CHAPTER VII

TEHUELCHE METHODS OF HUNTING

Hunting season -- Surefooted horses -- Description of big hunt -- Ring round game -- Splendid riding of Tehuelches -- Horses dislike jumping -- Game killed and spared by Tehuelches -- Difference of their hunting methods from those of the Onas of Tierra del Fuego -- Artistic perception of Onas -- Ill-faith of early settlers -- Indian trail -- "No place for us" -- Deterioration of horses -- They prize piebalds -- Method of breaking in -- Perfect riders -- Helpless on foot -- Staying powers of horses -- Dogs -- Evil of liquor trade -- National sin of permitting this traffic -- Picture of trader -- Drinking bout of Tehuelches -- Gambling for horses -- Fatal weakness of Tehuelches -- Another instance.

During the latter half of October and during November, which is the Patagonian spring, the Tehuelches hunt the guanaco _chicos_, or young guanaco.

At this period the young have not all been dropped, and the most prized pelts are those of the unborn young, which are obtained by killing the mother. These pelts, being very soft and fine in texture, are used to make the most valuable _capas_ or robes, and if sold out of the tribes at the settlements, bring in the highest prices.

At this season the Indians move to their favourite hunting-grounds; it is, in fact, to them the most important period of the year. Two requisites are necessary to make their hunting a success: the first is plenty of game, and in this there is rarely any disappointment; the second is good ground on which to hunt it. As long, however, as the guanaco do not take absolutely to the crags, the Indians, with the help of their sure-footed unshod horses, are able to levy a heavy toll on the herds.

The method of hunting adopted by the Tehuelches is interesting enough to call for description at length. On the morning of the hunt, the Indians saddle up a good long-journey horse apiece, they also catch each man his fastest mount, upon which he puts a _bozal_ and _cabresto_, as well as a bit in his mouth. The hunter rides the former horse, and leads the latter for use later on.

The big herds of guanaco have meantime been located, and the plan of the day's hunt arranged by the _cacique_. All the hunters start forth in couples, riding in different directions, and so form an immense circle, into the centre of which they systematically drive the game. They then signal their whereabouts to one another by means of smokes until the ring round the guanaco is complete. Each hunter is accompanied by his dogs, of which he possesses probably a score. Six or eight gaunt hounds of no particular breed, but whose characteristic points run chiefly to legs and teeth, follow their master. As the circle narrows the terrified game huddle together in the centre of it, and there may be seen hundreds of guanaco, many ostriches, and possibly a puma or two. The guanaco bucks pace upon the edge of the herd, and give out their neighing, half-defiant call as their human enemies approach.

The positions assumed by guanaco when under the influence of curiosity and fear are most singular. They will stand staring at the Indians for many seconds, and will then dash off at a wild gallop with the strange leaping run peculiar to them. The necks, too, swing and sway at all conceivable angles, and whenever their ears are assailed by a sudden sound, I have seen a whole herd, upwards of one hundred strong, sway their necks to within a couple of inches of the ground almost in unison.

In the meanwhile the Indians draw remorselessly nearer, dismount from their saddle-horses, leap on their led animals, and precipitate themselves from all sides upon the frantic herds. The horses that are left have generally been carefully schooled to stand when their reins are dropped forward to the ground over their heads. The Indians howl and roar as they dash down upon the guanaco, whirling their _boleadores_ round their heads. This _bolas_, with which they hunt the guanaco, is very heavy, and the three balls are generally made of stone, but they use a lighter form for the capture of the ostrich. In the case of guanaco _chicos_, clubs are often employed.

Holding his weapon by the shortest of the three _sogas_, or thongs, and while going at full gallop, the Indian launches it at the long neck of the guanaco; a doe is always selected if possible. Extremely expert in its use, the rider's weapon probably reaches its mark, and the quarry, maddened by the tightening of the _sogas_, bucks and rears, until she becomes hopelessly entangled.

I have mentioned that the Tehuelches hunt in pairs. The companion of the Indian who has thrown the _bolas_ then leaps to the ground and despatches the guanaco. Meantime his comrade has dashed forward at the tail of the herd, and has probably secured another animal. The dogs, too, do their part, and as the storm of the chase sweeps across the pampa, it leaves the ground in its path dotted with the yellow-brown forms of the slain.

The chase tails itself out for many miles, and may be followed over desolate leagues marked by lines of dead guanacos and dropped _boleadores_ which have failed to carry home. I should be afraid to say how many animals are killed at one of these singular battues. To see the Indian hunt the guanaco is to see the art of rough-riding exemplified. How they gallop! Down one sheer _barranca_, or cliff, and up another. The roar of loosened stone behind them. The guanaco jink and dodge and break back, always making for the highest ground in the vicinity.

