or two. Even now, in midwinter, there was a foretaste of it, and it came to us first as a delicious fragrance in the air, at one spot beside a row of old, lombardy poplars, an odour that to the child is like wine that maketh the heart glad to the adult. Here, at the roots of the poplars, there was a bed or carpet of round leaves, which we knew well, and putting the clusters apart with a hand, lo, there were the violets already open, the dim, purple-blue hidden violets, the earliest sweetest of all flowers, the most loved by children in that land, and doubtless in many other There was more than time enough for us small children to feast on violets and run wild in our forest, since, for several weeks, we were encouraged to live out of doors, as far away as we could keep from the house where we were not wanted. For just then great alterations were being made to render it habitable, new rooms were being added onto the old building, wooden flooring laid over the old bricks and tiles, and the half-rotten thatch, a haunt of rats in the home of centipedes, and of many other hibernating creeping things, was being stripped off to be replaced by a clean, healthy wooden roof. For me it was no hardship to be sent away to make my playground in that wooded wonderland. The trees, both fruit and shade, were of many kinds, and belonged to two widely separated periods. The first were the old trees, planted by some tree-loving owner a century or more before our time, and the second, the others which had been put in a generation or two later, to fill up some gaps and vacant places, and for the sake of a greater variety. The biggest of the old trees, which I shall describe first, was a red willow growing by itself within forty yards of the house. This is a native tree, and derives its specific name, rubra, as well as its vernacular name, from the reddish colour of the rough bark. It grows to a great size, like the black poplar, but as long narrow leaves like those of the weeping willow. In summer I was never tired of watching this tree, since high up in one of the branches, which in those days seemed to me so close against the sky. A scissor-tail tyrant bird always had its nest, and this high, open, exposed nest was a constant attraction to the common brown carrion hawk, called Shimango, a hawk with the carrion crow's habit of perpetually loitering about in search of eggs and fledglings. The scissor-tail is one of the most courageous of that hawk-hating, violent-tempered tyrant bird family, and every time a Shimango appeared, which was about forty times a day, he would sally out to attack him in mid-air with amazing fury. The marauder driven off, he would return to the tree to utter his triumphant rattling, cast a net-like note, and, no doubt, to receive the congratulations of his mate, then to settle down again to watch the sky for the appearance of the next Shimango. A second red willow was the next largest tree in the plantation, but of this willow I shall have more to say in a later chapter. The tall-on-body poplars were the most numerous of the older trees, and grew in double rows, forming walks or avenues, on three sides of the entire enclosed ground. There was also a cross-row of poplars, dividing the gardens and buildings from the plantation, and these were the favourite nesting-trees of two of our best-loved birds. The beautiful little golden finch, or Argentine ciskin, and the bird called firewood-gatherer by the natives, on account of the enormous collection of sticks which formed the nest. Between the border-popular walk and the farce outside, there grew a single row of trees of a very different kind. The black acacia, a rare and singular tree, and of all our trees, this were made the strongest and sharpest impression on my mind, as well as flesh, pricking its image in me, so to speak. It had probably been planted originally by the early first planter, and I imagine experimentally, as a possible improvement on the widespreading disorderly aloe, a favourite with the first settlers. But it is a wild, lawless plant, and has refused to make a proper hedge. Some of these acacias had remained small, and were like old, scraggly bushes. Some were dwarfish trees, while others had sprung up like the fabled beanstalk, and were as tall as the poplars that grew side by side with them. These tall specimens had slender bowls, and throughout their slender horizontal branches of great length on all sides. From the roots to the crown, the branches and the bowl itself, being armed with thorns, two to four inches long, hard as iron, black or chocolate brown, polished and sharp as needles. And to make itself more formidable, every long thorn had two smaller thorns growing out of it near the base, so that it was in shape, like a round, tapering dagger, with a crossguard to the handle. It was a terrible tree to climb, yet, when a little older, I had to climb it a thousand times, since there were certain birds which would make their nests in it, often as high up as they could, and some of these were birds that laid beautiful eggs, such as those of the Gheera cuckoo, the size of Pulitz eggs, of the purest turquoise blue, flecked with snowy white. Among our old or ancient trees, the peach was the favourite of the whole house, on account of the fruit it gave us in February and March, or so later in April and May, when what we called our winter peach ripened. Peach, quince, and cherry were the three favourite fruit trees in the colonial times, and all three were found in some of the quintars, or orchards, of the old distancia houses. We had a score of quince trees, with thick, gnarled trunks, and old twisted branches like ramshorns, but the peach trees numbered about four to five hundred, and grew well apart from one another, and was certainly the largest I have ever seen. Their size was equal to that of the oldest and largest cherry trees, one sees in certain favourite spots in southern England, where they grow not in close formation, but wide apart, with ample room for the branches to spread out on all sides. The trees planted by a later generation, both shade and fruit, were more varied. The most abundant was the mulberry, of which there were many hundreds, mostly in rows, forming walks, and, albeit of the same species as our English mulberry, they differed from it in the great size and roughness of the leaves, and in producing fruit of a much smaller size. The taste of the fruit was also less luscious, and it was rarely eaten by our elders. We small children feasted on it, but it was mostly for the birds. The mulberry was looked on as a shade, not a fruit tree. And the other two most important shade trees, in number, were the acacia blanca, or false acacia, and the paradise tree, or pride of China. Besides these, there were row of eight or ten elanthus trees, or tree of heaven, as it is sometimes called, with tall white smooth trunk, crowned with a cluster of palm-like foliage. There was also a modern orchard, containing pear, apple, plum, and cherry trees. The entire plantation, the buildings included, comprising an area of eight or nine acres, was surrounded by an immense ditch, or fos, about twelve feet deep, and twenty to thirty feet wide. It was undoubtedly very old, and had grown in width, owing to the crumbling away of the earth at the sides. This, in time, would have filled and almost obliterated it, but at intervals of two or three years, at a time when it was dry, quantities of earth were dug up from the bottom, and thrown on the mound instead. It was in appearance something like a prehistoric earthwork. In winter, as a rule, it became full of water, and was a favourite haunt, especially at night, of flocks of teal, or so dark of other kinds, whigen, pintail, and shoveler. In summer it gradually dried up, but a few pools of muddy water usually remained through all the hot season, and were hunted by the solitary or summer snipe, one of the many species of sandpiper and birds of that family, which bred in the northern hemisphere, and wintered with us when it was our summer. Once the water had gone down in the moat, long grass and herbage would spring up, and flourish on its sloping sides, and the rats and other small beasties would return, and riddle it with innumerable burrows. The rats were killed down from time to time with the smoking machine, which pumped the fuels of sulfur, bad tobacco, and other deadly substances into their holes, and suffocated them, and I recall two curious incidents during these crusades. One day I was standing on the mound at the side of the moat, or fos, some forty yards from where the men were at work, when an armadillo bolted from his earth, and running to the very spot where I was standing began vigorously digging to escape by burying himself in the soil. Neither men nor dogs had seen him, and I at once determined to capture him unaided by anyone, and imagined it would prove a very easy task. Accordingly, I laid hold of his black bone-cased tail with both hands, and began tugging to get him off the ground, but couldn't move him. He went on digging furiously, getting deeper and deeper into the earth, and I soon found that instead of my pulling him out, he was pulling me in after him. It hurt my small boy pride to think that an animal, no bigger than a cat, was going to beat me in a trial of strength, and this made me hold on more tenaciously than ever, and tug and strain more violently. Until, not to lose him, I had to go flat down on the ground, but it was all for nothing. First my hands, then my aching arms were carried down into the earth, and I was forced to release my hold, and get up to rid myself of the mould he had been throwing up into my face, and all over my head, neck, and shoulders. In the other case, one of my older brothers, seeing the dog sniffing and scratching at a large burrow, took a spade, and dug a couple of feet into the soil, and found an adult black-and-white opossum, with eight or nine half-grown young, lying together in a nest of dry grass, and, wonderful to tell, a large venomous snake coiled up amongst them. The snake was the dreaded Vivore de la Cruz, as the gauchos call it, a pit viper of the same family as the fur de lance, the bush master, and the rattlesnake. It was about three feet long, very thick in proportion, and with broad head and blunt tail. It came forth hissing and striking blindly right and left, when the dogs pulled the opossums out, but was killed with a blow of the spade, without injuring the dogs. This was the first serpent with a cross I had seen, and the sight of the thick, blunt body of a greyish green colour, blotched with dull black, and the broad flat head with its stony white, lidless eyes, gave me a thrill of horror. In after years I became familiar with it, and could even venture to pick it up without harm to myself. Just as now, in England, I pick up the less dangerous adder when I come upon one. The wonder to us was that this extremely erasable and venomous serpent should be living in a nest with a large family of opossums, for it must be borne in mind that the opossum is as rapacious and an exceedingly savage-tempered beast. This, then, was the world in which I moved, and had my being, within the limits of the old rat-haunted fos among the enchanted trees. But it was not the trees only that made it so fascinating. It had open spaces and other forms of vegetation, which were exceedingly attractive too. There was a field of alfalfa, about half an acre in size, which