Where the Earth Ends
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John Harrison
John Harrison is Yorkshire born and bred. His work draws inspiration from his beloved county and is known for portraying built structures in the wider landscape, exploring the contrast between the manmade and the natural.
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5 ratings1 review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I have read one of his other books, Cloud Road, which I thought was excellent. so was looking forward to this.
Harrison is travelling around the very southern extremes of the South America, in an area known as Patagonia. He is searching for the indigenous people, and is aiming to immerse himself into the region. part of the way through he is offered a bargain price to travel to go Antarctica, and takes it. Travel all around the region meeting the people and seeing the scenery, and does get to meet the indigenous people, including a few who still speak the original languages.
There is a lot in the book about the history of the region, from the very earliest explorers who came across the abundance of life in the Southern oceans, and he writes of the pain and suffering that these explorers brought with them.
There were parts of this that I really enjoyed reading, about his traveling and his observations, for instance, but I felt the book did not have the same focus as Cloud Road. And that is a shame because Harrison is a writer of quality.
Book preview
Where the Earth Ends - John Harrison
Copyright
Where the Earth
Ends
John Harrison
John Harrison was born in Liverpool to a seafaring family who made a hobby of rounding Cape Horn. He’s now done it fourteen times, and breaks it up with trips to Antarctica and remote corners of South America. Home is in Cardiff, and shared with his partner Elaine. He has recently walked a thousand kilometres alone through the High Andes for two new books on Peru. He is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
To Elaine,
for believing
xxxx
1. Patagonia
A Landing
December. Three in the morning. The plane shuddered down through the turbulence in the low cumulus and banked. The most southerly town on Argentina’s mainland came up out of the black: Rio Gallegos. The plane abruptly fell another three hundred feet and I could see down the narrow aisle and over the pilot’s shoulder, and watch the earth saucer back and forth, trying to dodge our outstretched wheels. In all the earth this was the last continental land which mankind reached. In Central Africa tool-making early humans roamed the plains 2.5 million years ago but there is no evidence of people here on the tip of South America until twelve thousand years ago.
Studying the street maps in the guide it was easy to forget which town I was looking at, each bright gridiron named after the standard set of generals. In Argentina they are San Martín, Roca, Belgrano; in Chile, O’Higgins, Prat, Montt. The orange-lit lines of dead heroes tilted and came to meet us.
I asked the taxi driver to find a mid-price hotel. He said, ‘No problem.’ The Punta Arenas, no vacancies. Further down the street, the Liporace sounded and looked like a skin complaint. The taxi driver pounded the locked door. Red light was making weak rents in the eastern sky, four mongrels besieged a cat in a small tree. A man appeared and talked to the driver, shaking his head. The driver came back, ‘The town is full. The hotel is full.’
When a hotel named after a skin disease has no empty beds, I can believe the town is full.
The pavements were broken, and sheets of water lay in the road. We did the rounds. Sleepy faces came to doors, tired bodies leaned on the jamb. They shook their heads and cut their hands horizontally across each other. At the Laguna, a stooped thin man with a ten-month-old haircut and a pensioner’s cardigan declaimed ‘No room’ as if there was surely a Second Coming and anyone with a stable should clean out the manger.
‘I know another place!’ the driver exclaimed.
The Colonial was pink low concrete. It had two doors; no one answered either. The driver said, ‘I am sorry, this never happened before. I’ll stop the meter.’ The street was nearly light.
‘If I find somewhere now, will they charge me for tonight?’
‘They charge eight to eight, if you book in at five to eight you pay for the night’s sleep you just missed.’
‘Take me to a café, the one we passed at the crossroads in the centre.’
The Monaco was at the intersection of two heavyweight generals, Roca and San Martín. It was glass-walled and brightly lit, open twenty-four hours. A third of the tables were taken, many by couples winding up the evening, talking quietly. I drank large milk coffees. ‘Nothing to eat, sir?’
I had been awake forty-eight hours and three time zones. So tired I no longer knew if I was hungry.
‘Nothing to eat.’
The dawn began to fix the street in place, like a photograph being developed. People drifted away, the rest were drunk, quietly and gently drunk. A tired waiter broke a glass and smiled ruefully at the applause. Everyone took turns at looking at me, the only sober customer, the only non-smoker, the only person alone. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid once held up the bank here. When the shops opened, I would buy a Colt 45 and free up some hotel beds.
