A rural railway station in Uruguay
The fertile Uruguayan plains in the Cerro Chato (Flat Hills) district
“Pirirín” and his cowboys at an estancia round-up in northern Uruguay
Freighting across the gently rolling plains of the “Purple Land”
I had been reading the Uruguayan epic “Tabaré” for hours next morning, and possessing my soul in such patience as one acquires in Latin-America, when I learned by chance that a mucamo, as they call a mozo in Uruguay, had been waiting in the hotel patio below and asking for me every few minutes since the night before, the servants having been too indolent to bring me word. With the better part of a day lost I rode away on a stout, gray-white horse of rocking-chair canter. The muddy or flooded road curved and turned and rose and fell, always seeking the moderate height of the succeeding ridges and here and there crossing gently rounded cuchillas. The mucamo on his piebald was outwardly a most unprepossessing creature, but he was a helpful, cheery fellow, in great contrast to the usual surly workman of southern South America, and though only sixteen and scarcely able to read, he was by no means dull-witted. Apparently there was not a bird, a flower, or an animal which he did not know intimately, and he was supernaturally quick in catching sight or sound of them. The hornero, a little brown bird that makes its ovenlike nest on fence-posts, the branches of trees, and the crosspieces of telegraph-poles, was there in force; the cotorra, a species of noisy paroqueet, was almost as numerous. The chingolo, resembling a sparrow, sits on the backs of grazing cattle and lives on the garrapatas, or ticks, that burrow into the animal’s hide. The bien-te-veo (“I spy you”), a yellow bird with a whistling call suggesting that of a happy child playing hide-and-seek, frequently glided past; the startled cry of the teru-teru rose as we advanced, disturbing it. The latter is called the “sentinel bird” and is so certain to give warning of anything approaching that even soldiers have found it a useful ally. Dark-gray with white wings and a slight crest, it resembles a lapwing with a cry not unlike that of our “killdeer.” The bien-te-veo and the teru-teru live in perfect immunity because of a local superstition similar to the one sailors have for the albatross. The woodpecker of Uruguay is called carpintero, because he works in wood; the viuda (widow), a little white bird with a black head, is so called, my companion explained to me in all innocence, because she produces her brood regularly each year without ever being seen with a male. A little dark-brown bird called the barranquero builds nests like the homes of our ancient cliff-dwellers, in the sides of barrancas, or sand-banks. Among the many small birds, songsters, screamers, and disciples of silence, which eddied about us, one of the most conspicuous was the cardenal, gray with white under the wings, its whole head covered with a bright-red liberty cap. A large bird resembling the stork my companion called “Juan Grande”; others call it the chajá, because of the jeering half-laugh it is always uttering. It lives on the edges of swamps, though it cannot swim. A big brown carancho, a hawk-like bird living on carrion, circled above us with the ordinary South American scavenger buzzard, here called simply cuervo, or crow. There is good shooting of a local partridge in Uruguay, the open season being from April to September. At plowing time the gulls come in great numbers to feast on the fat grubs. The dainty crested Uruguayan sparrow has all but been driven out by the English variety, introduced, if the local legend can be believed, by an immigrant who let a cageful of them fly rather than pay duty on them.
Thus we rode hour after hour over the rolling lomas and cuchillas. The ground was here and there speckled with macachines, daisy-like little flowers of a wild plant that produces a species of tiny sweet potato. The mucamo had never heard of the Castilian tongue; what he spoke was the “lingua oriental.” It was, to be sure, by no means pure Spanish, but a Spaniard would have had no difficulty in understanding him.