flowered three times a year, and during the flowering time it drew the butterflies from all the surrounding plain, with its luscious bean-like fragrance, until the field was full of them, red, black, yellow, and white butterflies, fluttering in flocks around every blue spike. Canes, too, in a large patch, or break, as we called it, grew in another spot, a graceful plant about twenty-five feet high, in appearance unlike the bamboo, as the long-pointed leaves were of a glaucus blue-green colour. The canes were valuable to us as they served as fishing rods when we were old enough for that sport, and were also used as lances when we rode forth to engage in mimic battles on the plain. But they also had an economic value, as they were used by the natives when making their thatched roofs, as a substitute for the bamboo cane, which cost much more, as it had to be imported from other countries. Accordingly, at the end of the summer, after the cane had flowered, they were all cut down, stripped of their leaves, and taken away in bundles, and we were then deprived, till the following season, of the pleasure of hunting for the tallest and straightest canes, to cut them down, strip off their leaves, and bark, to make beautiful green-polished rods for our sports. There were other open spaces, covered with a vegetation, almost as interesting as the canes and the trees. This was where what we called weeds were allowed to flourish. Here were the thorn-apple, chenopodium, south-istle, wild-mustard, redwood, viper's bugloss, and others, both native and introduced, in dense thickets, five or six feet high. It was difficult to push one's way through these thickets, and one was always in dread of treading on a snake. At another spot, fennel flourished by itself, as if it had some mysterious power, perhaps its peculiar smell, of keeping other plants at a proper distance. It formed quite a thicket, and grew to a height of ten or twelve feet. This spot was a favourite haunt of mine, as it was in a waste place at the furthest point of the house. A wild, solitary spot, where I could spend long hours by myself watching the birds. But I also loved the fennel for itself. Its beautiful green, feathery foliage, and the smell of it, also the taste, so that whenever I visited that secluded spot, I would rub the crushed leaves in my palms, and chew the small twigs for their peculiar fennel flavour. Winter made a great change in the plantation, since it not only stripped the trees of their leaves, but swept away all the rank herbage, the fennel included, allowing the grass to grow again. The large, luxuriously growing an alice also disappeared from the garden and all about the house. The big, four o'clock bushes, with deep red stems and wealth of crimson blossoms, and the morning convolvulus with its great blue trumpets climbing over and covering every available place, with its hop-like mass of leaves and abundant blooms. My life in the plantation in winter was a constant watching for spring. May, June and July were the leafless months, but not wholly songless. On any genial and windless day of sunshine, a few swallows would reappear, nobody could guess from where, to spend the bright hours wheeling like house-martins about the house, revisiting their old breeding-holes under the eaves, and uttering their lively little rippling songs, as of water running in a pebbly stream. When the sun declined they would vanish, to be seen no more, until we had another perfect spring-like day. On such days in July, and on any mild misty morning, standing on the mound within the moat, I would listen to the sounds from the wide open plain, as they were the sounds of spring, the constant drumming and rhythmic cries of the spur-wing lap-wings engaged in their social meetings and dances, and the song of the pit-pit soaring high up, and pouring out its thick, prolonged strains as it slowly floated downwards to the earth. In August the peach blossomed, the great old trees standing wide apart on their grassy carpet, barely touching each other with the tips of their widest branches, were like great mound-shaped clouds of exquisite rose-pink blossoms. There was then nothing in the universe which could compare in loveliness to that spectacle. I was a worshipper of trees at that season, and I remember my shocked and indignant feeling when, one day, a flock of green parakeets came screaming down and alighted on one of the trees near me. This parakeet never bred in our plantation. They were occasional visitors from their home in an old grove about nine miles away, and to their visits were always a great pleasure to us. On this occasion I was particularly glad, because the birds had elected to settle on a tree close to where I was standing. But the blossoms thickly covering every twig annoyed the parrots as they could not find space enough to grasp a twig without grasping its flower as well. So what did the birds do in their impatience? But began stripping the blossoms off the branches on which they were perched, with their sharp beaks, so rapidly that the flowers came down in a pink shower. And in this way, in half a minute, every bird had made a twig bear where he could sit perched at ease. There were millions of blossoms, only one here and there would ever be a peach, yet it vexed me to see the parrots cut them off in this heedless way. It was a desecration, a crime even in a bird. Even now, when I recall the sight of those old flowering peach trees, were trunks as thick as a man's body, and the huge mounds or clouds of myriads of rosy-et blossoms seen against the blue, ethereal sky. I am not sure that I have seen anything in my life more perfectly beautiful, yet this great beauty was but half the charm I found in those trees. The other half was in the bird music that issued from them. It was the music of but one kind of bird, a small greenish yellow-field finch, in size like the linnet, though with a longer and slimmer body, and resembling a linnet too in its general habits. Thus, in autumn, it unites in immense flocks which keep together during the winter months and sing in concert and do not break up until the return of the breeding season. In a country where there are no birdcatchers or human persecutors of small birds, the flocks of this finch, called misto by the natives, were far larger than any linnet flocks ever seen in England. The flock we used to have about our plantation numbered many thousands, and you would see them like a cloud wheeling about in the air, then suddenly dropping and vanishing from sight in the grass, where they fed on small seeds and tender leaves and buds. I'm going to the spot, they would rise with a loud humming sound of innumerable wings, and begin rushing and whirling about again, chasing each other in play and chirping, and presently all would drop to the ground again. In August, when the spring begins to infect their blood, they repair to the trees at intervals during the day, where they sit, perched and motionless for an hour or longer, all singing together. This singing time was when the peach trees were in blossom, and it was invariably in the peach trees where they settled and could be seen, the little yellow birds in thousands amid the millions of pink blossoms pouring out their wonderful music. One of the most delightful bird sounds or noises to be heard in England is the concert singing of a flock of several hundreds and sometimes of a thousand or more linets in September and October, and even later in the year before these great congregations have been broken up or have migrated. The effect produced by the small field finch of the Pampas was quite different. The Linnet has a little twittering song with breaks in it and small chirping sounds, and when a great multitude of birds sing together, the sound at a distance of fifty or sixty yards is as of a high wind among the trees, but, on an error approach, the mass of sound resolves itself into a tangle of thousands of individual sounds, resembling that of a great concourse of starlings at roosting time, but more musical in character. It is as if hundreds of fairy minstrels were all playing on stringed instruments of various forms, everyone intent on his own performance, without regard to the others. The field finch does not twitter or chirp and has no break or sudden change in his song, which is composed of a series of long-drawn notes, the first somewhat throaty, but grown clearer and brighter towards the end, so that when thousands sing together, it is as if they sang in perfect unison. The effect on hearing, being like that on the sight of flowing water, or of rain, when the multitudinous falling drops appear as silvery grey lines on the vision. It is an exceedingly beautiful effect, and so far as I know unique among birds that have the habit of singing in large companies. I remember that we had a carpenter in those days, an Englishman named John, a native of Cumberland, who used to make us laugh at his slow, heavy way, when, after asking him some simple questions, we had to wait until he put down his tools, and stared at us for about twenty seconds before replying. One of my elder brothers had dubbed him the Cumberland Boar. I remember one day on going to listen to the choir of finches in the blossoming orchard, I was surprised to see John standing near the trees doing nothing, and as I came up to him, he turned towards me, with a look astonished me on his dull old face, that look which perhaps one of my readers has by chance seen on the face of a religious mystic in a moment of exultation. Those little birds, I never heard anything like it, he exclaimed, then trudged off on his work. Like most Englishmen, he had, no doubt, a vein of poetic feeling hidden away somewhere in his soul. We also had the other kind of concert singing by another species in the plantation. This was the common purple cowbird, one of the trupial family, exclusively American, but supposed to have affinities with the starlings of the old world. This cowbird is parasitical, like the European cuckoo, in its breeding habits, and having no domestic affairs of its own to attend to, it lives in flocks all the year round, leading an idle vagabond life. The male is of a uniformed deep purple-black, the female a drab or mouse-colour. The cowbirds were excessively numerous among the trees in summer, perpetually hunting for nests in which to deposit their eggs. They fared on the ground, out on the plain, and more often in such big flocks, as to look like a huge black carpet, spread out on the green suede. On a rainy day they would not feed. They congregated on the trees in thousands and sang by the hour. Their favourite gathering place at such times was behind the house, where the trees grew pretty thick and were sheltered on two sides by the black acacias and double rows of lombardy poplars, succeeded by double rows of large mulberry trees, forming walks, and these by pear, apple and cherry trees. Overside the wind blew, it was calm here, and during the heaviest rain the birds would sit here in their thousands, pouring out a continuous torrent of song, which resembled the noise produced by thousands of starlings at roosting time, but was louder and differed somewhat in character, owing to the peculiar song of the cowbird, which begins with hollow guttural sounds, followed by a burst of loud, clear ringing notes. These concert singers, the little green and yellow field-finch, and the purple cowbird, were with us all the year round, with