Sometime after six I walked to the estuary, past the building designated an historic monument to record the visit of the first president to come to Rio Gallegos: Julio Roca. He spoke from a balcony and urged immigrants to populate the south and exploit the wealth of the Magellan Straits. The historic monument is a wooden balcony hanging cock-eyed from a big shed. I am sorry, but it is. The shore was a concrete esplanade, grey and perspectiveless as childhood. A red balustrade. The sea wall dropped ten feet to shingle, which shelved to sharp-smelling mud that glued down flimsy supermarket bags. Pigeons and gulls pecked a path across the mud. The water of the mile-wide estuary lay polished, ceramic. I was looking north; low flat-topped hills on the farther shore hinted at the majestic monotony of the plains which went north, horizon after horizon. This was the last country man found, this strand, this hill, the sky shining like wet paint; the dust already sticking to the fresh wax on my boots was made from flecks of legend. This was Patagonia.
Patagonia! The origin of the word, still a byword for being off the beaten track, has been much argued over. The Oxford English Dictionary, which has time to ruminate on these things, is content that there is a Spanish word patagon meaning a large clumsy foot, and that it derives from large clumsy shoes worn by natives. Spanish regional dialects still use patacones for big-pawed dogs, and the depth of the footprints the dancing natives made in the sand was remarked on by the first visitor, Magellan.
A second theory involves the Incas, who explored the Andes a long way south of the territory they formally conquered. Their empire was not ancient. In 1532, when Pizarro rode his horse through its golden halls, the realm was little more than a hundred years old. In the Incan language, Quechua, the south was called Patac-Hunia, or mountain regions, and as Spanish does not pronounce ‘h’ the sound is very close to Patagonia. But why would men from an empire of the high Andes describe the lesser peaks of the south as mountain regions?
Bruce Chatwin was tipped off by Professor González Díaz that Tehuelche Indians wore dog-faced masks, and Magellan might have nicknamed them after a character in a novel called Primalon of Greece which features a dog-eared monster called Patagon. It is an anonymous romance published in Spain in 1512 and translated into English by Anthony Mundy in 1596. As an aside, Mundy was a friend of Shakespeare, who would soon after have Trinculo say of Caliban, in The Tempest, ‘I shall laugh myself to death at this puppy-headed monster.’
Three flaws are apparent in the theory. Firstly, who names lands after novels? Secondly, it seems incredible that rough and ready adventurers would pause in their journeys on the edge of the unknown to make literary allusions; and thirdly, there isn’t a shred of evidence that Magellan knew of the book.
But California is named after an island in a novel. Hernando Cortés sailed up the Gulf of California believing the land on his left was an island, not a peninsula, and named it after an island called California in the tale The Adventures of Esplandián, written by Garcí Ordóñez de Montalvo in 1510.
Secondly, as Bernal Díaz records, when his men walked a causeway into Mexico City in 1520, they ‘said that it seemed like one of those enchanted things which are told about in the book of Amadís’. The chivalric fantasy Amadís of Gaul was one of the real books which Cervantes slipped into the library of Don Quixote; literate soldiers carried them round in the same way that GIs carry comics.
Finally, Magellan could perhaps have known about Primalon of Greece. It was published seven years before Magellan sailed, and he spent a lot of time at court where such books were read by the chattering classes of the day. There are many odd theories about the origin of the name of the strange land of Patagonia; perhaps the oddest one is true.
In the dead of early morning the town was dreadful. Although a lot of money was made here in the livestock industries, it did not stay. The moneyed families built their belle époque mansions to the south, around Plaza Muñoz Gamero in Punta Arenas, importing everything from Europe, from the art to the architect. Here in Rio Gallegos, the post office and one restaurant excepted, there was no building in the whole centre worth a minute’s pause. All the tawdriness of a dead-end town with none of the excuses. Desperate for sleep, and groggy with lack of food, I bought cakes and savouries at a baker’s and walked past the pink Colonial Hotel once again. A young backpacker came out of it and climbed into a taxi. A bed.
