Through the Heart of Patagonia

by H. Hesketh-Prichard

We advanced for a good distance up the river over terribly bad ground, all boulders and steep cliffs, and then we attempted to ford to the other side. The two black horses, however, seemed to have conceived a horror of the river and could not be induced to cross. They simply made us very wet, and we had to go forward on foot. We were now within easy distance of the end of the Gorge, and had joined the route of Von Plaaten[21] from the south.

On December 10 I went out in the evening to shoot something for the pot. On the first ridge I came to I stalked and killed a big guanaco buck, putting a bullet into his lungs. Then I signalled to Barckhausen to come and help to cut him up. As I waited there in the fading light, wondering at the desolation of the place, a little huemul buck came bounding along and "paid the penalty," as the cricket reporters say. I had some trouble to keep off the condors while I went to some distance to call Barckhausen.

Altogether the Gorge was not an inviting spot with its hot marshy valleys and fat stinging flies. After sweating among the boulders in the lower ground, if we climbed the barranca, the chill wind from the Cordillera nipped our very bones.

As I sat writing my diary during those days, diabolical-looking insects with upturned tails used to crawl across the page.

My desire to penetrate farther at that time seemed likely to be fulfilled, as so far we had seen no warning smoke from the lake direction. The chief difficulties hindering our advance were the treacherous footing on the barrancas, which we were obliged to scale very frequently, and the trouble with the horses both on them and at the fords.

Finally I decided to leave Barckhausen with the horses and to walk on as long as food held out, for the boulders made riding impossible. But next morning, just as I had fixed up my kit preparatory to starting, a column of smoke began to arise somewhere in the direction of the lake. We fancied at first it was Scrivenor, who had come back to rejoin us, and we hastened up the cliff. But in that clear air distances are very deceptive, and the smoke, which from the depth of the Gorge had looked so near, turned out to be on the farther shore of Lake Buenos Aires. Then we perceived there were two fires throwing up their smoke in the morning sun—the "Come-at-once" signal.

We did not loiter, but in a quarter of an hour were climbing the barranca from our camp. The old game with the horses had to be gone through again. We made our way straight down the strip of tableland towards the lake, along the high sliding cliffs of the river's cañadon. It was a long ride, and as we went along the fact became obvious that the river had risen during the night and was still rising. The waters had grown earth-coloured and large trees were being hurtled down-stream.

The warm weather which we had been experiencing must have melted the snows which feed the torrents of the Cordillera. Rivers inside and in the neighbourhood of the Cordillera vary during the spring very much in volume, changing in a single day or night from a mere trickle of water to a torrent 100 yards in width. In the present instance the River de los Antiguos had begun to rise in the day while we were hunting. At length we saw a place where a big shelf of stone and shingle rising in the middle of the river divided it into two streams. To reach the bank nearest to this island of shingle it was necessary to climb down some two hundred feet of an uncommonly nasty slope. On the way the horses struck a bed of rolling stones and arrived very suddenly. The gut of the Gorge was choked with green forest and decaying vegetation; large dead trees, mostly trunks of antarctic beech, were jammed together, intersected by a dozen miniature torrents all sluicing down full of water since the melting of the snows.

Arrived at the river, my horse took the ford at once and went in straightly to his shoulders. The current was running like a mill-race—overstrong for us, but fortunately we had not plunged in too deeply, and so got back to the shore.

Had it not been for the two smokes, which we had arranged were not to be used save in the greatest extremity, I should have made a camp and waited to see if the river would fall. As things were, it seemed absolutely necessary to cross at once.