many others which it would take a whole chapter to tell of. When, in July and August, I watched for the coming spring, it was the migrants, the birds that came annually to us from the far north, that chiefly attracted me. Before their arrival the bloom was gone from the peach trees, and the choir of countless little finches broken up, and scattered all over the plain. Then the opening leaves were watched, and after the willows the first and best-loved were the poplars. During all the time they were opening, when they were still a yellowish-green in colour, the air was full of the fragrance, but not satisfied with that, I would crush and rub the new small leaves in my hands, and on my face to get the delicious balsamic smell in fuller measure, and, of all the trees after the peach, the poplars appeared to fill the new season with the greatest intensity, for it seemed to me that they felt the sunshine even as I did, and they expressed it in their fragrance, just as the peach and other trees did in their flowers, and it was also expressed in the new sound they gave out to the wind. The change was really wonderful when the rose on rose of immensely tall trees, which for months had talked and cried in that strange, sibilant language, rising to shrieks when a gale was blowing, now gave out a larger volume of sound, more continuous, softer, deeper, and like the wash of the sea on a wide shore. The other trees would follow, and by and by all would be in full foliage once more, and ready to receive their strange, beautiful guests from the tropical forests off. The most striking of the newcomers was the small scarlet tyrant bird, which is about the size of our spotted flycatcher, all a shining scarlet, except the black wings and tail. This bird has a delicate bell-like voice, but it was the scarlet color shining amid the green foliage, which made me delight in it above all other birds. Yet the hummingbird, which arrived at the same time, was wonderfully beautiful too, especially when he flew close to your face and remained suspended motionless on mists like wings for a few moments, his feathers looking and glittering, like minute emerald scales. Then came other tyrant birds and the loved swallows, the house swallow, which resembles the English house martin, the large purple martin, the gold reena domestica, and the brown tree martin. Then too came the yellow-billed cuckoo, the cuckoo, as it is called from its cry. Year after year I listened for its deep mysterious call, which sounded like gao gao gao gao gao. In late September, even as the small English boy listens for the call of his cuckoo in April, and the human-like character of the sound, together with the startling impressive way in which it was enunciated, always produced the idea that it was something more than a mere bird-call. Later in October, when the weather was hot, I would hunt for the nest, a frail platform, made of a few sticks, with four or five oval eggs, like those of a turtle dove in size, and of a pale green colour. There were other summer visitors, but I must not speak of them, as this chapter contains too much on that subject. My feathered friends were so much to me that I am constantly tempted to make this sketch of my first years a book about birds and little else. There remains too much more to say about the plantation, the trees, and their effect on my mind. Also, some adventures I met with, some with birds, and others with snakes, which will occupy two or three or more chapters later on. Chapter 4 Chapter 5 of Far Away and Longer Go This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Far Away and Longer Go by William Henry Hudson Chapter 5 Chapter 6 of the Plane As a small boy of six, but well able to ride bareback at a fast gallop without falling off, I invite the reader, mounted to, albeit on nothing but an imaginary animal, to follow me a league or so from the gate to some spot where the land rises to a couple or three or four feet above the surrounding level. There, sitting on our horses, we shall command a wider horizon than even the tallest man would have standing on his own legs. And in this way, get a better idea of the district in which ten of the most impressionable years of my life, from five to fifteen, were spent. We see all round us a flat land, its horizon a perfect ring of misty blue colour, where the crystal blue dome of the sky rests on the level green world. Green in late autumn, winter and spring, or say from April to November, but not all like a green lawn or field. There were smooth areas where the sheep had pastured, but the surface varied greatly, and was mostly more or less rough. In places, the land as far as one could see was covered with a dense growth of cardoon thistles, or wild artichoke, of a bluish or grey-green colour. While in other places the giant thistle flourished, a plant with big variegated green and white leaves, and standing when in flower, six to ten feet high. There were other breaks and roughnesses on that flat green expanse caused by the viscaches, a big rodent the size of a hare, a mighty burrower in the earth. Viscaches swarmed in all that district where they have now practically been exterminated and lived in villages called viscacheras, composed of thirty or forty huge burrows, about the size of half a dozen Badger's earths grouped together. The earth thrown out of these diggings formed a mound and being bare of vegetation it appeared in the landscape as a clay coloured spot on the green surface. Sitting on a horse one could count a score to fifty or sixty of these mounds, or viscacheras, on the surrounding plain. On all this visible earth there were no fences and no trees excepting those which had been planted at the old Estancia houses, and these being far apart the groves and plantations look like small islands of trees or mounds blue in the distance on the great plain or pumper. They were mostly shade trees, the commonest being the Lombardy Poplar, which of all trees is the easiest to grow in that land. And these trees at the Estancias or cattle ranches were at the time I'm writing about almost invariably aged and in many instances in an advanced state of decay. It's interesting to know how these old groves and plantations ever came into existence in a land where at that time there was practically no tree planting. The first colonists who made their homes in this vast vacant space called the Pampas came from a land where the people are accustomed to sit in the shade of trees where corn and wine and oil are supposed to be necessary and where there is salad in the garden. Naturally they made gardens and planted trees both for shade and fruit wherever they built themselves a house on the Pampas and no doubt for two or three generations they tried to live as people live in Spain in the rural districts. But now the main business of their lives was cattle raising and as the cattle roamed at over the vast plains and were more like wild and domestic animals it was a life on horseback. They could no longer dig or plow the earth or protect their crops from insects and birds and their own animals. They gave up their oil and wine and bread and lived on flesh alone. They sat in the shade and ate the fruit of trees planted by their fathers or their great-grandfathers until the trees died of old age or were blown down by the cattle. And there was no more shade and fruit. It thus came about that the Spanish colonists on the Pampas declined from the state of an agricultural people to that of an exclusively pastoral and hunting one. And later when the Spanish yoke as it was called was shaken off the incessant throat-cutting wars of the various factions which were like the wars of crows and pies except that knives were used instead of beaks confirmed and sunk them deeper in their wild and barbarous manner of life. Thus too the tree-clumps on the Pampas were mostly remains of a vanished past. To these clumps or plantations we shall return later on when I come to describe the home life of some of our nearest neighbours. Here the houses only with or without trees growing about them need be mentioned as parts of the landscape. The houses were always low and scarcely visible at a distance of a mile and a half one always had to stoop on entering a door. They were built of burnt or unburnt brick more often clay and brushwood and thatched with sedges or bull-rushes. At some of the better houses there would be a small garden a few yards of soil protected in some way from the poultry and animals in which a few flowers and herbs were grown especially parsley roux, sage, tansy and whorehound. But there was no other cultivation attempted and no vegetables were eaten except onions and garlic which were bought at the stores with bread, rice, matte tea oil, vinegar, raisins cinnamon, pepper cumin seed and whatever else they could afford to season their meat pies or give a flavour to the monotonous light of cow's flesh and mutton and pig. Almost the only game eaten was ostrich, armadillo and tinamoo the partridge of the country which the boys could catch by sneering or running them down. While duck, plover and such birds they rarely or never tasted as they could not shoot and as to the big rodent the viscaccia which swarmed everywhere no gaucho would touch its flesh but to my taste it was better than rabbit. The summer change in the aspect of the plain would begin in November. The dead dry grass would take on a yellowish brown colour. The giant thistle a dark rust brown and at this season from November to February the grove or plantation at the Estancia house with its deep fresh unchanging verger and shade was a veritable refuge on the vast flat yellow earth. It was then when the water courses were gradually drying up and the thirsty days coming to flocks and herds that the mocking illusion of the mirage was constantly about us. Quite early in spring on any warm cloudless day this water mirage was visible and was like the appearance on a hot summer's day of the atmosphere in England when the air near the surface becomes visible, when one sees it dancing before one's eyes like thin wavering and descending tongues of flame crystal clear flames mixed with flames of a faint pearly or silvery grey. On the level and hotter pampas this appearance is intensified and the faintly visible wavering flames change to an appearance of lakelets or sheets of water looking as if ruffled by the wind and shining like molten silver in the sun. The resemblance to water is increased when there are groves and buildings on the horizon which look like dark blue islands or banks in the distance while the cattle and horses feeding not far from the spectator appear to be wading knee or belly deep in the brilliant water. The aspect of the plane was different in what was called a thistle year when the giant thistles which usually occupied definite areas or grew in isolated patches suddenly sprang up everywhere and for a season covered most of the land. In these luxuriant years the plants grew as thick as sedges and bullrushes in their beds and were taller than usual attaining a height of about 10 feet. The wonder was to see a plant which throws out leaves as large as those of rhubarb with its stems so close together as to be almost touching. Standing among the thistles in the growing season one could in a sense hear them growing as the huge leaves freed themselves with a jerk from a cramped position producing a crackling sound. It was like the crackling sound of the