All this goes to make up a man of the Campo—the estanciero, colonist, peon, gaucho, or whatever other name he may be called. Certain conditions of living and working are forced upon him from which there is no escape. Whether landed proprietor, farmer, servant, or agricultural labourer, the vastness of the plain which opens in front of him, the distance between inhabited dwellings, the roughness of the roads, leave him no other means of communication but the horse, which abounds everywhere and can be unceremoniously borrowed on occasion. The man of the Campo is a horseman. He is certainly not an elegant horseman, whose riding would be appreciated at the Saumur Cavalry School. No curb; only a plain bit is used, whose first effect is to bring down the animal's head and throw him out of balance, whilst his rider, to remedy this defect, raises his hands as high as his head. To the unsightliness of this picture is added an unstable seat. As very often happens in similar circumstances, instinct and determination more or less making up for all mistakes, the rider manages approximately to keep on his beast's back, thanks partly to the fact that the horse is rarely required to go at more than a moderate pace over level ground. The hoof never by any chance can strike on a stone, though it may be caught in a hole; the active little creole horse excels in avoiding this danger. One can ask no more of him. (I shall have something to say later of the way wild horses are broken in.)
On his enormous saddle of sheepskin, the peon or gaucho, his hat pulled well down over his eyes, his shoulders draped in the folds of the poncho,—a blanket with a hole in it for the head to pass through,—is encumbered with a whip whose handle serves on occasion as a mallet, and a lasso, with or without metal balls, coiled behind his saddle. He makes a picturesque enough figure in the monotonous expanse of earth and sky, where rancho or tree, beast or man, stand out in high relief against a background of glaring light. Without sign or syllable, his eyes fixed on the empty horizon, the man passes through the silence of infinite solitude, rising like a ghost from the nothingness of the horizon at one point to sink again into nothingness at another. When riding in a troop, they talk together in low tones. There are none of those outbursts of fun that you might expect in a land of sunshine. It is the gravity natural to men brought face to face with Nature in the pitiless light of sky and earth where no fold or break in the surface arrests the glance or fixes the attention.
Still, there are those gigantic herds of horned cattle or horses which fill an appreciable portion of the melancholy plain—"green in winter, yellow in summer." I say nothing of the great flocks of sheep because there were none in the districts which I visited. When you talk of a herd of ten thousand cows, you make some impression on even a big farmer of the Charolais. Well, I can assure you that out in the Pampas ten thousand head of cattle is a small affair. You see a dark shadow that rises on the horizon that might be either a village or a group of haycocks, until the vague shifting of the mass suggests to your mind the idea of some form of life. The lines show clearer, groups break off and stand out, pointed horns appear, and at last you find you are watching the tranquil passage of a monstrous herd, whose outlines are stencilled in black upon the whiteness of the sky-line like the Chinese shadow pictures I saw on one occasion at the Chat Noir (in Montmartre) when the flocks of the patriarchs were flung upon the sheet. So distinct are the shapes here that you lose the sense of distance and are astonished at the harmony of nonchalant impulse, as irresistible as slow, which can thus set in movement this huge living mass and make it pass before us like a vision of Fate. The dream fantasy is the more striking because it changes so rapidly. Withdraw your eyes a moment from the picture, and it is entirely altered. The heavy mass of migrating cattle seems now to have taken root at the opposite extremity of the horizon, whilst in the depths of the luminous distance shadowy patches of haze more or less distinct betoken further living bodies, some stationary, some in motion. These are mirages of the Pampas of which none takes any heed; but upon me they made a powerful impression, for I saw in them the whole tragedy of this land, from the tuft of grass on which the eyes of the beast first saw the light down to the last step of that fateful journey which ends at the slide of the slaughter-house.
The rapid travelling of the motor-car multiplies one's point of view. The vast estates on the Pampas, which run from two to a hundred square miles in extent, are further divided into large sections bounded by wire fencing to limit the wandering of the herds. The roads are marked out by a double row of wire. What dust and what mud may be found thereon, according to weather conditions, may be imagined, since there is not the smallest pebble to be found there. Yet vehicles do, it appears venture along these paths, and even arrive at their destination. You may also meet flocks of sheep and oxen on them, and families of pigs engaged in breakfasting on a sheep that has been relieved of its skin. In less than an hour its bones, picked clean, are scattered along the way, where in process of time they will contribute precious phosphates to the soil. Naturally, on such a "road," the automobile does not yearn to travel; rather does it prefer the green smoothness of the immense prairie. Here there are no police regulations to annoy the motorist. No other law but your own fancy and a certain thought for the savoury lunch that is awaiting you at the next estancia. When you reach it you will discover that the monstrous herds on the horizon were merely these gentle creatures, placid in their happy ignorance of the fell designs that are the hidden causes of man's kindness to them. Do we astonish them? Or are they wholly indifferent? Their eyes are fixed on our panting machines as ours are on the grazing beasts, and not a spark is struck by the meeting of the two intelligences, the one so calmly definite and the other too soon checked in its effort to understand. Obedient to the rebenque (whip) of the peon, the herd, which in motion looks so threatening, allows itself to be stopped or led by the cries and rapid movements of the horsemen going at a hand-gallop. The sight of any object that waves in the wind (whether coat or poncho) is equally effectual.
