And, when he was gripped by hunger, the puma too came down from the uplands to prowl about the houses and ranches of La Presa.
When the puma was mentioned there were several smiles and glances in Friterini’s direction. It was not yet forgotten that one dawn as the waiter was on his way to the corral from the boliche he had seen a kind of tiger jump from the bottom of an empty barrel; yes, there were spots on its skin, and it was about the size of a dog. The puma, which had evidently selected this place as a safe lodging for the night and had curled himself up to sleep, had given the homesick young Brescian, whose mind was full of serenades, a fearful scare.
“When we have water, and the land is irrigated,” Gonzalez continued, “there will be thousands and thousands of families here.”
Both he and his customers spoke, in a tone that was almost lyric, of the marvels of irrigation. Beyond La Presa was Fuerte Sarmiento, the nearest railway station. The town there had grown up around a fort at the time when the Indians were driven out. The troops of the occupation had without much difficulty opened up a small canal, taking advantage of the grade of the river, and this water course had made the place a veritable oasis in the midst of the dry adjacent lands. Great poplars formed walls of defence around the orchards; vines, all kinds of garden products, and fruit trees grew with the prodigality due to a vigorous soil that after resting thousands of years begins once more to give birth to the multitudes of living things that it is able to conceive and nourish. And all the more striking were these rich harvests because of the contrast they offered to the desert that began at once beyond the reach of the tentacles of the canal.
But the majority of the drinkers were even more enthusiastic about another oasis in that arid region. This one was a good many miles below the dam at a point where there was a natural declivity in the river bed; it had been very easy to run irrigation ditches out from the lower level of the stream.
It was a Basque colonist who had opened up some canals, and irrigated the several hundred acres on which he had sown alfalfa. What a fine fodder that was! The patrons of the boliche always began to talk excitedly whenever the subject of this crop came up. No, really, irrigated alfalfa was nothing short of miraculous. In the whole territory of Rio Negro this plant, of Asiatic origin, needed to be sown but once. If the alfalfa fields had water, they would sow themselves. Why, in Fuerte Sarmiento there were alfalfa lands that dated as far back as the expulsion of the Indians, and now after thirty odd years of productivity they were more fertile than the day when they were first sown. The greater the number of crops taken off, the stronger and more luxuriant were the alfalfa plants that sprang up in their place.
“If only we could eat alfalfa,” the Gallego remarked gravely, “the social problem would be solved for there would then be food enough in the world for everybody.”
But, unfortunately, only cattle could assimilate this remarkable fodder. The sheep that the Basque kept in his alfalfa fields were like animals from another planet, where miraculous fodder might give the creatures feeding on it proportions that to our terrestrial eyes would seem fantastically exaggerated.
“They look like creatures seen through a magnifying glass,” said the proprietor of the boliche.
The Basque fellow, proud of his endless pasture lands and his huge sheep, liked to say when some poor tramp passed through his ranch.