Across the Andes

by Charles Johnson Post

I started at dawn on a little, tough mountain-bred horse and had passed the divide early in the afternoon. At Huaylata I stopped for breakfast—a tin of salmon and some cakes of Aymará bread—a little outside the sprawling collection of mud huts, and an Indian woman came out and sold me a sheaf of barley for the horse. There were no signs of Indian trouble here. The horse ate and then drank and as he finished drinking he threw up his head and the blood trickled in a heavy stream from his nostrils and he trembled.

If the horse was frightened he was not more so than I. To be horseless and on foot in an Indian plain and with the uncertain rumors of Aymará outbreaks that might have spread like a flame among that dull, hostile population was the most unpleasant situation I have ever faced. The little Indian towns where I expected to camp, Copencara and the tambo of Cocuta, were safe enough, but the thought of getting even to Achicachi—where I might be able to get a fresh horse—gave me five minutes of cold and clammy quivers of panic at the pit of my stomach. The horse stood with the blood dripping in a steady patter on the cold ground while a puddle slowly grew into a great red blot; he looked at me with what, to my understanding, appeared to be his final vision from dulling eyes; the straggling population of the scattering huts of Huaylata seemed to have become raised to the final power of sinister hostility; there was no doubt that I was frightened. I took a box of cartridges from my saddle bags and distributed them in my pockets so their weight bore evenly and waited. There was nothing else to do. There was no use in starting on foot till the horse was surely dead.

Presently the horse went back to the spring, took a little drink, and then turned to the cebada and began nibbling. I felt better for no seriously deranged animal would eat in its final moments. The trickling of blood grew less and the animal showed in better shape. If he could only last to Achicachi, that was all that I wanted.

I did not think it wise to start on foot and leading the horse—that would advertise the fact that I was crippled—while I could wait in Huaylata without betraying anything more than a sluggish and lazy disposition. I tried mounting at last and the horse grunted and then started slowly. How I nursed him those miles; out of sight of Huaylata I walked; the bleeding had stopped, but he seemed weak; I took his temperature with my hand, I petted him, I gave him a bite of chocolate, and when any Aymará huts or little parties hove in sight I mounted and rode by.

Steadily the horse improved and at times responded to a test trot without difficulty so that I rode through Achicachi without stopping. Only once had I had the sign of trouble and that was a little group of Aymarás near the beginning of an old Inca causeway that cuts across one arm of Lake Titicaca. They were drunk and I could hear snatches of their thin, wailing songs while they were still dots in the distance. As I rode by they were at one side of the trail where an old mud building held forth as a chicharia and struggling in that aimless drunken fashion that seems so common to all topers and that divides all wassailing bands into those prudent souls who are already drunk enough and know it and those who won’t go home until morning or till daylight, or the day after, doth appear. They started for me uncertainly, one reached for a stone, but an Aymará rushed out of the house and knocked it from his hand. Some of the more sober came, too, and again the wrangling started, apparently as to whether they should rush me or not. And in the meantime I had ridden out of reach.

There was nothing to fear in that incident, at least so far as my immediate safety had been concerned. But the critical point lay in avoiding trouble; no one Indian or similar group would have had a chance, unarmed as they were, against any man with a gun, but in a peculiarly abrupt Indian fashion the countryside is aroused and trouble is apt to close in on the trail ahead in a particularly congested and fatal manner.

I had planned to camp in Copencara, but the delay left me plodding along in the cold darkness and I was glad when I reached Guarina. In the blackness I rode into a pack-train of sleepy llamas before they knew it—or I either for that matter—and on the instant I could hear the patter and thud of their padded feet as they scattered in a panic stricken flight, while from out of the night came the hissing herd-calls of the Aymará drivers trying to hold them together. Off from the highway that led through the town and from somewhere beyond the walled streets there came the dull beating of many Aymará drums and the mournful tootling of their flutes. Now and again there was the bang of a dynamite cartridge and the pop of firecrackers. An Aymará flitted by in the streets and I called to him for the way to the house of the corregidor—the chief official. All I could get of his reply was the respectful “Tata” as he disappeared.

There was not a light that gleamed through a chink in any window or door, the wretched streets were deserted, and only the noises of the fiesta and the occasional glow from a big bonfire down some alley showed where the only signs of life existed. It was possible that the corregidor was barricaded in his house as in the very recent affair at Illabaya and I had no mind to intrude on any collection of Aymarás beating tom-toms and raising drunken memories of their abused ancestors. It looked ominous.

Presently another dim figure pattered through the darkness and again I asked for the way to the corregidor. The Aymará gave explanations that I could not have followed in daylight and then started off to lead the way, straight down an alley to the plaza where were the bonfires and the drums and the dancing and the explosions. Along one side we skirted until the farther side was reached. It was a big plaza—almost as big as the town—and it was filled with Aymarás from miles around. A mass of shifting groups shuffled in their trotting dance around the fires and hundreds of unattached guests wandered drunkenly about or lay stupefied as they fell with their faithful wife—or wives—taking care of the bottle of alcohol till they should revive afresh and athirst.

At one end of this plaza my guide stopped, he was a tattered ragged Aymará—a pongo—a carrier of water and of the lowest caste, and left me at the headquarters of the corregidor to whom I had the customary right of the country to appeal for shelter. When there is no corregidor you go to the padre. He was a Cholo, a heavy, thick-set man with a strong face, dressed in the ordinary clothes of a white man, whose peculiar dull complexion alone marked him as Cholo. A couple of tattered police lounged in the doorway and a half dozen Cholos were idling around this headquarters. A Winchester leaned against the corregidor’s chair, some of the others carried theirs as they shuffled about, and back in the dimness of the room could be seen extra carbines leaning against the walls, and from every belt there was the bulge under the coat that indicated a revolver.