furs seed-vessels which one hears in June in England only much louder. To the gout-show who lives half his day on his horse and loves his freedom as much as a wild bird of restraint. His small low-roofed mud-house was then too like a cage to him as the tall thistles hemmed it in and shut out the view on all sides. On his horse he was compelled to keep to the narrow cattle-track and to draw in or draw up his legs to keep them from the long, pricking spines. In those distant primitive days the gout-show, if a poor man was usually shod with nothing but a pair of iron spurs. By the end of November the thistles would be dead and their huge hollow stalks as dry and light as the shaft of a bird's feather, a feather shaft twice as big ground as a broomstick and six to eight feet long. The roots were not only dead but turned to dust in the ground so that one could push a stalk from its place with one finger but it would not fall since it was held up by scores and these by hundreds more and the hundreds by thousands and millions. The thistle dead was just as great a nuisance as the thistle living and in this dead dry condition they would sometimes stand all through December and January when the days were hottest and the danger of fire was ever present to people's minds. At any moment a careless spark from a cigarette might kindle a dangerous blaze. At such times the sight of smoke in the distance would cause every man who saw it to mount his horse and fly to the dangerous spot where an attempt would be made to stop the fire by making a broad path in the thistles some 50 to 100 yards ahead of it. One way to make the path was to lasso and kill a few sheep from the nearest flock and drag them up and down at a gallop through the dense thistles until a broad space was clear and the flames could be stamped and beaten out with horse rugs. But the sheep to be used in this way were not always to be found on the spot and even when a broad space could be made if a hot north wind was blowing it would carry showers of sparks and burning sticks to the other side and the fire would travel on. I remember going to one of these big fires when I was about 12 years old it broke out a few miles from home and was travelling to another direction. I saw my father mount and dash off but it took me half an hour or more to catch a horse for myself so that I arrived late on the scene. A fresh fire had broken out a quarter of a mile in advance of the main one where most of the men were fighting the flames and to this spot I went first and found some half a dozen neighbors who had just arrived on the scene. Before we started operations about 20 men from the main fire came galloping up to us. They had made their path but seeing this new fire so far ahead had left it in despair after an hour's hard hot work and had flown to the new danger spot. As they came up I looked in wonder at one who rode ahead a tall black man in his shirt sleeves who was a stranger to me. Who is this black fellow I wonder? said I to myself and just then he shouted to me in English boy what are you doing here? It was my father an hours fighting with the flames in a cloud of black ashes in that burning sun and wind had made him look like a pure blooded negro. During December and January when this desert world of thistles dead and dry as tinder continued standing a menace and danger. The one desire and hope of everyone was for the Pampero the south west wind which in hot weather is apt to come with startling suddenness and to blow with extraordinary violence. And it would come at last usually in the afternoon of a close hot day after the north wind had been blowing persistently for days with a breath as from a furnace. At last the hateful wind would drop and a strange gloom that was not from any cloud would cover the sky and by and by a cloud would rise a dull dark cloud as of a mountain becoming visible on the plane at an enormous distance. In a little while it would cover half the sky and there would be thunder and lightning and a torrent of rain and at the same moment the wind would strike and roar in the bent down trees and shake the house. And in an hour or two it would perhaps be all over and the next morning the detested thistles would be gone or at all events level to the ground. After such a storm the sense of relief to the horseman now able to mount and gallop forth in any direction over the wide plane and see the earth once more spread out for miles before him was like that of a prisoner released from his cell or of the sick man when he at length repairs his vigor lost and breathes and walks again. To this day it gives me a thrill or perhaps it would be safer to say the ghost of a vanished thrill when I remember the relief it was in my case albeit I was never so tied to a horse so parasitical as the Gaucho after one of these great thistle levelling Pampero winds it was a rare pleasure to ride out and gallop my horse over wide brown stretches of level land to hear his hard hoofs crushing the hollow desiccated stalks covering the earth in millions like the bones of a countless host of perished foes it was a queer kind of joy a mixed feeling with a dash of gratified revenge to give it a sharp savor after all this abuse of the giant thistle the Cardo Asnal of the natives and Cardo Usmariana of the botanists it may sound odd to say that a thistle year was a blessing in some ways it was an anxious year on account of the fear of fire and a season of great apprehension too the courts of robberies and other crimes were abroad in the land especially for the poor women who were left so much alone in their low-roofed hovels shut in by the dense prickly growth but a thistle year was called a fat year since the animals, cattle, horses, sheep and even pigs browsed freely on the huge leaves and soft Swedish tasting stems and were in excellent condition the only drawbacks was that the riding horses lost strength as they gained in fat and cow's milk didn't taste nice the best and fattest time would come when the hardening plant was no longer fit to eat and the flowers began to shed their seed each flower in size like a small coffee cup would open out in a white mass and shared its scores of silvery balls and these when freed of heavy seed would float aloft in the wind and the whole air as far as one could see would be filled with millions and myriads of floating balls the fallen seed was so abundant as to cover the ground under the dead but still standing plants it is a long slender seed about the size of a grain of Carolina rice of a greenish or blueish-gray colour spotted with black the sheep feasted on it using their mobile and extensible upper lips like a crumb brush to gather it into their mouths horses gathered it in the same way but the cattle were out of it either because they could not learn the trick or because their lips and tongues cannot be used to gather a crumb-like food pigs however flourished on it and to birds, domestic and wild it was even more than to the mammals in conclusion of this chapter I will return for a page or two to the subject of the Pampero the south-west wind of the Argentine Pampus to describe the greatest of all the great Pampero storms I have witnessed this was when I was in my seventh year the wind blowing from this quarter is not like the south-west wind of the North Atlantic and Britain a warm wind laden with moisture from the hot tropical seas that great wind which Joseph Conrad in his Mirror of the Sea has personified in one of the sublimist passages in recent literature it is an excessively violent wind as all mariners know who have encountered it on the south Atlantic off the river plate but it is cool and dry although it frequently comes with great thunder clouds and torrents of rain and hail the rain may last half an hour to half a day but when over the sky is without a vapour and the spell of fine weather ensues it was in sultry summer weather and towards evening all of us boys and girls went out for a ramble on the plane and were about a quarter of a mile from home when a blackness appeared in the south-west and began to cover the sky in that quarter so rapidly that taking alarm we started homewards as fast as we could run but the stupendous slaty black darkness mixed with yellow clouds of dust gained on us and before we got to the gate the terrified screams of wild birds reached our ears and glancing back we saw multitudes of gulls and plover flying madly before the storm trying to keep ahead of it then a swarm of big dragonflies came like a cloud over us and was gone in an instant and just as we reached the gate the first big drops splashed down in the form of liquid mud we had hardly got indoors before the tempest broke a full fury a blackness as of night a blended uproar of thunder and wind blinding flashes of lightning and torrents of rain then as the first thick darkness began to pass away we saw that the air was white with falling hailstones of an extraordinary size and appearance they were big as fouls eggs but not egg shaped they were flat and about half an inch thick and being white looked like little blocks of bricklets made of compressed snow the hail continued falling until the earth was white with them and in spite of their great size they were driven by the furious wind into drifts two or three feet deep against the walls of the buildings it was evening and growing dark when the storm ended but the light next morning revealed the damage we had suffered pumpkins, gourds and watermelons were cut to pieces and most of the vegetables that were born were destroyed the fruit trees too had suffered greatly 40 or 50 sheep had been killed outright and hundreds more were so much hurt that for days they went limping about or appeared stupefied from blows on the head three of our heifers were dead and one horse an old loved riding horse with a history, Old Zango the whole house was in grief at his death he belonged originally to a cavalry officer who had an extraordinary affection for him a rare thing in a land where horse flesh was too cheap and men as a rule careless of their animals and even cruel the officer had spent years in the Banda Oriental in guerrilla warfare and had written Zango in every fight in which he had been engaged coming back to Buenos Aires he brought the old horse home with him two or three years later he came to my father whom he had come to know very well and said he had been ordered to the upper provinces and was in great trouble about his horse he was twenty years old he said and no longer fit to be ridden in a fight and of all the people he knew there was but one man in whose care he wished to leave his horse I know he said that if you will take him and promise to care for him until his old life ends he will be safe and I should be happy about him as happy as I can be without the horse I have loved more than any other being on earth my father consented and had kept the old horse for over nine years when he was killed by the hail he was a well shaped dark brown animal with a long mane and tail but as I knew him always lean and old looking and the chief use he was put to was for the children to take their first riding lessons on his back my parents had already experienced one great sadness on account of Zango before his strange death for years they had looked for a letter a message from the absent officer and had often pictured his return and joy at finding a live still and embracing his beloved old friend again but he never returned