Through the Heart of Patagonia

by H. Hesketh-Prichard

These data, it must be confessed, were bewildering. In fact, as described by the Indians the Iemisch was scientifically absurd; but the Indian is like a child in many ways and would naturally endow a creature he feared with extraordinary attributes.

I will quote here an extract from Winwood Reade's "Savage Africa," one of the finest books of travel ever written.

"It must be laid down as a general principle that man can originate nothing; that lies are always truths embellished, distorted, or turned inside out. There are other facts beside those which lie on the surface, and it is the duty of the traveller and the historian to sift and wash the gold-grains of truth from the dirt of fable.... It is true that some of the ancient myths have been sobered down to natural beings. The men with dogs' heads of whom Herodotus speaks are the barking baboons which I saw in Senegal: the men with their head under their shoulders, their eyes in their breast, are the ill-formed negroes, whose shoulders are shrugged up, and whose heads drop on their breasts: the mermaids of the Arab tales are the sea-cows of the African rivers, which have feminine dugs and a face almost human in expression: the huge serpent which opposed the army of Regulus is now well known as the python: the burning mountains which Hanno saw, and the sounds of the lutes which were believed to proceed from the strife of the elements, are only caused by the poor negroes burning the grass of their hill-tops: the music being that of their flutes, as I have heard it often in those long and silent African nights far away.

"Incredulity has now become so vulgar a folly, that one is almost tempted, out of simple hatred for a fashion, to run into the opposite extreme. However, I shall content myself with citing evidence respecting certain unknown, fabulous and monstrous animals of Africa, without committing myself to an opinion one way or the other; preserving only my conviction that there is always a basis of truth to the most fantastic fables, and that, by rejecting without inquiry that which appears incredible, one throws away ore in which others might have found a jewel. A traveller should believe nothing, for he will find himself so often deceived: and he should disbelieve nothing, for he will see so many wonderful things; he should doubt, he should investigate, and then, perhaps, he may discover."

It was in this spirit that I set out for the interior of Patagonia. Although the legends of the Indians were manifestly to a large extent the result of imaginative exaggeration, yet I hoped to find a substratum of fact below these fancies. After thorough examination, however, I am obliged to say that I found none. The Indians not only never enter the Cordillera but avoid the very neighbourhood of the mountains. The rumours of the Iemisch and the stories concerning it, which, in print, had assumed a fairly definite form, I found nebulous in the extreme when investigated on the spot.

Finally, after much investigation I came to the conclusion that the Indian legends in all probability refer to some large species of otter. Musters, in his book "At Home with the Patagonians," makes mention of an animal much feared by the tribe with whom he travelled, which they called "water-tiger," and which they said lived in a rapid and deep river near to Nahuel-huapi, a lake the name of which lends colour to the tale, for it means Tigers' Island. Musters says he himself saw two ostriches, that, being considered in too poor a condition to be worth taking to camp for food, were left on the bank of the river referred to, torn and partly devoured when on the following day he and his party revisited the spot. Tracks of an animal were also plainly visible leading down into the water.

Compare this with a story told me by Mr. Von Plaaten Hallermund. He described the case of a mule which had fallen over a precipice in the vicinity of the River Deseado. When on the following day the peones climbed down to salve its cargo, they found the animal on the edge of the water half eaten, and in its neighbourhood were tracks strange to them. "Like those of a puma, yet not those of a puma," as they said.

The manager of Messrs. Braun and Blanchard's store at Santa Cruz gave me a description of a skin brought in by Indians which, though not a puma-skin, was quite as large as the skin of the common silver-grey puma generally is. I myself saw a very large otter in the River Senguerr, but unluckily had not my rifle with me, and although I returned as quickly with it as I could, all trace of the otter had vanished.

Taking into consideration the amphibious nature attributed by the Indians to the Iemisch, there seems to be little reason to doubt that the real animal underlying the rumours of a mysterious monster is a sub-species of the large Brazilian otter (Lutra brasiliensis).

To return to the possible survival of the Mylodon, as far as our travels led us both north and south on the eastern side of the Cordillera, we could discover no trace whatever either by hearsay or from the evidence of our own experience to warrant the supposition that it continues to exist to the present day. But there are hundreds of square miles of dense forest still unexplored along the whole length of the Patagonian Andes, and I do not undertake to declare positively that no such animal exists in some unknown and hidden spot among their recesses. Roughly speaking, there are many thousand square miles of snowy summits, ravines, high plateaus and valleys in this region. The task of finding a final answer to the Mylodon problem on the drag-net principle of passing to and fro throughout the whole district would be so gigantic and prolonged where the natural difficulties are great, as to be practically impossible. Such an answer must be left to time and the slow process of things. In the meanwhile I can merely state my own conviction that the odds are very heavily against the chances of such a survival. The probable habitat of the Mylodon would naturally be the forests. I penetrated these in more than one direction, and one of the most striking characteristics of the forests was the absence of animal life, evidence of which grew less and less the farther we forced our way into their depths. It is a matter of common knowledge that, where the larger forms of life are to be found, there also a liberal catalogue of lesser creatures co-exist. The conditions which favour the life of the greater favour also the existence of the less. This is presumptive evidence only, and though it has certainly influenced my own conclusions, I do not wish to force it upon others. I have stated the case as fairly as I can, and I leave my readers to form their own opinions.