The dexterity with which the horses of the hunters keep their feet is truly wonderful. They will go at full gallop anywhere, and hardly ever fall or miss their footing. There is, however, one thing which they universally dislike, and that is jumping in any of its forms. Here and there in some parts of Patagonia the pampa is cut and scored with fissures a few feet in width. To have your horse stop dead, both feet together, on the edge of one of these and violently shy away at an acute angle is no uncommon experience. Generally, however, a certain amount of inducement and coercion at length takes them over in a complicated buck.

When the chase has run itself out, the lean dogs are fed upon the grosser parts, the pelts of the young are pulled off, and the meat, such of it as is wanted, is cargoed or packed upon the horses, and the hunting-party jogs back to the shelter of the wigwams, made from the skins their fathers and their grandfathers slew before the white men began to move southward and to overrun the land.

The Indians kill no bird save the ostrich, and this is a curious fact, because the lagoons and pools literally swarm with great flocks of upland geese (_Chloephaga magellanica_), which are very fair eating. Perhaps the reason why they spare the geese arises from the fact that they have no weapons suitable for killing them. On one occasion when I shot a brace of geese, the Indians seized upon them and pronounced them "good." Also, they kill few animals but the guanaco and the puma. Had the guanaco a reasonable amount of fat upon it, the life of the Indians would be idyllic, but in this the guanaco fails. Of lean meat he supplies plenty, for he is a large beast, but though he lives in a land where sheep grow fat and well-liking, the long-necked Patagonian llama retains his leanness and his running condition.

Although it may be slightly outside the province of this book, I cannot help contrasting the very different methods employed by the Onas of Tierra del Fuego, who are after all only separated from the Tehuelches of Patagonia by the narrow Straits of Magellan, in hunting the same animal. The Onas do not use horses, and kill the guanaco with bows and arrows. When they perceive a herd, they surround it as the Tehuelches do, but, of course, the circle is on a much smaller scale. It is their aim to remain invisible to their quarry, for which purpose, during their stalk, they are in the habit of wrapping themselves in the skins of the animals which they have formerly killed. Once the herd is surrounded, it is with the same accompaniment of screams and shouts that the hunters rush in to secure their prey.

The dissimilarities between the Tehuelches and the Onas are numerous.[17] While the Tehuelches are peaceful, the Onas are warlike. There is a story current that the only white man who has ever lived in the very primitive dwelling of boughs, which are all the Onas have to shelter them from a bitter climate, was a Scotchman whom the Indians had captured. He was with them three weeks, and his face was adorned by a singularly luxuriant crop of orange whiskers. The Onas are reported to have amused themselves by pulling these out in instalments by the roots. Might not some anthropologist base a treatise upon "The Artistic Perceptions of the Onas of Tierra del Fuego" upon this occurrence?

The Onas are also a tall people, although not equalling in height my friends the Tehuelches, and their physical development is less conspicuously remarkable. The Ona woman does not, as does the Tehuelche _china_, form an attachment to a white suitor, appearing to have no desires outside her own race and people, but under certain circumstances the women have shared the hearthstone of the foreigner. Polygamy is allowed and practised among them. There is something of the spirit which characterises the Gipsy of Europe about this people; they are quite ready to take all they can get from the alien, while they at the same time maintain a bitter rancour against the hand that gives. But this is not, as it is in the case of the Gipsies, the continuance of an original dislike and implacability, but rather the result of the infamous ill-faith which leavened the dealings of the very earliest visitors to the coasts of Tierra del Fuego.

I must confess that all my sympathies are on the side of the primitive races, who on coming into contact with the white man suffer those outrages on their best feelings which, I am sorry to say, are only too common. You must understand, however, that I in no way refer to the settlers of this generation. My remarks must be taken to refer to the first pioneers. At the present day--so Burbury, who has had a great experience of Tierra del Fuego, informed me--the Indians there are treacherous and absolutely implacable, and do endless harm in their periodical raids upon the "white guanaco," as they call the sheep. They do this not only when hunger presses them, but at all times out of a spirit of revenge. Sometimes they drown the sheep and leave them in the ice, where they keep good for weeks, during which time the Onas feast on them.

