Counting cattle is rather laborious work, and needs close concentration. Six of us were in the saddle from daybreak to dusk, with short intervals for meals, and December 31 is at the height of the summer in the southern hemisphere, so the heat was considerable.
This is the method employed in a "count." The cattle are driven into "mobs" of some eight hundred ("Rodeo" is the Spanish term for mob) by the "peons." Some twenty tame bullocks are driven a quarter of a mile from the "mob," and the counters line up on their horses between the two, with their pockets full of beans. The "peons" use their whips, and one or two of the cattle break away from the herd to the tame bullocks. They are followed by more and more at an ever-increasing pace. Each one is counted, and when one hundred is reached, a bean is silently transferred from the left pocket to the right. So the process is continued until the entire herd has passed by. Should the numbers given by the six counters tally within reason, the count is accepted. Should it differ materially, there is a recount; then the counters pass on to another "mob" some two miles away. Under a very hot sun, the strain of continual attention is exhausting, and those six counters found their beds unusually welcome that night.
The dwelling-house of Negrete, which was to become very familiar to me, was over a hundred years old, and stretched itself one-storied round a large patio, blue and white tiled, with an elaborate well-head in the centre decorated with good iron-work. The patio was fragrant with orange and lemon trees, and great bushes of the lovely sky-blue Paraguayan jasmine. I can never understand why this shrub, the "Jasmin del Paraguay," with its deliciously sweet perfume and showy blue flowers, has never been introduced into England. It would have to be grown under glass, but only requires sufficient heat to keep the frost out.
I had never felt the joie de vivre—the sheer joy at being alive—thrill through one's veins so exultantly as when riding over the "Camp" in early morning. I have had the same feeling on the High Veldt in South Africa, where there is the same marvellous air, and, in spite of the undulations of the ground, the same sense of vast space. The glorious air, the sunlight, the limitless, treeless expanse of neutral-tinted grass stretching endlessly to the horizon, and the vast hemisphere of blue sky above had something absolutely intoxicating in them. It may have been the delight of forgetting that there were such things as towns, and streets, and tramways. And then the teeming bird-life of the camp! Ibis and egrets flashed bronze-green or snowy-white through the sunlight; the beautiful pink spoon-bills flapped noisily overhead in single file, a lengthy rosy trail of long legs and necks and brilliant colour; the quaint little ground owls blinked from the entrances of their burrows, and dozens of spurred plovers wheeled in incessant gyrations, keeping up their endless, wearying scream of "téro-téro." I always wanted to shout and sing from sheer delight at being part of it all.
The tinamou, the South American partridge, surprisingly stupid birds, rose almost under the horses' feet, and dozens of cheery little sandpipers darted about in all directions. Birds, birds everywhere! Should one pass near one of the great shallow lagoons, which are such a feature of the country, its surface would be black with ducks, with perhaps a regiment of flamingoes in the centre of it, a dazzling patch of sunlit scarlet, against the turquoise blue the water reflected from the sky.
In springtime the "Camp" is covered with the trailing verbena which in my young days was such a favourite bedding-out plant in England, its flowers making a brilliant league-long carpet of scarlet or purple.
There are endless opportunities for shooting on the "Camp" in the Province of Buenos Ayres, only limited by the difficulties in obtaining cartridges, and the fact that in places where it is impossible to dispose of the game the amount shot must depend on what can be eaten locally. Otherwise it is not sport, but becomes wanton slaughter.
The foolish tinamou are easily shot, but are exceedingly difficult to retrieve out of the knee-high grass, and if only winged, they can run like hares. There is also a large black and white migratory bird of the snipe family, the "batitou," which appears from the frozen regions of the Far South, as winter comes on, and is immensely prized for the table. He is unquestionably a delicious bird to eat, but is very hard to approach owing to his wariness. The duck-shooting was absolutely unequalled. I had never before known that there were so many ducks in the world, nor were there the same complicated preliminaries, as with us; no keepers, no beaters, no dogs were required. One simply put twenty cartridges in a bandolier, took one's gun, jumped on a horse, and rode six miles or so to a selected lagoon. Here the horse was tied up to the nearest fence, and one just walked into the lagoon. So warm was the water in these lagoons that I have stood waist-high in it for hours without feeling the least chilly, or suffering from any ill effects whatever. With the first step came a mighty and stupendous roar of wings, and a prodigious quacking, then the air became black with countless thousands of ducks. Mallards, shovellers, and speckled ducks; black ducks with crimson feet and bills; the great black and white birds Argentines call "Royal" ducks, and we "Muscovy" ducks, though with us they are uninteresting inhabitants of a farm-yard. Ducks, ducks everywhere! As these confiding fowl never thought of flying away, but kept circling over the lagoon again and again, I am sure that anyone, given sufficient cartridges, and the inclination to do so, could easily have killed five hundred of them to his own gun in one day. We limited ourselves to ten apiece. Splashing about in the lagoon, it was easy to pick up the dead birds without a dog, but no one who has not carried them can have any idea of the weight of eight ducks in a gamebag pressing on one's back, or can conceive how difficult it is to get into the saddle on a half-broken horse with this weight dragging you backwards. In any other country but the Argentine, to canter home six miles dripping wet would have resulted in a severe chill. No one ever seemed the worse for it out there.
At times I went into the lagoons without a gun, just to observe at close quarters the teeming water-life there. The raucous screams of the vigilant "téro-téros" warned the water-birds of a hostile approach, but it was easy to sit down in the shallow warm water amongst the reeds until the alarm had died down, and one was amply repaid for it, though the enforced lengthy abstention from tobacco was trying.
The "Camp" is a great educator. One learnt there to recap empty cartridge-cases with a machine, and to reload them. One learnt too to clean guns and saddlery. When a thing remains undone, unless you take it in hand yourself, you begin wondering why you should ever have left these things to be done for you by others. The novice finds out that a bridle and bit are surprisingly difficult objects to clean, even given unlimited oil and sandpaper. The "Camp" certainly educates, and teaches the neophyte independence.