Tierra del Fuego Read Free Page B

wanted, and exchanged only the few words necessary to live companionably. Tierra del Fuego itself was changing, too, in tune with their spirits, as it emerged from winter, which is another kind of defeat, and a hard one, beneath its thick crust of snow and ice. The tussock grass, the only grass whose metabolism allows it to survive under snow, had reappeared and provided food for the guanacos, swans, bustards, ducks and wild geese. On the coast, there were seagull eggs the size of a hen’s, speckled brown and sky blue, like porcelain flowers on the dark tuff, and herds of seals started to swarm over the rocks and sands with their fine-looking pups born in the breeding grounds of Cape Horn.
    But every now and again, during those calm, idle days, Novak and Schaeffer would raise their eyes from the rocks where they had taken refuge and look around them like a pair of suspicious seals. They still feared the King of the Páramo.
    And they knew this wasn’t going to last forever. One day, winter would return to crush the earth, the wild geese and bustards would fly home, and even the guanacos would be few and far between. Where would they go then? Where could they fly to? On what wings?
    â€œSnail, snail, come out of your shell!” Schaeffer would say every time the weather was fine and he could offer up his wound to the earth’s eternal healer.
    Walking as best he could, using his rifle as a stick, he would head for the beach, to breathe in the sea air. One morning, he took a long walk to the north, across the dunes than run along the edge of the pampa before you get to the cape. There was another promontory between the pampa and the sea, rising in the middle of the wide beach of sand and gravel like a solitary medieval castle, with black scrub on top and bushes and flowers tumbling down its sides like creepers. To test how well his leg had healed, he walked all the way to the foot of the promontory and then all the way up. From the top, he could see the breakwater of the Páramo, and, to the south, the sandy beach that curves toward the cliff of Cape Domingo. The South Atlantic lay before him like a gray-green plain stretching away to the Antarctic, just as the pampa was a greenish-yellow plain extending as far as the blue mountains of the Carmen Sylva. These two vast expanses were garlanded on the one side with gray dunes, and on the other with white foam flecking the waves that unfolded on the wide gravel beach like roses.
    Suddenly, as his eyes moved from the ocean to the land, they encountered something else white in the middle of the gray beach, something that looked like the shell of a ship that had run aground. But he was puzzled by the shape of it and, taking another look, he realized that it was the skeleton of a huge whale, bleached white by the elements.
    Once more he looked out toward the limits of the Antarctic sea, where the whale’s country was, and then moved his eyes back again, as if following the route the cetacean had taken, to the framework of bones embedded in the wide gravel beach. Then he looked at the surrounding pampas, the wall of clay rising toward the cape, the dunes like a calmer sea, and the promontory beneath his feet. “My bones could end up like that, too, cast up on the rim of the world!” he thought, with a touch of unease, as he turned back toward the cave.
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    A refreshing breath of humanity, such as neither man had known for a long time, was gradually entering their lives in that remote corner of the eastern edge of Tierra del Fuego.
    Often they went together to hunt the fur seals that were arriving with their pups from the southern sea. After killing them with a single blow on the head with a stick, they used the skins for coats and the flesh of the pups for food.
    As the time for hatching approached, there were fewer edible seagull eggs, and the seagulls themselves became more aggressive in defense of their nests. While one of the two men made off with