The landlady asked me to wait ten minutes while she changed the sheets. When she had finished, I sat on the bed and took out a cheese and ham croissant. Under the cling film it had looked quite brave. Naked, the ingredients looked like naïve patriotic things which, in a rush of enthusiasm, had signed up as food but, on reflection, had realised their utter unsuitability for the task ahead. Tasted as seen.
The room was the size of a prison cell but without the amenities. No wardrobe no chest of drawers no table no toilet no basin no water no glass no carpet no rug no curtains no view. No matter, it had a bed, and a little gap down one side of it to get in and out. I walked to the bathroom in bare feet, looked inside, and went back for my boots.
What was I doing here?
Rainy Childhood Days
Voyages begin in books. Mine started with rainy childhood days and a house with one coal fire in the front room of our council house, near the Liverpool FC training ground. Wooden window frames with cold panes and tiny petals of orange mould in the corners. Knot resin weeping, pushing paint into blisters. A finger on the glass made two beads run together and zigzag down the glass collecting others, like chequers. My breath fogged the game.
We were three boys, I was in the middle. The first adult novel I read was Robinson Crusoe, when I was still small enough to curl up entirely inside the wooden arms of my mother’s tiny armchair. At that time the only sea I knew was the brown of the Mersey and the racing tides of the Wirral’s flat, estuarine resorts. I pored silently over the watercolour illustrations of palms and blue horizons, then took a red spade to dig my own fort in the back garden.
One damp Sunday I sat cross-legged in front of an oak utility furniture bookcase. ‘Da-aad,’ I drizzled, ‘what would I like to read?’ He tapped his faintly nicotined fingers on a green book spine, Percy Harrison Fawcett’s Exploration Fawcett.
‘Read this, he is a Harrison,’ he said.
‘Is he a relative?’
He looked out of the window at the rain, falling on the split paling fence. There was no prospect of going out. ‘Yes.’
I pulled out the book. In the front was a picture of a frowning man sporting a hip-length jacket and riding boots, and leaning on a wooden balcony. His propeller moustache waited for a batman to swing it into motion. The chapter titles called to me: The Lost Mines of Muribeca, Rubber Boom, River of Evil, Poisoned Hell, and The Veil of the Primaeval. I strode into the book and came out two days later.
Percy Fawcett made impossible journeys into the interior of the greatest South American jungles, again and again. He walked the frontiers of Bolivia to map them. Maps were crucial; without them the rubber barons would not know whose country they were robbing. He was in the interior most of the years from 1906 to 1913 and met travellers who had seen potions which made rock soften so it could be cut in the butter-smooth joints of the earthquake-proof Incan cities.
I swallowed tales of men who fell out of canoes in piranha-filled rivers, clung to the stern, and were removed at the river bank, skeletons from the waist down. They were killed by anacondas, poisonous spiders, flesh-rotting diseases and the cat o’ nine tails. They were sold to pay their own debts. Rubber magnates living on the world’s greatest flow of fresh water sent their laundry to Paris and constructed an opera house for Caruso, who came and anchored mid-river off Manaus. A cholera epidemic raged. Caruso walked the decks, and received the daily lists of the dead. Contracts beckoned, time ran out, he went home. Outside the opera house, the curved twin staircases leading up to the classical mezzanine were cleared of cholera victims each day. Dust motes descended shafts of light in the silent theatre.
The book was drafted in note form by Fawcett in 1923. There remained one dream, his search for the lost city of João da Silva Guimarões. In 1743 Guimarões had been hunting only for lost mines. A negro in his party had chased a white stag to the summit of a mountain pass. Below, on a plain, was a city of some sort. Next day they entered through three arches, so tall that no one could read the inscriptions above them. A broad street led them to a plaza. At each corner was a black obelisk. In the centre rose a colossal column of black stone on which was a statue of a man pointing to the north. The entire city was deserted except for a cloud of huge bats. Nearby they found silver nails lying in the dirt of caverns, and gold dust in the streams.
By 1925 Fawcett, discouraged by his failure to find men of his own invulnerability to hardship and disease, went out aged 57 with his inexperienced son Jack, and Jack’s friend Raleigh Rimmel, on one last search for the lost city of Guimarões. Fawcett’s last letter to his wife in England read, ‘you need have no fear of failure’. They were never heard of again. His surviving son Brian put together the book from his father’s notes and published it in 1953.
On another, interminable, wet afternoon in the school holidays, I opened a black book of narrative poetry and read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The prologue begins: ‘How a ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole.’