If one expects the cows, which are penned for milking (three quarts a day as an average), the only apparent relations between man and beast consist in the easy use of this instrument of terror. Nothing is done for the flock except to provide the mill which automatically feeds the water-troughs, and to see to the safe arrival of the bulls intended to improve the breed, and to select those from the herd destined for the freezing machines; for all their other needs Providence is expected to provide—quite a different régime from that prevailing in our French stock-farms. Of shelter against wind or sun there is none. The grass is there when the drought has not burnt it up, also an ugly thistle which no one troubles to pull up and which sometimes overruns the pasture. Of Nature's scourges, the drought is the most to be feared, for it falls with fearful suddenness on great stretches of the Campo. In the absence of rain, neither turf nor forage nor harvest can be looked for; for the cattle, death is certain. Winter in any case is a hard season for them. Their coats lose their gloss, their flanks fall in, and their pointed bones witness to their sufferings, which the icy breath of the pampero does nothing to assuage. With the spring comes the hope of rain. But if this hope is betrayed, nothing can save innumerable herds from starvation and death. Forage is always stored for the more precious of the stock, but to feed the herd is out of the question. The Pampas then become one vast cemetery where hundreds of thousands of dead cattle are lying in heaps beyond all possibility of burial. It is the custom to leave the body of the beast that dies by the way to the tender mercies of the wind and the sun, the rain and the earth, into whose wide-open pores the remains are little by little absorbed. The birds of prey and dogs are valuable assistants but wholly insufficient. One of my friends told me that it was by no means uncommon for the dogs to return to the farm from the Campo bearing a horrible smell about them. For my part, if I was often revolted by the spectacle of putrefying carcasses lying about the Pampas and seen either on my walks or from the railway-train—some even lying festering in pools close to dwelling-houses—I cannot say that my olfactory nerves were ever troubled. I occasionally spoke of the danger of poisonous fly-bites, but I got only vague replies.
In my personal experience, whenever I met something disagreeable on my walks about the Pampas, the carcass was invariably completely mummified, the skin being so thoroughly tanned that the object might have been carefully prepared for a museum of comparative anatomy. But when death was recent, and the summer season had set in, with its attendant flies, I should certainly avoid the neighbourhood.
It will surprise no one to hear that I took the liberty of calling the attention of two or three statesmen to the dangers of this unfortunate custom and the detestable impression it is bound to make on travellers. The reply invariably was that the Argentine was suffering, and would, no doubt, continue to suffer for some time to come, from a lack of hands and that the thousands of animals which under normal conditions perished in the Pampas could never find grave-diggers. When, therefore, a dry season killed off as many as ten thousand sheep on a single ranch, there was no alternative but to bow to the inevitable.
We see that cattle-rearing in the Argentine has its ups and downs. At every turn Nature intervenes with its elements of success or disaster. Man's rôle is to furnish a minimum of labour, and by the force of circumstances, he is compelled to reckon on quantity for his modicum of success; but the fact does not prevent his successful efforts to improve the quality. As I have already said, he will give any prize to secure a fine strain. It is naturally from England that he gets his stock for breeding, since the customers for his meat are chiefly English. On all hands I was told that the results were most satisfactory. As regards their breed of horses, the result is manifest. But as for the cattle, I take the liberty of disagreeing with those who declare that the Argentine can send to our slaughter-houses at La Villette meat as fine as our own at half its price. If, however, I am firmly convinced that our palate would not readily be satisfied with the frozen meat that seems to please the English, I am quite aware that there is a distinction to be drawn between the choice beasts, generally magnificent, that make such a show at exhibitions and the common run of the average flock, amongst which truth compels me to admit there are some very indifferent animals. It will require a long time and a change of system on the cattle-rearing farms for the Argentine ever to equal the fine products of our French breeders. It cannot be otherwise as long as the young animal, bred somewhat at haphazard and born on the open camp between the corpses of some of its relations, is left to grow up as best it can, exposed to every change of temperature. Everywhere I came upon young calves abandoned by their mothers as soon as born, and only sought out when the time for feeding came round; it cannot be said that the stock would bear comparison with the average produce of a Norman or Charolais byre. Not all the quality of its mother's milk will suffice to make up for the ground lost by neglect.
As I have said, the troops of horses seem to have lost the least. I speak less of their appearance than of their action, which often seemed to me remarkable. You cannot imagine the pleasure it is to glide swiftly across the Pampas in a motor-car with a troop of young horses on either side of you, neighing and galloping to keep up with the machine. But do not, pray, call them "wild horses."
Tradition to the contrary notwithstanding, I believe there are no wild horses in the Argentine. There are horses, and there are horsemen who treat them brutally under the pretext of breaking them in. This is a survival of ancient times which not even the universality of the horse in civilised countries can destroy. Any English squire will get more out of a young horse by quiet skill and kindness than can ever be obtained by the useless and cruel lasso, to which I shall return later.