Patagonia bears upon its length the clear-cut and long-drawn initial of the Tehuelche race. By this I mean the Indian trail, which can be followed from water to water, from good camp to good camp, stretching from Punta Arenas in the south to Lake Buenos Aires in the north and beyond it. Up and down this trail and along others, less extended, generations of Indians have wandered with their wives and children, their tents and horses. We struck it when travelling south from Lake Buenos Aires, in the early January of 1901. It was hard to distinguish the Indian road from any parallel series of guanaco-tracks, which here line the country in numbers, and, indeed, it was only by keeping a sharp look-out for the hoof-prints of horses that we were able to follow the trail at all. It runs along under the Cordillera at a varying distance of about twenty or thirty miles from their bases. It was a sad remark that an Indian made to us while talking about the ancient wanderings of his people. "Once," he said, "we had the sea upon the one side of us, and upon the other the Cordillera. But this is not so now. The white man is ever advancing upon one side and the Cordillera remains ever unchanging upon the other. Soon there will be no place for us; yet once the land was ours."

One would imagine that a people so dependent on their horses for the very necessities of life would give attention and care to the breeding and improvement of the stock. But this is far from being the case. The Tehuelches appear to be, like other far less intelligent races of uncivilised peoples, incapable of much forethought. They live for to-day and make little provision for to-morrow. As a case in point, they are allowing their horses to become very deteriorated. The animals are, almost without exception, to use a Spanish term, _mañero_, which means of a spoiled temper. In some localities they have been crossed with the horses of the settlers which have a strain of English blood, and the result is animals of spirit and of character, but _muy mañero_. The Tehuelches prize white horses, and _overos_, or piebalds, exceedingly. The backs of their horses are generally badly galled, but this is no matter for surprise, as they often ride upon a sheepskin flung anyhow across the beast. The method of breaking-in or taming is simple and severe in the extreme. It consists of leaping on a raw colt and galloping him to exhaustion. One reason why their horses are falling below level certainly is that the Indians have a foolish trick of riding two- and three-year-olds both hard and far. A colt of this age once fairly "cooked" by an over-long ride will never be of very much use afterwards.

And yet these people are peculiarly dependent upon their horses. They will not walk ten yards if they can ride them. And they have undoubtedly carried the art of riding to the last perfection. I never knew what riding really meant until I went to Patagonia and saw the Indians on horseback. We once asked an Indian what he could do if he were left on the pampa without his horses. "Sit down," he said. This man, however, was not a Tehuelche but a Pampa Indian.

The horses are far from large, the average running to about thirteen hands, but they are wiry, untiring beasts, and some show extraordinary speed. The manner in which they carry the heavy well-developed Indians is wonderful. They are entirely fed on grass. When the camp is made, they are simply turned out to graze upon the pampa, where frequently the grass is sparse and poor enough, though near many of the Indian camping-grounds good _vegas_ of rich grass exist. In winter, of course, the _tropillas_ become very thin and in poor condition, but at that season they have infinitely less work to do, as there is hardly any hunting, and the camp is usually stationary for the coldest months.

The hounds of the Indians are something like our lurcher breed. In the tents they lie about among the rugs and bedding. They are irreclaimable thieves and very cowardly. A good guanaco hound is, however, of very great value, for a pair of accomplished hounds, skilled in the chase, represent a capital upon which an entire family can live.

One of the strongest feelings which I brought away with me from Patagonia was a hatred of the trader who battens upon the failings of the Tehuelches. If he hears of a festival or any tribal ceremony, he arrives upon the spot with drink. He sells liquor in exchange for horses, and when his customers are well steeped in the poison he brings, he makes some magnificent bargains. His influence is far-reaching and fatal as far-reaching to the picturesque and harmless race out of whose degradation and death he makes his living. Savage races may survive war and internecine struggles, and the decimation not infrequently caused by a cruel rule such as was T'Chaka among the Zulus, but they never survive the Civilisation of the Bottle. The horrors of the wars of history would pale beside the cold-blooded slaughter, the gradual, malignant, poisoning processes which the most self-satisfied and religious nations of the world allow to continue year after year, I should say century after century, among the aboriginal tribes, who live nominally under their protection. The pioneer trader with his stores of cheap maddening liquor is free to sell as much as he pleases, although it is a well-known fact that such trading means ruin and extermination to the unhappy ignorant folk who buy. The sin after all is national rather than personal, for the trader has his living to earn, whereas the nation which is responsible for allowing him liberty to traffic puts out no hand to stay the evil. I do not in the least bring any charge against the Argentine Government; we British are guilty of the same crime or carelessness, and in some of our dependencies terrible object-lessons of precisely the same kind can be observed.

Let me draw a picture of one of these traders for you. A lean stooping man of Paraguayan extraction, dressed out in store clothes which he but half filled. A plump face of the caste peculiar to the lowest type of the Latin peoples, with a full greasy-lipped animalism stamped upon it, after the manner of his kind. The lean body and fat face formed a contrast that struck you with repulsion as an actual deformity. This fellow played a very old trick upon a batch of Indians and considerably enriched himself thereby.