‘Are there any others like that one?’ I asked my father, when the other poems in the collection bored me. Thirty-five years on I know the answer.
In my teens I painted, again and again, the spars of the Mariner’s un-named ship against livid skies. We moved to Falmouth in Cornwall, where I watched Robin Knox-Johnson tack Suhaili into the harbour and complete the first single-handed non-stop round-the-world voyage. It had begun as a race; he won it by being the only survivor.
I left Falmouth Grammar School, and went up to Jesus College, Cambridge to read geography. On the walls of the medieval dining hall were portraits of former scholars. Beneath them, Mr West, the Head Porter with the cut of W. C. Fields in his flesh and clothes, lectured us on the evils of fornication and drugs. He did not seem heavily scarred by either. Thomas Malthus, author of the essay on population, looked over our heads. Coleridge, opium addict, stared down with great baleful eyes. He had written home, ‘There is no such thing as discipline at our College.’ That winter I discovered a reprint of Gustav Doré’s fabulous engravings for the Ancient Mariner. In 1978 I read Chatwin’s In Patagonia and, looking at atlases, my eyes began to fall south.
In Hay-on-Wye I was trawling the second-hand bookshops for material on Chile, when I found a hank of pages without a cover, which had fallen down the back of the other books. I pulled it out: An Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Chile by Alonso de Ovalle, a Jesuit. It had been torn from a larger volume. Although in English, the cover said it was printed in Rome in 1649. It was in such good condition I assumed it was a reproduction. The pages were fresh and white, they were flexible and clean. I bought it and took it round the corner to bookbinder Christine Turnbull. A gravel path led me down an avenue of lavender to her cottage workshop. She looked quietly over it and compared the paper with samples from her cabinets. She stroked her fingers down the spine. ‘The first English text was published in 1703. It should be full leather’
‘Then I'll have full leather!’
Alonso’s report is the first English account of Chile. It was dynamite in its day. The English translator confided that it ‘contains secrets of commerce and navigation, which I wonder how they were published’. Ovalle advised speculators that a man with 40,000 crowns to invest, including in slaves, might earn a twenty-five per cent return ‘very lawful, and without any trouble to one’s conscience.’
I then found Lucas Bridges’s book on growing up in Tierra del Fuego as the son of the first successful missionary, Thomas Bridges. After a few chapters I knew I would visit Ushuaia and the bare savage islands of the far south. My great-grandfather had sailed there before the mast on the great square-riggers. My grandfather Thomas Harrison, born in 1896, sailed the Horn in steam and diesel, plying the last of the ‘WCSA’ (West Coast of South America) trade out of Liverpool. I was the first generation not to sail the Horn or fight a war. Instead, I would go to the end of the world, beyond Patagonia, to Tierra del Fuego. I would do more, I would see the Horn and find lost tribes. The child in me could go even further and sail the waters of Coleridge’s albatross and enter the watercolours’ blue horizons and sit on Crusoe’s imaginary shore. I had imagined these places; they must exist. All I had to do was look for them.
Rio Gallegos
By lunchtime I had slept four hours and woken too excited to stay in bed. I went out to look at the town with fresh eyes. I would like to say it helped.
Rio Gallegos was named after the river it stood on, but no one knows where the river got its name. One of the earliest houses belonged to a Doctor Victor Fenton. It was made in the Falklands from a design in an English catalogue, and shipped here, perhaps as early as 1890. It was here before the town, which grew around it during the following fifteen years. It is a two-storey wooden dormer with a long sun lounge running across the whole front. In 1915 it passed into the Parisi family. Señor Parisi’s wife was Maria Catalina. She was born one cold snowy August morning in 1860, in her family’s toldo or skin tent. They were Tehuelche pampas Indians and lived by hunting with the bolas. She had five daughters and three sons who survived to adulthood. All her life she made a living by native traditional crafts, making guanaco capes, sewing the skins together using the veins of ostriches. Her favourite food was mare’s meat with ostrich.
The house is now a museum. The stove has not moved in sixty years; some furniture came from other early houses. The study had three old Remington typewriters. In the lounge a colossal Canadian Victrolla brought over in 1904 played a fine tango on a paste 78. In the kitchen was a washing-machine, hand-cranked and looking like a butter churn with wringers above it. But I was more taken with the story of Maria Catalina. Most of her children would still be alive. I talked to Señora McDonald, now retired, whose Scottish father had come to Patagonia and married a Spanish woman. She spoke English with a strange rural Scots edge to it.
