It was but the barest outline, yet it shook and excited us out there in the ends of the earth just as if we had formed items of a crowd in Fleet Street.
Following on this came that other heavy tidings indeed, the death of the Queen. We took off our hats, and at first nothing was said. The news struck each man of us. There was a sense of loss and of the blankness of a personal calamity, which expressed themselves at last in a few odd homely words.
There, 7000 miles away, the abstract idea of the nation became concrete. One had no picture in one's mind of England that did not bear in the foreground, filling the heart and eye, that gracious, royal, simple, noble figure, which for so long had drawn out towards itself the highest patriotism of the race. The tumult of a nation's mourning was taken up and echoed feebly here as in other remote corners of the earth. Thousands of pens have borne witness to the world-wide sorrow. No need to say more, but while I write the scene comes back, as some moments of one's life will and do come—the broad blue heavens, the wide lake, the wind, the smell of grass and califate-bushes, the grasping after shattered fancies, and the heavy acceptance of the hour assigned.
CHAPTER XVI
WILD CATTLE
Denseness of forest—Wild cattle originally escaped from early settlers—Grown somewhat shaggy—Indians will not hunt them in forest—Patagonia not a big-game country—Hunting wild cattle—Disappointment—Hunters paradise—Twelve blank days—Sport on Punta Bandera—Big yellow bull—Losing the herd—Baffling ground—Charge of bull and cow—A shot at last—Hunting in forests on Mount Frias—String shoes—Winter hunting—Shoot bull—Shoot huemul five-pointer—Wild-cattle hunting first-class sport.
Very different to the easy sport afforded by the huemul was our experience of hunting wild cattle in the forests which clothe more or less densely the ravines and slopes of the lower Andes. These forests, which in some parts are absolutely impenetrable in the spring, because at that season the pantanos are saturated with the rains and melting snow, give shelter to many scattered herds of wild cattle.
FORESTS UNDER THE SNOWS WHERE
WILD CATTLE BREED
Captain Musters, writing in 1871, speaks of hunting these animals under the Cordillera, but their existence in a wild state dates from a far earlier period—in fact, from the time of the first Spanish occupation, when cattle escaped from the Valdez Peninsula, and roaming over the pampas at length reached the high grass and sheltered places of the Cordillera. Finding these entirely to their liking, they have ever since lived and bred in that region; their numbers, no doubt, being from time to time increased by deserters from the unfenced farms on the east coast of Patagonia. It is a strange thing that cattle which escape almost invariably head north-west towards the Cordillera. This fact has been commented on to us by many different Gauchos and cattle-owners up and down the east coast.