and no message came and no news could be heard of him and it was at last concluded that he had lost his life in another country where there had been much fighting to return to the hailstones the greatest destruction had fallen on the wild birds before the storm immense numbers of golden plover had appeared and were in large flocks on the plane one of our native boys rode in and offered to get a sack full of plover for the table and getting the sack he took me up on his horse behind him a mile or so from home upon scores of dead plover lying together where they had been in close flocks but my companion would not pick up a dead bird there were others running about with one wing broken and these he went after leaving me to hold his horse and catching them would ring their necks and drop them in the sack when he had collected two or three dozen he remounted and we rode back later that morning we heard of one human being in one of our poor neighbour's houses who had lost his life in a curious way he was standing in the middle of the room gazing out at the falling hail when a hailstone cutting through the thatched roof struck him on the head and killed him instantly and of chapter 5 chapter 6 just before my riding days began in real earnest when I was not yet quite confident enough to gallop off alone for miles to see the world for myself I had my first long walk on the plane one of my elder brothers one of my elder brothers invited me to accompany him to a water course one of the slow flowing, shallow marshy rivers of the Pampas which was but two miles from home the thought of the half-wild cattle we would meet terrified me but he was anxious for my company that day and assured me that he could see no herd in that direction and he would be careful to give a wide berth to anything with horns we might come upon then I joyfully consented and we set out three of us to survey the wonders of a great stream of running water where bullrushes grew and large wild birds never seen by us at home would be found I had had a glimpse of the river before as when driving to visit a neighbour we had crossed it at one of the fords and I had wished to get down and run on its moist green low banks and now that desire would be gratified it was for me a tremendously long walk as we had to take many a turn to avoid the patches of cardoon and giant thistles and by and by we came to low ground where the grass was almost waist-high and full of flowers it was all like an English meadow in June when every grass and every herb is in flower, beautiful and fragrant but tiring to avoid six years old to walk through at last we came out to a smooth grass turf and in a little while were by the stream which had overflowed its banks with heavy rains and was now about fifty yards wide an astonishing number of birds were visible chiefly wild duck, a few swans and many waders ibises, herons, spoonbills and others but the most wonderful of all were three immensely tall white and rose-coloured birds wading solemnly in a row a yard or so apart from one another some twenty yards out from the bank I was amazed and enchanted at the sight and my delight was intensified when the leading bird stood still and raising his head and long neck aloft opened and shook his wings for the wings went open were of a glorious crimson colour and the bird was to me the most angel-like creature on earth what were these wonderful birds I asked of my brothers but they could not tell me they said they had never seen birds like them before and later I found that the Flamingo was not known in our neighbourhood as the water courses were not large enough for it but that it could be seen in flocks at a lake less than a day's journey from our home it was not for several years that I had an opportunity of seeing the bird again later I have seen its scores and hundreds of times at rest or flying at all times of the day and in all states of the atmosphere in all its most beautiful aspects as when at sunset or in the early morning it stands motionless in the still water with its clear image reflected below or when seen flying in flocks seen from some high bank beneath one moving low over the blue water in a long crimson line or half moon the birds at equal distances apart their wingtips all but touching but the delight in these spectacles has never equaled in degree that which I experienced on this occasion when I was six years old the next little bird adventure to be told exhibits me more in the character of an innocent and exceedingly credulous baby of three than of a field naturalist of six with a considerable experience of wild birds one spring day an immense number of doves appeared and settled in the plantation it was a species common in the country and bred in our trees and in fact in every grove or orchard in the land a pretty dove colored bird with a pretty sorrowful song about a third lesson size than a domestic pigeon and belongs to the American genus Zanada this dove was a resident with us all year round but occasionally in spring and autumn they were to be seen traveling in immense flocks and these were evidently strangers in the land and came from some subtropical country in the north where they had no fear of the human form at all events I'm going out into the plantation I found them all about on the ground diligently searching for seeds and so tame and heedless of my presence that I actually attempted to capture them with my hands but they wouldn't be caught the bird when I stooped and put out my hands slipped away and flying a yard or two would settle down in front of me and go on looking for and picking up invisible seeds my attempts failing I rushed back to the house wildly excited to look for an old gentleman who lived with us and took an interest in me and my passion for birds and finding him I told him the whole place was swarming with doves and they were perfectly tame but wouldn't let me catch them could he tell me how to catch them? he laughed and said I must be a little fool not to know how to catch a bird the only way was to put salt on their tails there would be no difficulty in doing that I thought and how delighted I was to know that birds could be caught so easily off I ran to the salt barrel and filled my pockets and hands with coarse salt used to make brine in which to dip the hides for I wanted to catch a great many doves armfuls of doves in a few minutes I was out again in the plantation with doves and hundreds moving over the ground all about me and taking no notice of me it was a joyful and exciting moment when I started operations but I soon found that when I tossed a handful of salt at the bird's tail it never fell on its tail two or three or four inches short of the tail if I thought the bird would only keep still a moment longer but then it wouldn't and I think I spent quite two hours in these vain attempts to make the salt fall on the right place at last I went back to my mentor to confess that I had failed and to ask for fresh instructions but all he would say was that I was on the right track that the plan I had adopted was the proper one and all that was wanted was a little more practice to enable me to drop the salt on the right spot thus encouraged I filled my pockets again and started afresh and then finding that by following the proper plan I made no progress I adopted a new one which was to take a handful of salt and hurl it at the bird's tail still I couldn't touch the tail my violent action only frightened the bird and caused it to fly away a dozen yards or so before dropping down again to resume its seed searching business by and by I was told by somebody that birds could not be caught by putting salt on their tails that I was being made a fool of and this was a great shock to me since I had been taught to believe that it was wicked to tell a lie now for the first time I discovered that there were lies and lies or untruths that were not lies which one could tell innocently although they were invented and deliberately told to deceive this angered me at first and I wanted to know how I was to distinguish between real lies and lies that were not lies and the only answer I got was that I could distinguish them by not being a fool in the next adventure to be told we pass from the love or tameness of the turtle to the rage of the vulture it may be remarked in passing that the vernacular name of the dove I have described is Turcasa which I take it is a corruption of Tortola the name first given to it by the early colonists with slight resemblance to the turtle dove of Europe then as to the vulture it was not a true vulture nor a strictly true eagle but a carrion hawk a bird the size of a small eagle blackish brown in color with a white neck and breast suffused with brown and spotted with black also it had a very big eagle shaped beak and claws not so strong as an eagle nor so weak as a vulture in its habits it was both eagle and vulture as it fed on dead flesh and was also a hunter and killer of animals and birds especially of the weekly and young a somewhat destructive creature to poultry and young suckling lambs and pigs its feeding habits were in fact very like those of the raven and its voice too was raven like or rather like that of the carrion crow at his loudest and harshest considering the character of this big rapacious bird the polyborous tharus of naturalists and the carancho of the natives it may seem strange that a pair were allowed to nest and live for years in our plantation but in those days people were singularly tolerant not only of injurious birds and beasts but even of beings of their own species of redacious habits on the outskirts of our old peach orchard described in a former chapter there was a solitary tree of a somewhat singular shape standing about 40 yards from the others on the edge of a piece of waste weedy land it was a big old tree like the others and had a smooth round trunk standing about 14 feet high and throwing out branches all round so that its upper part had the shape of an open inverted umbrella and in the convenient hollow formed by the circle of branches the caranchos had built their huge nest composed of sticks, lumps of turf dry bones of sheep and other animals pieces of rope and rawhide and any other object they could carry the nest was their home they roosted in it by night and visited it at odd times during the day usually bringing a bleached bone or thistle stalk or some such object to add to the pile our birds never attacked the fowls and were not offensive or obtrusive but kept to their own end of the plantation furthest away from the buildings they only came when an animal was killed for meat and would then hang about keeping a sharp eye on the proceedings and watching their chance this would come when the carcass was dressed and lights and other portions thrown to the dogs and then the carancho would swoop down like a kite and snatching up the meat with his beak would rise to a height of 20 or 30 yards in the air and dropping his prize would definitely catch it again in his claws and soar away to feed on it at leisure I was never tired of admiring this feat of the carancho which is I believe unique in birds of prey the big nest in the old inverted umbrella shaped peach tree had a great attraction for me I used often to visit it and wonder if I would ever have the power of getting up to it oh what a delight it would be to get up there above the nest and look down into the great basin like hollow lined with sheep's wool