‘Are any of Maria Catalina’s children still alive?’
She thought for a moment. ‘One of the sons, Roberto, lives a few streets away.’
‘Is he the kind of man who would mind me calling in for a chat?’
‘No, not normally, but his wife died of cancer two days ago.’
This was the dry season; it never rains here in December. But every few hours the rain lashed down like cold nails. People shook their heads and said ‘El Niño’. I walked round Rio Gallegos once more and decided to leave. My journey was planned to follow a V shape, moving south to Tierra del Fuego, as far as I could go down the east coast, then to turn north up the west coast. But first I had to backtrack north a short way, to Puerto San Julián. I was sure it would now be a dull town, but I wanted to see it, because it was the scene of treason, bloodshed and executions where tragedy was followed by farce. It was the launchpad for the first two circumnavigations of the world, by Magellan, then Drake. And, of course, Magellan and Drake both met and talked to giants so tall the sailors could not touch the tops of their heads.
Puerto San Julián
The bus making the five-hour trip to Puerto San Julián left at half three in the afternoon. This time I rang ahead to book; there were no medium-price hotels. I thought about going to the bathroom in my boots, and booked the one up-market hotel, the Bahía San Julián.
At the travel agents I got on the bus. Everyone else was being picked up from home. Many had been Christmas shopping in Rio Gallegos, and waded on board festooned with bags and boxes. Every seat was filled. When we eventually left town an hour later, the only place left to put my legs was in the aisle. We pulled in at the airport. The driver collected eight large plastic packing boxes and filled the aisle.
The landscape was the colour of burnt grass, stony, empty and huge. The road appeared flat, but was not. After a while the eye learned to see the slight turns, the subtle rises and falls. There were hidden dips betrayed by the road shimmering as a grey soft-edged lens in the air above them. One of the few towns we passed through was named after an early administrator, his whole name: Comandante Luis Pedra Buena! A mid-stream island was wantonly green with trees and flower meadows. Then we entered the great basin where the land falls to one hundred metres below sea level, the lowest in all Argentina. The sun dropped, the dry grass colour turned corn gold and then red gold.
At ten-thirty we rolled into the unmade streets of Puerto San Julián, veering all over the road looking for purchase in the mud. The driver began dropping people off, picking out places where they would not drown walking to the kerb. Eleven o’clock came. He pulled out onto a well-lit dual carriageway, and pointed at me. There stood my brand new hotel. I walked self-consciously onto the thick blue carpets, staring after me to see how much mud I was trailing. A large bar supported two drinkers watching football on the television. The smart receptionist showed me to my room. It looked as though I was the first person ever to stay in it.
‘How long have you been open?’
‘Not long, two years.’
Early photographs of the town, lining the hotel corridors, had a strange bare quality to them, like a town in a child’s dream: big simple buildings, one car, one house, one dog. A single steamer stood at a short pier. Thousands of sheep trotted across an empty square and through a wooden V onto a gangplank and into the hold. One man, stationary on a horse, watched over them. Clutter, the detail that makes life real, had not arrived.
Morning was overcast. I walked down the road at the side of the hotel to see the south end of the bay. Above the high-tide mark was a zone of grassy flats criss-crossed by channels. The bay’s circle was wide; low hills came down to grey sandy cliffs. The water was milky blue from fine sediment. As I descended the hill I left the gridiron, the invader’s geometry, and entered a barrio of makeshift houses that followed the streams and contours, responding to the land. Each rested at the size it had reached when money ran out. Tiny birds followed me through the scrub, keeping level or just behind. They were rufous-backed negritos, the females dun, the males a shimmer of red-brown and shining blue-black. Perhaps they follow people because we disturb insects for them to feed on, but nobody really knows.
Mongrels, long-haired golden mongrels, squealed and twisted on thin rope tethers, their anguished yelps squeezed from far back in the throat. The plaint of the dogs’ barking was blown out to sea by a flat wind. On the wall round the bone-dust sports field lone graffti appealed: ‘Don’t fail me.’