The Indians had come in upon the outskirts of a coast-town, rich with the sale of a six-months harvest of ostrich feathers, guanaco-skins and other such merchandise as they gather from the pampas. After some drinking and a variety of games of chance, our friend the trader started an argument as to which of the Indians owned the swiftest horse. A race was soon decided upon, the trader most liberally offering a prize in the shape of a bottle of drink. The race was to be ridden bare-back, as is usual in contests of this description among the Indians. The trader further suggested that the race should be run off in heats. A horse with a white blaze and a very fine head won, and his proprietor, a tall Indian in a black poncho, received the prize, which he, with help, soon disposed of. After this the talk fell naturally upon the merits of the respective horses.

"Your _picaso_ is a good horse," said the trader to the tall Indian, "but I have a horse in my troop that could leave him far behind."

At first the Indian laughed, but the trader's boasting and insistence presently stung him to resent the aspersion on his mount, and he said he should like to see the thing done.

The trader jumped at the opportunity. The Indians had had sufficient drink to destroy their ordinary cautiousness, and were ready to take up any challenge.

"The loser to forfeit his horse to the winner," continued the trader, who had laid his plans beforehand. He then called a Chileno lad, who soon appeared leading a big lean _alazan_. It was easy for any seeing eye to recognise that the animal had been tied up the night before and was in quite fair racing trim; besides which, the Indian's _picaso_ was already tired with the previous races. The Chileno boy swung up and the two horses came thundering along their course. The Indian's weight also told as compared with the lightness of the Chileno boy, and the result was altogether a foregone conclusion.

But this by no means ended the business. The Indians were excited and ripe for any amount of gambling, and being skilfully handled by the trader they did not leave the settlement until he had stripped them of all their possessions. The tall Indian, who had come in with eighty dollars and five horses, returned to his camp with a two-kilo bag of _yerba_ and on a horse which he had been forced to buy for the return journey from the trader at, of course, the trader's own price.

There are many Indians who avoid the coast-towns, but although these do not go to the trader, the trader, as I have mentioned in another chapter, comes to them.

Throughout Patagonia, upon the rim of civilisation, are scattered _boliches_, or frontier drink-shops, whose liquor sales consist chiefly of "champagne cognac," whatever that potion may be. These establishments hold out a perpetual temptation to the passing Indians. The frequent presence of silver gear, such as the Tehuelches possess when fortune smiles upon them, that is almost always hanging from the ceiling of the neighbouring store, tells its own tale. An Indian has rarely enough money to "look upon the wine when it is red," or rather upon the unwholesome jaundice tinge of "champagne cognac," so he pays in kind; and when once the craving for drink grips him he will gamble away everything to satisfy it. This infatuation appears to lay a fatally strong hand upon the uncivilised peoples. They have no principles to stay them, no scruples to overcome, they have found a short cut to a wild species of happiness, and one cannot wonder that they seek its extraordinary pleasures as often as possible. So it is that liquor has destroyed whole races, wiped them clean off the face of the earth. Some one has written:

Oppression and the sword slay fast, Thy breath kills slowly but at last,

and it is certainly a terrible truth in this connection.

I can call to mind two Indians, whom I saw ride up to a _boliche_ near Santa Cruz. They offered a contrast to one another which it is not easy to forget. The first was an Indian with a close-shut mouth and the dark and ponderous dignity of the big Tehuelche. His gear was richly studded with silver, and his saddle covered with embroidered cloths. His head was bare, save that his brows were bound with a band of red finery. He made a picturesque and imposing figure as he cantered up on his white horse with its glinting eyes. Followed the second. He, too, was an Indian, but his gear was guiltless of silver, his _bozal_ was worn and blackened with age. The best thing he possessed was his horse. He wore an ancient tail-coat, once black but now green, this in conjunction with a _chiripa_, or Indian loin-cloth, gave him an appearance sufficiently incongruous. Instead of the quiet dignity of the first man, his face expressed little save vacuity. He was a pitiful object in the strong pampa sunshine, his health evidently broken by frequent orgies. And no doubt he had been a self-respecting Indian enough--before the trader came within the province of his knowledge.

FOOTNOTE:

[17] The Tehuelches are enormously above the Onas of Tierra del Fuego in the scale of civilisation. A Fuegian woman has been known to live in the Tehuelchian tents, but how she came there I am unable to say. On the other hand, I have never heard of any Tehuelche living with the Tierra del Fuegians, and cannot conceive such a state of things to be possible. But the Tehuelches will mix occasionally with the Araucanian tribes of Northern Patagonia, and intermarriages are common.