Tierra del Fuego Read Online Free Page A

utilized by the King of the Páramo to make his army appear much bigger than it was to the natives and the bands of men who were always prowling the Páramo in search of gold. Novak himself had manufactured a few straw dolls, dressed them in uniforms and tied them to the saddles of the horses. Then they were led in file by a single rider around the borders of his dominions, with wooden rifles over their shoulders. From a distance they looked like real cavalrymen, with the advantage that if they were shot they didn’t fall . . . “Those soldiers look sick . . .” said a man who saw them from a distance and later came to work in the Páramo gold deposits. “Why are their faces all one color?”
    So Popper had masks painted, with tufts of tussock grass stuck on them. Schaeffer smiled to himself bitterly, remembering the many times when, by order of the “commander,” he’d had to strap the dolls to the horses and send them trotting to make them look more alive.
    What most haunted Novak’s memory was that the same rag dolls he had invented had been used later to defeat his own forces during the skirmish in the Beta arroyo. Being familiar with the ruse, he had neglected his front and reinforced his rear, but, instead of the straw dolls, Julius Popper himself had approached from in front with all his men, while the dolls had appeared on his flanks. Thrown into confusion, Novak’s men had retreated, and defeat had ensued.
    The following day, Schaeffer saddled the horse they both used, and headed for the shore to realize his idea of making a shelter of whale ribs against the wind and rain.
    As he rode toward the skeleton, the horse began to snort, suspicious of that strange white frame. Closer still, it drew up and refused to move. Schaeffer dug in his spurs, and the animal jumped to the side, almost throwing him. He dismounted, hobbled the horse, and walked up to the skeleton.
    From close up, the size of the skeleton was even more impressive. The shape of the great cetacean, which must have been at least a hundred feet across, had been preserved intact. The bones of the head looked like a huge Roman chariot, the thorax like the hull of a boat, and the vertebrae of the tail like a monstrous snake buried in the sand.
    Schaeffer walked for a while inside the arch of bones, stretching his arms up, calculating the dimensions of the animal, which were remarkable, even though the vertebrae were half buried in the gravel and sand. He looked at the ribs one by one, and then, coming back out from inside the skeleton, began to shake them, as a first step toward carrying out his plan. They were firmly embedded, but one of them yielded as he moved it from side to side. The motion of the sharp edges gradually made a hole in the ground. By hanging from one end, he finally managed to get the rib free. He wiped the sweat from his brow, placed the rib on the sand like a curved bench, and sat down on it. He thought he would rest a while and take the rib to where he had hobbled his horse. If he couldn’t carry it over the saddle, he’d tie it to the horse and drag it to the cave. One rib one day, another rib the next day, until the shelter was done.
    He looked at his leather coat, which he had taken off and thrown on the ground to work on the rib. Frayed at the edges, its brown color faded, it was more like a piece of his own skin, which, in that wasteland, had become equally discolored and cracked by the elements. “If only we could get rid of our bodies,” he thought, “and grow new ones!”
    All at once, his eyes narrowed like those of a cat glimpsing a mouse’s tail. He rubbed them, as if trying to wake from a vision, and getting stealthily to his feet—again like a cat—he crept closer, as if hypnotized by what he saw on his frayed ­jacket. It was black sand, apparently thrown up from the bottom of the hole when he had pulled the whalebone out.
    He took it in his