I was walking in the steps of Magellan and Drake, I would also be following in the footsteps of a more recent buccaneer, the English bandit El Jimmy.
El Jimmy
The writer Herbert Childs came here by boat in the 1930s for his honeymoon. He was searching for an English-born gaucho and bandit who wanted his story written – James Radburne, nicknamed ‘El Jimmy’.
Wondering if all the tales of rough frontier life were true, particularly the casual cut-throat violence of the gauchos, Mr and Mrs Childs reached Puerto San Julián, and went ashore to stretch their legs. They found it dull rather than dangerous. Coming back to the ships, they shared the ferry with three gauchos in full rodeo dress. Once on board, a policeman steered them towards third class. Another passenger came up alongside Childs, ‘They’re going to Rio Gallegos for trial.’
‘What did they do?’
‘They were in a gang. A fourth one took a bribe and betrayed them to the police. They caught him, skinned him alive, and cut all the skin off his face to make him hard to recognise.’
‘Why aren’t they handcuffed?’
‘They’re no danger to anyone else. They only killed because a friend betrayed them. That’s not murder down here, they’ll get seven years, at most. There’s no point trying to escape and giving the police a chance to shoot you and get a reward – not over a little point of etiquette.’
In England, when James was seventeen his father died leaving twelve children. James did not help his mother’s desperate plight. Instead he turned to poaching and had an affair. Gossip led to discovery. The girl’s furious mother went to court. The judge was swift to reach a verdict, plainly embarrassed by the mother’s principal tactic of flourishing the girl’s knickers to the courtroom. Time to go. A nearby farmer had shares in a farm in Patagonia. Jimmy did not know where Patagonia was, but he went. After a swift passage of twenty-eight days, he stepped ashore in Punta Arenas on 8 December 1892. He was asked the question all fresh young men from Britain were asked: ‘Was it poaching or a girl?’
‘Both.’
Jimmy already had the right credentials for Patagonia, and he loved the outdoors and the horses, the hunting and camp life. But in a land of murders and thieves, a mere poacher needed to make a name. He made himself the best gaucho, shepherd, jockey and horse trainer in the district, and one of the best in the region. To his father’s fist-craft he added a knife and a gun, and his reputation became an invitation for every hardcase in Patagonia to take a pop at him.
One day, when shearing finished at the Denmark Estancia, he was kept on for a few weeks to cut fence posts and rails in the woods. He saw something which made him tingle, the toldos, or guanaco skin tents of Tehuelche Indians. Che means ‘people’ and tehuel means ‘of the South’. He was to befriend them and live with them, learning their skill and craft, their soft ways of taming horses. They had no bows or arrows, and hunted with the apparently primitive bolas. But in the tall grass of the pampa, the bolas will reach an animal when a lasso will be smothered by the grass, and an arrow deflected.
Two round stones were sheathed in leather, then bound six feet apart with rawhide. A third, egg-shaped stone was tied by a line to the centre of the first line. The throw comprised a combination of horizontal and vertical swings to make them fly in a Y shape and wrap the balls round the neck or legs of a horse, guanaco, cow or ostrich. For ostrich and farmed animals, packed gravel would be used instead of stones, so as not to smash the legs. Charles Darwin was given a brief lesson, swung the stones energetically round, and fell poleaxed as they hit him on the back of the head.
Jimmy, practical countryman though he was, could never make a bolas whose balance he liked as much as the Tehuelche-made ones. Whenever there was a serious hunt, he traded other goods for an Indian-made one.
The Tehuelche were so famous for their horsemanship that when the St Louis World Fair was held in 1904, the Argentine government wanted to send six of them to compete in the rodeo events. Baller, the local commissioner, was not liked. He gave his son the job of taking the party to St Louis. They didn’t like him any better. Young Baller was reduced to picking four men from a group which happened to be camped on his doorstep. Coloko was good at balling ostrich; another, Loco, was a good jockey. Casimiro and another old man were regarded as pretty well useless at most things. The Indians who remained said Baller had picked the most useless men, and then the ugliest women to go with them. But when they returned they brought home the prizes for lassooing and riding, beating all the American cowboys and the South American gauchos.
Not all Tehuelche pastimes were so constructive. One way of killing the time was to catch a viscacha, a cute animal halfway between a rabbit and a squirrel, and skin