Tierra del Fuego Read Free Page A

said.
    Before long, Schaeffer had recovered fairly well. Novak had found a rock encrusted with sea salt on the nearby shore, and he had used the salt not only to cook the birds he killed but also to disinfect the old man’s wound, which was healing ­nicely thanks to the sun and the sea air.
    â€œWhy’s he so worried about me?” Schaeffer wondered more than once, not realizing that, as a former artillery sergeant, the German had been trained to help men wounded in battle. Fritz Novak was a soldier through and through, and the reason he had led the fight against Popper was because the man had behaved like a feudal despot toward the troops under Novak’s command.
    Schaeffer, on the other hand, had led a life full of bitterness, ever since he had had to abandon his native puszta as a child to emigrate to America, and it had left him hardened to the behavior of his fellow men. To him, all men were pretty much the same, especially those who joined in the herd-like rush for gold. You could expect both good and bad from anyone, it all depended on circumstances. That was what life had taught him, and that was the way it had to be. He himself was just the same—he never thought of himself as either better or worse than anyone else—and that was why he was intrigued by Novak’s behavior. In his heart of hearts, Schaeffer considered Spiro’s behavior more logical. The man had run away from danger, leaving him his rifle in case he wanted to kill himself, but stealing the horse that might have helped him escape.
    Novak, on the other hand, who had been harsh and even cruel as the commander of Julius Popper’s private army, had put him on his horse, made sure he was securely attached so that he didn’t lose too much blood, and brought him to this cave in the rocks. He remembered the whining of the seagulls and the cawing of the cormorants, which had guided them to the coast in the middle of the night. The next day, Novak had found the source of the bird noises. Between the cliff edge where the pampa ended and the high-tide line lay an extensive shelf of tuff, and here thousands of seagulls had built their nests, laying their eggs in the holes the wind had hollowed in the tuff. Novak brought him a decent stock of eggs, carrying them in his neckerchief, and proceeded to boil them in the mess tin. These seagull and cormorant eggs were Schaeffer’s salvation. “Maybe that’s why he didn’t leave,” the old man thought. “Because he found food!”
    One morning, Novak hunted and killed a fine-looking female guanaco, with its baby. They roasted and ate the young animal, which was as tender as a lamb, and from the mother they made jerky, which they dried on the rocks in the sun and the sea air. It was turning out to be an easy life for the two men in their shelter behind Cape San Martín.
    More and more frequently, Schaeffer would drag himself out of the cave and use his whip to keep the vultures away from the meat of the guanacos that Novak, fine marksman that he was, killed from time to time. He gathered black scrub to make fire and took care of other chores in the cave while Novak went out to stock up on food—not a difficult thing to do, as this was the most fertile part of the spring in Tierra del Fuego.
    Bustards and wild geese as big as the domestic variety ­started arriving in their thousands. They had migrated from the north to breed in Tierra del Fuego, and later, when winter came, they would return with their young to milder climes. Pink flamingos and various kinds of duck also filled the lagoons and the streams that snaked across the pampas between the smooth ridges of tall, thick tussock grass.
    Like a butterfly abandoning the now useless cocoon in which it has been a chrysalis, Schaeffer’s spirit was emerging from years of bitterness and abuse and discovering that life in this desolate land wasn’t so bad at all. Both men had everything they