In the evening after dinner we indulged in some shooting matches—with the damaged Colt—which Barckhausen won.
A Patagonian Lagoon
Photochromogravure, Lyons & London.
On December 26 we bade good-bye to Horsham Camp. After a long interval the cargueros were once more loaded up, and the whole troop tailed away to the eastward. Is any sight sadder than a deserted camp? The dead or dying camp-fire, the broken remains of food surprised by the sun, the litter, the bare rubbed grass, and the occasional fox. We left some tins of corned beef behind us, as I hoped to travel very fast to Santa Cruz. That day we made anything from eight to ten leagues, and camped in Seven Ostriches cañadon, the spot that Barckhausen and I had previously visited and named after the birds we saw there.
The following day (27th) we made a good march and encamped by a lagoon, upon which I shot two yellow-billed teal, and Jones and Burbury four ducks, which were plucked before we came into camp. On the morning after a very difficult part of our journey commenced. All day we travelled over a pampa covered with basaltic fragments and thorny bushes; some of these bushes bore a red tulip-like flower.
Enormous numbers of guanaco haunt these grim plateaus. Jones and I galloped a half-grown one, and killed it with the help of a dog. The going was extremely bad, our path lying through gorges and up steep-sided ridges, rough with basaltic fragments and powdered with sharp clinkers of lava. It is not easy to describe the changing fortunes of such a day. For instance, we were turned again and again by gullies and rifts in the hollows of the hills, and, what with shifting cargoes on these cruel and almost perpendicular slopes, the difficulty of keeping the troop of horses straight and of taking care of one's own limbs, was extreme. Literally thousands of guanaco appeared on the summits of the surrounding barren ridges, and fled galloping down the rock-faces with jerking necks and flying hoofs. Sometimes the old bucks would come and look at us, running towards us and neighing and laughing, and then ducking their long necks and cantering off. What they lived on in so sterile a region still remains a mystery to me.
I saw one condor poised high.
Our Indian baqueano, Como No, had told us that we must strike "between two hills." Barckhausen asserted that he had indicated to him a couple of round peaks on the summit or rather forming the culminating-points of this high basalt range. We made our way up these monstrous steps, as it were, of rock, steering by the compass, and after some twenty miles of travelling found ourselves upon a bare black highland over which the wind was tearing in heavy gusts. No wood, no water, no grass. I was afraid we should have to remain there for the night, and also afraid that Mrs. Trelew, the madrina of the Trelew troop, whose udder was big, might drop her foal in that sterile spot. Another danger which menaced us, was that the horses would certainly become lame if they had to travel far over these broken rocks. We therefore rode on perhaps another fourteen miles, and the dark was falling when we found a camp in a cañadon—a bad approach strewn with basalt fragments, but a fair camp at the end with a little stream and good grass.
On December 29 the Trelew mare dropped her foal, a little disproportionately-boned, huge-jointed alazan filly. During the day Scrivenor and I explored the cañadon and I shot a guanaco and an ostrich. The guanaco was a very father of guanacos, old, scarred, black-faced and war-worn. His meat was worse than that of a he-goat.