and see the eggs bigger than turkey eggs all marbled with deep red for I had seen carancho eggs brought in by a goucho and I was ambitious to take a clutch from a nest with my own hands it was true I had been told by my mother that if I wanted wild birds eggs I was never to take more than one from a nest unless it was of some injurious species and injurious the carancho certainly was in spite of his good behavior when at home on one of my early rides on my pony I had seen a pair of them and I think they were our own birds furiously attacking a weak and sickly you she had refused to lie down to be killed and they were on her neck beating and tearing at her face and trying to pull her down also I had seen a litter of little pigs a sow had brought forth on the plane attacked by six or seven caranchos and found on approaching the spot that they had killed half of them about six I think and were devouring them at some distance and I was afraid of the big and the survivors of the litter but how could I climb the tree and get over the rim of the huge nest and I was afraid of the birds they look so unspeakably savage and formidable whenever I went near them but my desire to get the eggs was over mastering and when it was spring and I had reason to think that eggs were being laid I went oftener than ever to watch and wait for an opportunity and one evening just after sunset the birds anywhere about and thought my chance had now come I managed to swarm up the smooth trunk to the branches and then with widely beating heart began the task of trying to get through the close branches and to work my way over the huge rim of the nest just then I heard the harsh grating cry of the bird and peering through the leaves in the direction it came from I caught sight of the two birds flying furiously towards me screaming again as they came nearer again terror seized me and down I went through the branches and catching hold of the lowest one managed to swing myself clear and drop to the ground it was a good long drop but I fell on a soft turf and springing to my feet fled to the shelter of the orchard and then on towards the house without ever looking back to see if they were following that was my only attempt to raid the nest and from that time the birds continued until it came into some person's mind that this huge nest was detrimental to the tree and was the cause of its producing so little fruit compared with any other tree and the nest was accordingly pulled down and the birds forsook the place In the description in a former chapter of our old peach trees in their blossoming time I mentioned the parriquettes which occasionally visited us but had their breeding place some distance away this bird was one of the two common parrots of the district the other larger species being the Patagonia parrot Canaris Patagonus the Loro Barancuero or cliff parrot of the natives in my early years this bird was common in the treeless Pampas extending for hundreds of miles south of Buenos Aires as well as in Patagonia and bred in holes it excavated in cliffs and steep banks at the side of lakes and rivers these breeding sites were far south of my home and I did not visit them until my boyhood's days were over in winter these birds had a partial migration to the north at that season we were visited by flocks and as a child it was a joy to me when the resounding screams of the travelling parrots heard in the silence long before the birds became visible in the sky announced their approach then when they appeared flying at a moderate height how strange and beautiful they looked their pointed wings and long graduated tails in their somber green plumage touched with yellow, blue and crimson colour how I longed for a nearer acquaintance with these winter visitors and hoped they would settle on our trees sometimes they did settle to rest perhaps to spend half day or longer in the plantation and sometimes to my great happiness a flock would elect to remain with us for whole days and weeks feeding on the surrounding plain coming at intervals to the trees during the day and at night to roost I used to go out on my pony to follow and watch the flock at feed and wondered at their partiality for the bitter tasting seeds of the wild pumpkin this plant, which was abundant with us produced an egg shaped fruit about half the size of an ostrich's egg with a hard shell like rind but the birds with their sharp iron hard beaks would quickly break up the dry shell and feast on the pips scattering the seed shells about till the ground was whitened with them when I approached the feeding flock on my pony the birds would rise up and flying to and at me hover in a compact crowd just above my head almost deafening me with their angry screams the smaller bird the paracut which was about the size of a turtle dove had a uniform rich green color above and ashy gray beneath and like most parrots it nested in trees it is one of the most social birds I know it lives all year round in communities and builds huge nests of sticks near together as in a rookery each nest having accommodation for two or three to half a dozen pairs each pair has an entrance and nests cavity of its own in the big structure the only breeding place in our neighborhood was in a grove or remains of an ancient ruin plantation at an Estancia house about nine miles from us owned by an Englishman named Ramsdale here there was a colony of about a couple of hundred birds and the dozen or more trees they had built on were laden with their great nests each one containing as much material as would have filled a cart Mr. Ramsdale was not our nearest English neighbor the one to be described in another chapter nor was he a man we cared much about and his meager establishment was not attractive as his old slightly native housekeeper and the other servants were allowed to do just what they liked but he was English and a neighbor and my parents made it a point of paying him an occasional visit and I always managed to go with them certainly not to see Mr. Ramsdale who had nothing to say to a shy little boy in whose hard red face looked the face of a hard drinker my visits were to the parriquettes exclusively a why thought I many and many a time did not these dear green people come over their happy village in our trees yet when I visited them they didn't like it no sooner would I run out to the grove with a nest were then the place would be in an uproar out and up they would rush to unite in a flock and hover shriekingly over my head and the commotion would last until I left them on our return late one afternoon in early spring from one of our rare visits to Mr. Ramsdale we witnessed a strange thing the plane at that place was covered with a dense growth of cardoon thistle or wild artichoke and leaving the Estancia house in our trap we followed the cattle tracks as there was no road on that side about halfway home we saw a troop of seven or eight deer in an open green space among the great thistle bushes but instead of uttering their whistling alarm cry and making off at our approach they remained at the same spot although we passed within 40 yards of them the troop was composed of two bucks engaged in a furious fight and five or six does walking round and round the two fighters the bucks kept their head so low down that their noses were almost touching the ground while with their horns locked together they pushed violently and from time to time one would succeed in forcing the other 10 or 20 feet back then a pause then another violent push then with horns still together they would move sideways round and round and so on until we left them behind in spite of them this spectacle greatly excited us at the time and was vividly recalled several months afterwards when one of our goucho neighbors told us of a curious thing he had just seen he had been out on that cartoon covered spot where we had seen the fighting deer and at that very spot in the little green space he had come upon the skeletons of two deer with their horns interlocked tragedies of this kind in the wild animal world have often been recorded but they are exceedingly rare on the pampas as the smooth few pronged antlers of the native deer Corvus compestris are not so libel to get hopelessly locked as in many other species deer were common in our district in those days and were partial to land overgrown with cardoon thistle which in the absence of trees and thickets afforded them some sort of cover I seldom rode to that side without getting a sight of a group of deer often looking exceedingly conspicuous in their bright fawn color as they stood gazing at the intruder amidst the wide waist of gray cardoon bushes these rough plains were also the haunt of the Ria, our ostrich and it was here that I first had a close sight of this greatest and most un-bird-like bird of our continent I was eight years old then when one afternoon in late summer I was just setting off for a ride on my pony when I was told to go out on the east side till I came to the cardoon covered land about a mile beyond the shepherd's ranch the shepherd was wanted in the plantation and could not go to the flock just yet and I was told to look for the flock and turn it towards home I found the flock just where I had been told to look for it the sheep very widely scattered and some groups of a dozen or two to a hundred were just visible at a distance among the rough bushes just where these furthest sheep were grazing there was a scattered troop of seventy or eighty horses grazing too and when I rode to that spot I all at once found myself among a lot of Rias feeding two among the sheep and horses their gray plumage being so much like the cardoon bushes in color had prevented me from seeing them before I was right among them the strange thing was that they paid not the slightest attention to me and pulling up on my pony I set staring in astonishment at them particularly at one, a very big one embarrassed to me, engaged in leisurely pecking at the clover plants growing among the big prickly thistle leaves and as it seemed carefully selecting the best sprays what a great noble looking bird it was and how beautiful in its loose gray and white plumage hanging like a picturesquely worn mantel about its body why were they so tame, I wondered the sight of a mounted goucho even at a distance will invariably set them off at their topmost speed I was within a dozen yards of one of them with several others looking about me all occupied in examining the herbage and selecting the nicest looking leaves to pluck just as if I was not there at all I suppose it was because I was only a small boy on a small horse and was not associated in the ostrich brain with the wild looking goucho on his big animal charging upon him with a deadly purpose presently I went straight at the one near me and he then raised his head and neck and moved carelessly away to a distance of a few yards then began cropping the clover once more I rode at him again putting my pony to a trot and when within two yards of him he all at once swung his body round in a quaint way towards me and breaking into a sort of dancing trot brushed past me pulling up again and looking back I found he was ten or twelve yards behind me once more quietly engaged in cropping clover leaves again and again this bird and one of the others I rode at practiced the same pretty trick first appearing perfectly unconcerned at my presence and then when I made a charge at them was just one little careless