Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [26]
The guanacos, similarly unafraid, stood on the horizon in massive herds, ears perked at the noise of the approaching car, and ran off the road in groups, pulling their skinny legs together in unison and extending their long necks forward like giraffes.
“The Guanaco is in his proper district,” Darwin noted near the beginning of the Santa Cruz trip. “The country swarms with them; there were many herds of 50 to 100, & I saw one, with, I should think, 500.” This was a boon for the crew, since Darwin could shoot the animals and provide them with fresh meat, instead of the preserved “salt meat” they had brought with them. On the third day of the expedition, someone found a guanaco dead in the water, and the crew decided that even relatively recently expired guanaco beat their usual rations. The waterlogged carcass was “soon cut up & in the evening eat.”
The river sliced through the narrowest part of a wide valley in the plains, and the road ran along the edge of the southern bluffs, the Santa Cruz visible as a thin ribbon of silver a half-mile off on the passenger side of the car. After about sixty-five miles of remarkably similar terrain, marked every ten or twenty miles by a sign for a new sheep ranch, a glorified horse trail dropped abruptly off the highway and down the cliff to a ranch called the Estancia Rincón Grande— r ough ly, the “Big Curve Ranch.” I decided to follow the side road and drove down to the farmhouse with tales of legendary Patagonian hospitality dancing in my head.
The estancias of Patagonia, for those who haven’t read the classic Patagonian travel literature, are welcoming, enchanting places where hospitable ranchers sit around waiting for surprise guests in need of lunch, tea, and possibly a good night’s sleep, to stumble in. Take, for example, this sheep rancher’s quote from Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, the travel standard by which all Patagonian travel is measured: “‘Look here, come in and let me cook you some dinner. Fancy finding this place on your own.’”
I pulled up behind a corrugated metal farmhouse and stopped at an outside garage where a man stood fiddling under the hood of an idling blue pickup truck. A row of neatly planted poplar trees, gold and orange in the fall, lined the house, which was done up in traditional farmhouse colors, white with green trim. I parked and the man stopped fiddling.
As quickly as I could, I explained what I was doing and asked if I could wander across the ranch’s private property to go see the river. “Oh,” he said. “You want to talk to the boss. Come on.”
The ranch hand introduced himself as Carlos, and I followed him as he entered the house through a heavy swinging door. In a room to the left, I saw a flash of silver as a man sliced through a piece of meat. It was about lunchtime, and I half-expected an invitation.
Carlos did not stop, and led me down a narrow, poorly lit corridor to the rear of the house. He instructed me to wait and opened a door at the hallway’s end. “There ’s a boy here to see the river,” I heard him say. For some reason, the diminutive-sounding phrase he had used to describe me, muchacho, stuck in my head. I didn’t hear the jefe’s response, but Carlos waved me in.
The office was small, dirty, and dark. The boss, an elderly man with tanned, weather-beaten skin and a silver beard, sat behind a desk in one corner. A young man I presumed to be his assistant sat behind a desk in the other corner. The boss was doing something that neither Darwin nor Chatwin mentioned in their romantic raptures about the freewheeling ranch lifestyle: paperwork. He looked up. He shuffled the papers in his hand.
“Yes?” he said.
His tone was neither friendly nor welcoming. It did not indicate any promise of lunch with the family.
“I’d like to see the river,” I said. These words came out a bit