Last of the Incas: A Romance of the Pampas

by Gustave Aimard

He raised his gun, but at the moment when he was about to fire, a plaintive mewling made him raise his head. A dozen pajiros and subaracayas (wild cats of great size), perched on branches of trees, were looking down at him, while several red wolves were crouching in front of him.

A number of vultures, urubús, and caracaras, with half-closed eyes, were seated on the surrounding rocks, and apparently awaiting the hour for their meal.

Don Torribio jumped up on a rock, and then, by the help of his hands and knees, gained, after extraordinary difficulties, a sort of natural terrace situated about twenty feet above the ground. The frightful concert formed by the denizens of the forest, whom the subtlety of their scent attracted one after the other, increased more and more, and overpowered the very sound of the wind which raged in the ravines and forest clearings. The moon was once more hidden behind clouds, and Don Torribio found himself again in darkness; but if he could not distinguish the wild beasts near him, he guessed and almost smelt their presence; he saw their eyeballs flashing in the gloom, and heard their roars constantly coming nearer.

He set his feet firmly on the ground, and cocked his revolver. Four shots were followed by four howls of pain, and the noise produced by branch after branch in the fall of the wounded wild cats. This attack aroused a sinister uproar. The red wolves rushed with yells on the victims, for which they contended with the urubús and vultures. A rustling in the leaves reached the ear of the brave hunter, and a mass it was impossible clearly to distinguish cleft the space, and lodged with a roar on the platform. With the butt of his rifle he struck out in the darkness, and the panther, with a broken skull, rolled to the base of the rock. He heard a monstrous battle, which the cougars and wild cats waged with the wounded panther, and intoxicated by his triumph, and even by his danger, he fired two shots into the crowd of obstinate enemies snarling below him. Suddenly all these animals, ceasing their contest as if by common consent, united against the man, their common foe, and their rage was turned against the rock, from the top of which Don Torribio appeared to defy them all. They climbed up the projections. The wild cats were the first to arrive, and fast as Torribio felled them others leaped upon him. He felt his strength and energy gradually diminishing.

This struggle of a single man against a multitude of ferocious brutes had something grand and poignant about it. Don Torribio, as if suffering from a nightmare, struggled in vain against the swarms of assailants that were constantly reinforced. He felt on his face the warm, fetid breath of the wild cats and red wolves, while the roars of the cougars and the mocking miauling of the panthers filled his ears with a frightful melody that gave him a vertigo. Hundreds of eyes sparkled in the shade, and at times the heavy wings of the vultures and urubús lashed his forehead, which was bathed in a cold perspiration.

In him every feeling of self had died out: he no longer thought; his life, so to speak, had become entirely physical; his movements were mechanical, and his arms rose and fell to strike with the rigid regularity of a pendulum.

Already several claws had been buried deep in his flesh. Wild cats had seized him by the throat, and he had been compelled to struggle with them to make them loose their hold; his blood was flowing from twenty wounds, not mortal it is true, but the hour was approaching beyond which human strength cannot go; Don Torribio would have fallen from his rock and perished under the teeth of the wild beasts.

At this solemn moment, when all seemed to desert him, a loud cry burst from his bosom—a cry of agony and despair of undefinable expression, which was echoed far and wide by the rocks. It was the last protest of the strong man who confesses himself vanquished, and who, before falling, calls his fellow man to his aid, or implores the help of Heaven.

He cried, and a cry responded to his!

Don Torribio amazed, and not daring to count on a miracle in a desert which no human being had ever yet penetrated, believed himself under the impression of a dream or an hallucination; still, collecting all his strength, and feeling hope rekindled in his soul, he uttered a second cry, louder and more ear-piercing than the first.