movement placing themselves a dozen yards behind me but this same trick of the Ria is wonderful to see when the hunted bird is spent with running and is finally overtaken by one of the hunters who has perhaps lost the bolas with which he captures his quarry and who endeavors to place himself with it so as to reach it with his knife it seems an easy thing to do the bird is plainly exhausted panting his wings hanging as he lobes on yet no sooner is the man within striking distance then the sudden motion comes into play and the bird as by a miracle is now behind instead of at the side of the horse and before the horse going at top speed can be rained in and turned around the Ria has had time to recover his wind and get a hundred yards away or more it is on account of this tricky instinct of the Ria that the Gaucho say which means that the ostrich in its resourcefulness and the tricks it practices to save itself when hard-pressed is as clever as the Gaucho knows himself to be End of Chapter 6 Please visit LibriVox.org The happiest time of my boyhood was at that early period a little past the age of 6 when I had my own pony to ride on and was allowed to stay on his back just as long and go as far from home as I liked I was like the young bird when on first quitting the nest it suddenly becomes conscious of its power to fly my early flying days were however soon interrupted when my mother took me on my first visit to Buenos Aires that is to say the first I remember as I must have been there once before as an infant in arms since we lived too far from town for any missionary clergyman to travel all that distance just to baptize a little baby Buenos Aires is now the wealthiest most populous Europeanized city in South America what it was like at that time these glimpses into a far past will serve to show coming as a small boy of an exceptionally impressionable mind from that green plain where people lived the simple pastoral life everything I saw in the city impressed me deeply the lights which impressed me the most are as vivid in my mind today as they ever were I was a solitary little boy in my rambles about the streets for though I had a younger brother who was my only playmate he was not yet five and too small to keep me company in my walks nor did I mind having no one with me very very early in my boyhood I had acquired the habit of going about alone to amuse myself in my own way and it was only after years that my mother told me how anxious the singularity in me used to make her she would miss me when looking out to see what the children were doing and I would be called and searched for to be found hidden away somewhere in the plantation then she began to keep an eye on me and when I was observed stealing off she would secretly follow me and watch me standing motionless among the tall weeds or under the trees by the half hour staring at vacancy this distressed her very much then to her great relief and joy she discovered that I was there with a motive which she could understand and appreciate that I was watching some living thing an insect perhaps but often or a bird a pair of little scarlet flycatchers building a nest of lichen on a peach tree or some such beautiful thing and as she loved all living things herself she was quite satisfied that I was not going queer in my head for that was what she had been fearing the strangeness of the streets was a little too much for me at the start I remember that on first venturing out by myself a little distance from home I got lost in despair of ever finding my way back I began to cry hiding my face against a post at a street corner and was there soon surrounded by quite a number of passer-by's then a policeman came with brass buttons on his blue arm and a sword at his side and taking me by the arm he asked me in a commanding voice where I lived the name of the street and the number of the house I couldn't tell him then I began to get frightened on account of his sword and big black moustache and loud rasping voice and suddenly ran away and after running for about six or eight minutes found myself back at home to my surprise and joy the house where we stayed with English friends was near the front or what was then the front or a river which was like the sea with no visible shore beyond and like the sea it was tidal and differed only in its color which was a muddy red instead of blue or green the house was roomy and like most of the houses at that date had a large courtyard paved with red tiles implanted with small lemon trees and flowering shrubs of various kinds the streets were straight and narrow paved with round boulder stones the size of a football the pavements with brick or flagstones and so narrow that would hardly admit more than two persons walking abreast along the pavements on each side of the street were rows of posts placed at a distance of ten yards apart these strange looking rows of posts which foreigners laugh to see were no doubt the remains of yet ruder times when ropes of hide were stretched along the side of the pavements there were runaway horses wild cattle driven by wild men from the plains and other dangers of the narrow streets as they were then paved the streets must have been the noisiest in the world on account of the immense numbers of big springless carts in them imagine the thunderous racket made by a long procession of these carts when they were returning empty and the drivers as was often the case urged their horses to a gallop and they bumped and thundered on the roads just opposite the house we stayed at there was a large church one of the largest of the numerous churches of the city and one of my most vivid memories relates to a great annual festival at the church that of the patron sates day it had been open to worshippers all day but the chief service was held about three o'clock in the afternoon at all events it was at that hour when a great attendance of fashionable people took place and they searched them as they came in couples families and small groups in every case the ladies beautifully dressed attended by their cavaliers at the door of the church the gentleman would make his bow and withdraw to the street before the building where a sort of outdoor gathering was formed of all those who had come as escorts to the ladies and where they would remain until the service was over the crowd in the street grew and grew until there were about four or five hundred gentlemen young in the gathering all standing in small groups conversing in an animated way so that the street was filled with the loud humming sound of their blended voices these men were all natives all of the good or upper class of the native society and all dressed exactly alike in the fashion of that time it was their dress and the uniform appearance of so large a number of persons most of them with young, handsome, animated faces that fascinated me on the spot gazing at them until the big bells began to thunder at the conclusion of the service and the immense concourse of gaily dressed ladies swarmed out and immediately the meeting broke up the gentleman hurrying back to meet them they all wore silk hats and the glossiest black broadcloth not even a pair of trousers of any other shade was seen and all wore the scarlet silk or fine cloth waistcoat which at that period was considered the right thing for every citizen of the republic to wear also in lieu of buttonhole a scarlet ribbon pinned to the lapel of the coat it was a pretty sight and the concourse reminded me of a flock of military starlings a black or dark plumed bird with a scarlet breast one of my feathered favorites my rambles were almost always on the front since I could walk there a mile or two from home north or south without getting lost always with the vast expanse of water and with many big ships looking dim in the distance and numerous lighters or belanders coming from them with cargoes of merchandise which they unloaded into carts these going out a quarter of a mile in the shallow water to meet them then there were the water carts going and coming in scores and hundreds for at that period there was no water supply to the houses and every householder had to buy muddy water by the bucket at his own door from the watermen one of the most attractive spots to me was the congregating place of the lavanderas south of my street here on the broad beach under the cliff one saw a whiteness like a white cloud covering the ground for a space of about a third of a mile and the cloud as one drew near resolved itself into innumerable garments sheets and quilts and other linen pieces fluttering from long lines and covering the low rocks washed clean by the tide and the stretches of green turf between it was the spot where the washerwoman were allowed to wash all the dirty linen of Buenos Aires in public all over the ground the women, mostly negresses were seen on their knees beside the pools among the rocks furiously scrubbing and pounding away at their work and like all negresses they were exceedingly vociferous and their loud gable mingled with yells and shrieks of laughter reminded me of the hubbub made by a great concourse of gulls ibises godwits, geese and other noisy waterfowl on some marshy lake it was a wonderfully animated scene and drew me to it again and again I found, however, that it was necessary to go warily among these women for as they looked with suspicion at idling boys and sometimes when I picked my way among the spread garments I was sharply ordered off then, too, they often quarreled over their right to certain places and spaces among themselves then very suddenly their hilarious gavel would change to wild cries of anger and torrents of abuse by and by I discovered that their greatest rages and worst language were when certain young gentlemen of the upper classes visited the spot to amuse themselves by baiting the lavanderas the young gentlemen would saunter about in an absent-minded manner and presently walk right on to a beautifully embroidered and belaced night-dress or other dainty garments spread out toward a rock and standing on it calmly proceed to take out and light a cigarette instantly the black varago would be on her feet confronting him and pouring out a torrent of her foulest expressions and deadliest curses he in a pretended rage would reply an even worse language that would put her on her metal for now all her friends and foes scattered about the ground would suspend their work to listen with all their ears and the contest of words growing louder and fiercer would last until the combatants were both exhausted and unable to invent any more new and horrible expressions of a probrium to hurl at each other then the insulted young gentlemen would kick the garment away in a fury and hurling the unfinished cigarette in his adversary's face would walk off with his nose in the air I laugh to recall these unseemly word-battles on the beach but they were shocking to me when I first heard them as a small innocent-minded boy and it only made the case the worst when I was assured that the young gentleman was only acting apart that the extreme anger he exhibited which might have served as an excuse for using such language was all pretense another favorite pastime of the same idle, rich young gentleman offended me as much as the one I have related the night watchman, called Cyranoes of that time interested me in an extraordinary way when night came and appeared that the fierce policemen with their swords and brass buttons