The moon had set, though the forerunner of day had not yet appeared, when, after trying in vain to punch awake the peon Montes had ordered to attend me, I entered the immense hacienda corral to pescar, or “fish out,” as the Peruvians say, my horselet from the army of mules and horses munching the dry pulp of crushed sugarcane that constitutes the fodder of these near-tropical regions. I had no difficulty in recognizing my own animal in the dark, not only by his diminutiveness, but by his picturesquely docked tail. Looking back on that day, however, I am sorry I did not pescar another animal by mistake.
As I prepared to load him before my cabin door, I was startled to find that Chusquito seemed to have turned zebra during the night. Several dark lines ran from his spine down either side to his shaggy belly. The sense of smell astonished me with the information that these were of blood. I got water and washed him off, meanwhile cursing the savage mules that had evidently spent most of the night biting the helpless little brute. As a former Zone Policeman, trained to arrest every Panamanian coachman who dared enter the Canal Zone with a horse matado, I had taken extreme care to keep my own animal free from those back-sores so atrociously frequent and unattended in the Andes. But the soft alforjas could not add to his injuries. I, too, had been bitten, until my frame was one single expanse of tattooing; and Chusquito must bear his share of troubles unavoidable in the tropics. I arranged the load as carefully as possible, and we were off.
It was not long, however, before I realized that something, perhaps the impossibility of eating during the night, had decidedly sapped my companion’s strength. He did not tramp with his old-time vim; the joy of life seemed to have departed from him. I moderated my pace, thinking my haste to reach the climax of my South American journey was unconsciously causing me to outdo the pace we had long since agreed upon. Still he would not keep out from under my feet. For almost the first time in our acquaintance I found it necessary to touch him up with a stick. We were moving along a semi-tropical hollow, amid the deafening scream of parrakeets, with an occasional sharp dip into and climb out of a stony quebrada, from which I had almost to carry him by main force. He moved like a clock that was running down, and for the life of me I could not contrive the means of winding him up again. Then, all at once, I realized what had befallen him. The poor, misused brute had been bitten, not by mules, but by those loathsome vampire bats of tropical valleys that sometimes find even human victims for their blood-sucking propensities.
A religious procession in Abancay. Note the group of urchins in the church-tower vying with each other in beating the bells into an uproar
We crawled at last into the mud village of Limatambo, only to be informed that there was no alfalfa in town, and that we must push on at least to the “Hacienda Challabamba,” half a league up the valley. As we turned toward it, I was startled to find the way bordered by a splendid wall of cut stone, about which the effete modern inhabitants had pitched their miserable mud huts. For here, commanding the narrow entrance to the valley, stood one of those four fortresses with which the ancient emperors of Tavantinsuyo had defended, at some twelve leagues from the capital, the highways radiating to the Four Corners of the Earth. Chusquito had lost all response to any species of outside influence. Push as I would, putting my shoulder to the wheel—I would say rump—and digging my toes into the trail, we could not advance a mile an hour. The drooping animal took a half minute to lift each separate foot, a pebble caused him to stumble, a six-inch rock step made him groan audibly. He did not look particularly worn-out; he was fatter if anything than the day I had bought him; and surely even a man could have gone the mile or two more “on his nerve.” Instead, he came to a complete standstill. This would never do. At least we must reach the hacienda and its alfalfa-fields. Much as it grieved me to raise a hand against a faithful companion, I rapped him soundly across the quarters with my stick. He uttered a sudden pathetic groan, and dropped in the middle of the road as suddenly as a well-killed bull in a Spanish bull-ring; his legs quivered a moment, his eyes opened wide, closed, then opened again in a glassy stare.
Despite all my blustering before soulless gobernadores who would have starved him in the midst of plenty, despite all my struggles to find him food when even I had gone without, the patient little brute had come to this sad end. Never had I felt the loss of a traveling companion more keenly. For six weeks we had toiled together over lofty Andean ranges, across vast páramos with nothing in sight but their dreary nothingness. How often had we not listened to each other contentedly dining in our adjacent chambers at the end of a laborious day? If we had had differences, they had been only those which arise between all beings with wills of their own, joined together on a long journey. And the end of that journey had been so near at hand. I had long looked forward to our triumphal entry into Cuzco together, to having our pictures proudly taken side by side in the main plaza, and to the pleasure of presenting him as a pet to the children of the one American I knew dwelt in the ancient capital—should it turn out that the latter had any such appendages—that he might toil no more and end his days in the beloved mountain air of his native heights. Instead of which, here I sat on the edge of a Peruvian trail, gazing at a shattered dream stiffening in the blazing sunshine before me.
But the experienced traveler will not let misfortune long interfere with the regular flow of his existence. Behind the bristling cactus hedges lining the road were several Indian hovels. I risked leaving alone what was left of my possessions to walk to the nearest, some fifty yards away. Two arrieros, a boy, and a woman, were lounging within it. The muleteers spoke a Quichua somewhat different from that I had picked up; moreover they were half drunk. I offered them a good reward to toss my stuff on one of their grazing mules and carry it to “Challabamba.” But they were bound for “La Estrella”—probably five or six hours later—and could not turn back. Perhaps it brings bad luck. The woman would not be compromised, even to the extent of admitting my existence. As a final straw the boy refused a “peseta” to carry a note to the hacienda.
I returned to the scene of the disaster and sat down hopelessly in the shrinking shadow of the hedge. The connecting link between a sahib and his baggage kept running like a refrain through my head. Indian travelers and mule-trains passed to and fro, staring curiously and seeming, in so far as the impassive Indian face shows anything, to smirk with satisfaction at my plight. At least I could pull my belongings off the corpse; though not easily, with the “diamond-hitch” and the ropes wound round and round the body. Luckily the animal had fallen on the side carrying my “city” clothing, and had spared the developing-tank. I disentangled my still existent possessions and piled them beside me in the shade. An hour crawled by; another was crawling. Something must be done. I could neither leave my baggage unprotected here beside one of the four royal highways leading into, or out of the City of the Sun—depending on which way one was going, were one going at all—nor could I carry it myself, such was the bulk to which it had accumulated. I drew out a visiting-card, that proof of the caballero caste in South America, and wrote upon it:
“Vengo recomendado por los señores de La Laguna, pero á ’tres cuadras de su hacienda me ha muerto de repente el caballo. Puede V. mandarme un indio para que me ayude con el equipaje?”