Through the Heart of Patagonia

by H. Hesketh-Prichard

The older herds have lost the smooth aspect of domesticated animals and thrown back to the shaggy front, longer horns and rough-haired hide characteristic of wild cattle. As to the special parts of Patagonia in which wild cattle are most plentiful, it would be of little use to give a list of them. Should a herd stray in the plains, the Indians will soon make them change their quarters and return to take refuge among the woods and ravines of the foothills. Inside this forest-land the Indians will never venture, and there the emancipated bull thoroughly enjoys himself. Even the beasts belonging to the farmers lead a wandering life, and at a short distance from the settlements are shy of the approach of man, and have to be rounded up by mounted Gauchos. Those of them that have been inside a corral and regained their liberty are every whit as wild as the wild cattle proper. Being caught with a lasso and branded is by no means an experience calculated to instil any deep confidence in mankind into the mind of a calf.

In the Cordillera the herds are extremely wideawake. When a point is disturbed, they always go higher up into the mountains, and almost invariably leave that particular neighbourhood under cover of the ensuing night. Their climbing powers are extraordinary. Wherever a guanaco can go, a wild bull can follow him. Their tracks are regularly and clearly marked, and they appear to move along precisely the same paths from feeding-place to feeding-place. The snows of winter force them to lower ground, but in my opinion the herds never penetrate very deep into the Cordillera. Precisely how far they go it would be hard to determine, but they seldom ascend to the higher levels, preferring to wander about the outer spurs of the lower hills. There is a spot on the south side of the Lake Rica where they appear to make their way farther into the recesses of the mountains than in any other district.

Patagonia, as the reader will by this time realise, cannot be called a big-game country in the sense of affording any variety of large animals for the benefit of the sportsman. But whoever goes into the Cordillera will find the wild bulls of their forests well worthy of his attention, for they give as excellent sport as any big game in the world. A point which must tell greatly in their favour in the eyes of some people is the fact that the pursuit of them is a pleasure by no means unattended by danger.

The first day on which I attempted to find wild cattle we sighted two herds, one about half way up the hillside and the other higher, almost upon the snow-line. We had gone out rather with the idea of prospecting, having but little hope of being so lucky as to get a shot. Mr. Cattle, Burbury, and myself made up the party, and while Cattle hid in the direction towards which the herd might be expected to break, Burbury and I undertook the stalk. We separated, and I finally got within two hundred yards of a dun-coloured bull; but his position was so bad that it seemed a pity to shoot. The herd ultimately moved into a strip of forest high on the shoulder of the mountain, and we failed to locate it again.

Upon this followed a period when the memory of the shot I might have taken rankled as a thorn in the flesh. The difficulty of finding a herd was very great. We went out several days in succession and failed to catch sight of a single horn. For twelve days we searched from dawn to dark and found nothing. Yet these days, which resulted in a total bag of two huemules, were infinitely more sporting than were those in the neighbourhood of the River de los Antiguos, where a large number of animals might have been secured. On four occasions fresh tracks were found, and in that keen invigorating air the hunting of such a quarry was a sport for the gods.

A GLADE IN THE LAKE RICA FOREST

There is a picturesque sentence in one of Mr. Kipling's writings, in which he speaks of a life "spent on blue water in the morning of the world." Each savage of us has, I suppose, some such ideal existence, and if that be so, mine would be passed in hunting some great horned quarry upon frozen hills in a land where no wind too strong should blow, and where the views of water and of peaks should be in all shades of separate and glorious blue. What a splendid place such a happy hunting-ground would be! Quite different to the happy hunting-grounds of the North American Indian, the Tehuelche or the Eskimo—the latter, by the way, looks forward to a paradise where he will lie for ever upon the sleeping-bench in the warmth and eat decomposed seals' heads! The nomad hunter races kill to eat in any manner or by any means, the romance of sport is in one sense lacking in them; but in my happy hunting-ground there will be Irish elk with mighty spreading horns upon those wondrous hills....

We have wandered far away from our subject. I think it may be said that during those twelve blank days every method of hunting wild cattle had a fair trial. Upon the northern slopes of Mount Buenos Aires (which, I must mention, is very far distant from Lake Buenos Aires, being, in fact, surrounded on three sides by the waters of Lake Argentino) there is comparatively little wood, although there is much thick high brush, so that—as in Sardinian moufflon-shooting—one may spy the ground two or three times in the day, and yet fail to discover a herd hidden in the brush or in one of the many water-worn ravines. Nevertheless, this place was the most open ground which we hunted, and was far superior to the Lake Rica side of the mountain, upon which cluster dense forests of antarctic beech, through which it is impossible to see more than twenty or thirty yards, and often not so far.