were no longer needed to safeguard the people and their place in the streets was taken by a quaint, frowsy-looking body of men, mostly old some almost decrepit wearing big cloaks and carrying staffs and heavy iron lanterns with a tallow candle, a light inside but what a pleasure it was to lie awake at night and listen to their voices calling the hours the calls began at the stroke of eleven and then from beneath the window would come a wonderful long, drawing call of lazon, sihan, do, do i, sereno which means eleven of the clock and all serene but if clouded the concluding word would be nublado and so on according to the weather from all the streets from all over the town the long-drawn calls would float to my listening ears with infinite variety in the voices the high and shrill the falsetto the raucous tone like the caw of the carrion crow the solemn, booming bass and then some fine, rich, pure voice that soared heavenwards above all the others and was like the peeling notes of an organ I loved the poor night watchmen and their cries and it grieved my soft little heart to hear that it was considered fine sport by the rich young gentlemen to sally forth at night and do battle with them and to deprive them of their staffs and lanterns I took home and kept as trophies another human phenomenon which annoyed and shocked my tender mind like that of the contests on the beach between young gentlemen and washer women was the multitude of beggars which infested the town these were not like our dignified beggar on horseback with his red poncho, spurs and tall straw hat who rode to your gate and having received his tribute blessed you and rode away to the next estancia these city beggars on the pavement were the most brutal even fiendish looking men I'd ever seen most of them were old soldiers and having served their ten, fifteen or twenty years according to the nature of the crime for which they'd been condemned to the army had been discharged or thrown out to live like carrion hawks on what they could pick up twenty times a day at least you could hear the iron gate opening from the courtyard into the street swung open followed by the call or shout of the beggar demanding charity in the name of God outside you could not walk far without being confronted by one of these men who would boldly square himself in front of you on the narrow pavement and beg for alms if you had no change and said perdón por Dios he would scowl and let you pass but if you looked annoyed or disgusted or ordered him out of the way or pushed by without a word he would glare at you with a concentrated rage which seemed to say oh, to have you down at my mercy bound hand and foot a sharp knife in my hand and this would be followed by a blast of the most horrible language one day I witnessed a very strange thing the action of a dog by the waterside it was evening and the beach was forsaken cartman, fisherman, boatman all gone and I was the only idler left on the rocks but the tide was coming in rolling quite big waves onto the rocks and the novel sight of the waves the freshness, the joy of it kept me at that spot standing on one of the outermost rocks not yet washed over by the water by and by a gentleman followed by a big dog came down onto the beach and stood at a distance of 40 or 50 yards from me while the dog bounded forward over the flat slippery rocks and through pools of water until he came to my side and sitting on the edge of the rock gently down at the water he was a big shaggy round-headed animal with a grayish coat with some patches of light reddish color on it what his breed was I cannot say but he looked somewhat like a sheep dog or an otter hound suddenly he plunged in quite disappearing from sight but quickly reappeared with a big shad of about three or four pounds weight in his jaws climbing onto the rock he dropped the fish and then he fingered much as it began floundering about in the exceedingly lively manner I was astonished and looked back at the dog's master but there he stood in the same place smoking and paying no attention to what his animal was doing again the dog plunged in and brought out a second big fish and dropped it on the flat rock again and again he dived until there were five big shads all floundering about on the wet rock back into the water the shad is a common fish in the plata and the best to eat of all its fishes resembling the salmon in its rich flavor and is eagerly watched for when it comes up from the sea by the Buenos Aires fishermen just as our fishermen watch for mackerel on our coasts but on this evening the beach was deserted by everyone, watchers included and the fish came and swarmed along the rocks and there was no one to catch them so a poor hungry idler to pounce upon and carry off the five fishes the dog had captured one by one I saw them washed back into the water and presently the dog hearing his master whistling to him bounded away for many years after this incident I had failed to find anyone who had even seen or heard of a dog catching fish eventually in reading I met with an account of fishing dogs in Newfoundland and other countries a strange adventure met with on the front remains to be told it was about eleven o'clock in the morning and I was on the parade walking north pausing from time to time to look over the sea wall to watch the flocks of small birds that came to feed on the beach below presently my attention was drawn to a young man walking on before me pausing and peering two from time to time over the wall and when he did so throwing something at the small birds and overtook him and was rather taken aback at his wonderfully fine appearance he was like one of the gentlemen of the gathering before the church described a few pages back and wore a silk hat and fashionable black coat and trousers and scarlet silk waistcoat he was also a remarkably handsome young man with a golden brown curly beard and moustache and dark liquid eyes that studied my face with a half amused curiosity on how to wrap up at him in one hand he carried a washed leather bag by its handle and holding a pebble in his right hand he watched the birds the small parties of crested song sparrows yellow house sparrows siskins, field finches, and other kinds and from time to time he would hurl a pebble at the bird he had singled out forty yards below us on the rocks I did not see him actually hit a bird but his precision was amazing for almost invariably the missile, thrown from such a distance at so minute an object, appeared to graze the feathers, and to miss killing by but a fraction of an inch. I followed him for some distance, my wonder and curiosity growing every minute, to see such a superior-looking person engaged in such a pastime. For it is a fact that the natives do not persecute small birds. On the contrary, they despise the aliens in the land who shoot and trap them. Besides, if he wanted small birds for any purpose, why did he try to get them by throwing pebbles at them? As he did not order me off, but looked in a kindly way at me every little while, with a slight smile on his face, I at length ventured to tell him that he would never get a bird that way, that it would be impossible at that distance to hit one with a small pebble. Oh, no, not impossible, he returned smiling and walking on, still with an eye on the rocks. Well, you haven't hit one yet, I was bold enough to say, and at that he stopped and putting his finger and thumb in his waistcoat pocket, he pulled out a dead male Ciskin and put it in my hands. This was the bird called Goldfinch by the English resident in La Plata, and to the Spanish it is also Goldfinch. It is, however, a Ciskin. Cairo Sumitris Malagenica and has a velvet black head, the rest of its plumage being black, green, and shining yellow. It was one of my best-loved birds, but I had never had one in my hand, dead or alive before. And now its wonderful, unimagined loveliness, its graceful form, and the exquisitely pure, flower-like yellow hue affected me with a delight so keen that I could hardly keep from tears. After gloating a few moments over it, touching it with my fingertips and opening the little black and gold wings, I looked up pleadingly and begged him to let me keep it. He smiled and shook his head. He would not waste his breath talking. All his energy was to be spent in hurling pebbles at other lovely little birds. Oh, senior, will you not give it to me? I pleaded still. And then with sudden hope, are you going to sell it? He laughed, and taking it from my hand put it back in his waistcoat pocket. Then, with a pleasant smile and a nod to say that the interview was now over, he went on his way. Standing on the spot where he left me and still bitterly regretting that I had failed to get the bird, I watched him until he disappeared from sight in the distance, walking toward the suburb of Palermo, and a mystery he remains to this day, the one and only Argentine gentleman, a citizen of the Athens of South America, amusing himself by killing little birds with pebbles. But I do not know that it was an amusement. He had perhaps in some wild moment made a vow to kill so many siskins in that way, or a bet to prove his skill in throwing a pebble, or he might have been practicing a cure for some mysterious deadly malady prescribed by some wandering physician from Baghdad, or Isphaham, or more probable still some heartless soulless woman he was in love with, who had imposed this fantastical task on him. Perhaps the most wonderful thing I saw during that first eventful visit to the capital was the famed Don Espueo, the court jester or fool of the president or dictator Rosas, the Nero of South America, who lived in his palace at Palermo, just outside the city. I had been sent with my sisters and little brother to spend the day at the house of an Anglo-Argentine family in another part of the town, and we were in the large courtyard playing with the children of the house, when someone opened a window above and called out, Don Espueo. That conveyed nothing to me, but the little boys of the house knew what it meant. It meant that if we went quickly out to the street we might catch a glimpse of the great man in all his glory. At all events they jumped up flinging their toys away and rushed to the street door and we after them. Coming out we found quite a crowd of lookers on, and then down the street in his general's dress, for it was the dictator's little jokes to make his fool a general, all scarlet with a big scarlet three-cornered hat, surmounted by an immense a great of scarlet plumes, came Don Espueo. He marched along with tremendous dignity, his sword at his side, and twelve soldiers, also in scarlet, his bodyguard, walking six on each side of him with drawn swords in their hands. We gazed with joyful excitement at this splendid spectacle, and it made it all the more thrilling when one of the boys whispered in my ear that if any person in the crowd laughed or made any insulting or rude remark he would be instantly cut to pieces by the guard, and they look truculent enough for anything. The great roses himself I did not see, but it was something to have had this momentary sight of General Usobio, his fool, on the eve of his fall after a reign of over twenty years, during which he proved himself one of the bloodiest as well as the most original minded of the cadillos and dictators, and altogether perhaps the greatest of those who have climbed into power in this continent of republics and revolutions.