His Small, Low-Roofed, Mud House Was Then Too Like A Cage
To Him, As The Tall Thistles Hemmed It In And Shut Out The View On All
Sides.
On his horse he was compelled to keep to the narrow cattle
track and to draw in or draw up his legs to keep them from the long
pricking spines.
In those distant primitive days the gaucho if a poor
man was usually shod with nothing but a pair of iron spurs.
By the end of November the thistles would be dead, and their huge
hollow stalks as dry and light as the shaft of a bird's feather - a
feather-shaft twice as big round as a broomstick and six to eight feet
long. The roots were not only dead but turned to dust in the ground,
so that one could push a stalk from its place with one finger, but it
would not fall since it was held up by scores of other sticks all
round it, and these by hundreds more, and the hundreds by thousands
and millions. The thistle dead was just as great a nuisance as the
thistle living, and in this dead dry condition they would sometimes
stand all through December and January when the days were hottest and
the danger of fire was ever present to people's minds. At any moment a
careless spark from a cigarette might kindle a dangerous blaze. At
such times the sight of smoke in the distance would cause every man
who saw it to mount his horse and fly to the danger-spot, where an
attempt would be made to stop the fire by making a broad path in the
thistles some fifty to a hundred yards ahead of it. One way to make
the path was to lasso and kill a few sheep from the nearest flock and
drag them up and down at a gallop through the dense thistles until a
broad space was clear where the flames could be stamped and beaten out
with horse-rugs. But sheep to be used in this way were not always to
be found on the spot, and even when a broad space could be made, if a
hot north wind was blowing it would carry showers of sparks and
burning sticks to the other side and the fire would travel on.
I remember going to one of these big fires when I was about twelve
years old. It broke out a few miles from home and was travelling in
our direction; I saw my father mount and dash off, but it took me half
an hour or more to catch a horse for myself, so that I arrived late on
the scene. A fresh fire had broken out a quarter of a mile in advance
of the main one, where most of the men were fighting the flames; and
to this spot I went first, and found some half a dozen neighbours who
had just arrived on the scene. Before we started operations about
twenty men from the main fire came galloping up to us. They had made
their path, but seeing this new fire so far ahead, had left it in
despair after an hour's hard hot work, and had flown to the new danger
spot. As they came up I looked in wonder at one who rode ahead, a tall
black man in his shirt sleeves who was a stranger to me. "Who is this
black fellow, I wonder?" said I to myself, and just then he shouted to
me in English, "Hullo, my boy, what are you doing here?" It was my
father; an hour's fighting with the flames in a cloud of black ashes
in that burning sun and wind had made him look like a pure-blooded
negro!
During December and January when this desert world of thistles dead
and dry as tinder continued standing, a menace and danger, the one
desire and hope of every one was for the _pampero_ - the south-west
wind, which in hot weather is apt to come with startling suddenness,
and to blow with extraordinary violence. And it would come at last,
usually in the afternoon of a close hot day, after the north wind had
been blowing persistently for days with a breath as from a furnace. At
last the hateful wind would drop and a strange gloom that was not from
any cloud would cover the sky; and by and by a cloud would rise, a
dull dark cloud as of a mountain becoming visible on the plain at an
enormous distance. In a little while it would cover half the sky, and
there would be thunder and lightning and a torrent of rain, and at the
same moment the wind would strike and roar in the bent-down trees and
shake the house. And in an hour or two it would perhaps be all over,
and next morning the detested thistles would be gone, or at all events
levelled to the ground.
After such a storm the sense of relief to the horseman, now able to
mount and gallop forth in any direction over the wide plain and see
the earth once more spread out for miles before him, was like that of
a prisoner released from his cell, or of the sick man, when he at
length repairs his vigour lost and breathes and walks again.
To this day it gives me a thrill, or perhaps it would be safer to say
the ghost of a vanished thrill, when I remember the relief it was in
my case, albeit I was never so tied to a horse, so parasitical, as the
gaucho, after one of these great thistle-levelling _pampero_ winds. It
was a rare pleasure to ride out and gallop my horse over wide brown
stretches of level land, to hear his hard hoofs crushing the hollow
desiccated stalks covering the earth in millions like the bones of a
countless host of perished foes.
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