before the doctors rendered their opinion, they had realized that the jagunços’ arrows killed the animals twice over, first taking their lives and then the possibility of their helping those who were herding them along to survive. From that point on, the moment an animal falls, Major Febrônio de Brito pours kerosene over it and sets fire to it. Grown thinner, suffering from eye irritation, in the few short days since the departure of the column from Queimadas the major has become a bitter, sullen man. Of all those in the column, he is probably the one on whom the whistles wreak their intended effect most successfully, keeping him awake and tormenting him. As his ill luck would have it, he is the one responsible for these quadrupeds that fall amid loud bellows of pain, he is the one who must order them to be given the coup de grâce and burned, knowing that these deaths herald future pangs of hunger. He has done everything within his power to minimize the effect of the arrows, sending out men to patrol in circles around the herds and shielding the animals with leather and rawhide coverings, but in the very high summer temperature, this protection makes them sweat, lag behind, and sometimes topple over in the heat. The soldiers have seen the major at the head of the patrols which go out to scour the countryside the moment the symphony begins. These are exhausting, depressing incursions that merely serve to prove how elusive, impalpable, ghost-like the attackers are. The earsplitting racket their whistles make suggests that there are many of them, but that cannot possibly be so, for how in the world could they make themselves invisible in this flat terrain with only sparse vegetation? Colonel Moreira César has given them the explanation: the attackers are divided into very small groups, which hole up in key sites and lie in wait for hours, for days, in caves, crevices, animal lairs, thickets, and the sound of the whistles is deceptively amplified by the astral silence of the countryside they are passing through. This trickery should not distract them; it can have no effect on the column.
And on giving the order to resume their march, after receiving the report on the animals that have been lost, he has remarked: “That’s fine. It lightens our burden, and we’ll get there that much sooner.”
His serenity impresses the correspondents, before whom, each time he receives reports of more deaths, he permits himself to make some joking remark. The journalists are more and more nervous in the presence of these adversaries who constantly spy on their movements yet are never seen. It is their one subject of conversation. They besiege the nearsighted reporter from the Jornal de Notícias, asking him what the colonel really thinks of this relentless attack on the nerves and reserves of the column, and each time the journalist answers that Moreira César doesn’t talk about those arrows or hear those whistles because he is entirely preoccupied, body and soul, by one concern: arriving at Canudos before the Counselor and the rebels can make their escape. He knows, he is certain, that those arrows and whistles have no other object than to distract the Seventh Regiment so as to give the bandits time to prepare their retreat. But the colonel is a clever officer who does not allow himself to be taken in or lose a single day pointlessly scouring the countryside or turn aside a single millimeter from his planned route. He has told the officers who are worried about future provisions that, from this point of view too, what matters most is getting to Canudos as soon as possible, since the Seventh Regiment will find everything it needs there, in the enemy’s storehouses, fields, and stables.
How many times since the regiment began marching again have the correspondents seen a young officer clutching a handful of bloody arrows gallop up to the head of the column to report yet another attack? But this time, at midday, a few hours before the regiment enters Monte Santo, the officer sent by Major Febrônio de Brito brings not only arrows but a whistle and a