Dance of the Dwarfs (17 page)

What I now saw or half saw was out of pattern, for peccary are among the bravest and most formidable of any herbivorous animals. When in danger the whole herd will attack, and lord help the dog which cannot run faster or the man on foot who finds no handy tree! A shot in the air will usually turn aggressive cattle, but will not, I am told, turn a herd of peccary. If the intruder does not get off the premises, he will be under those razor-sharp little hooves.

A single peccary on the outskirts of the herd broke away and took off for the llano squealing as if the devil was after it. The herd neither attacked in its defense nor crossed its line. Indeed I had an impression—in which I put no faith although I could make out their backs in the long grass—that they actually moved off the line, leaving a space for the pursuer. It was behavior clean against the norm.

The following shadow appeared for a fleeting second as two loops. By the time I had decided that there could not possibly be a boa constrictor of that size and that no snake heaved middle sections of its body off the ground, the bullock had torn the inadequate thornbush out by the roots and was off to the llano as well.

I swung round to cover it and never had a second glimpse of the loops. I was pretty sure that what I had seen were the backs of two duendes in line chasing the peccary with their curious loping gait—in fact the sea serpent effect of two porpoises, one behind another, leaping simultaneously.

There was not another movement till birds and monkeys began their racket at dawn. I got down from my perch, stiff, bored, cold, hungry and not much wiser. Still, the duendes had only won the first round on points. The peccary gave away some of their habits. Its carcass was four hundred yards out on the llano with the vultures just settling on it. I drove them off before they could tear away the evidence.

The peccary had been killed by the usual bite. Two canines had met just below the skull. The other two had passed under the spine. That explained why both I and the guerrilleros, seeing only clean perforations in bone, had jumped at bullet wounds. There was not enough soft tissue left on either Pedro or the jaguar to show the damage done by the canines on the other side of the jaw.

The belly had been clawed open and the soft parts eaten. Teeth had torn open the jugular vein, yet there was no crusted pool of blood. I have a strong feeling that duendes not only draw their life from panic, as Joaquín suggested, but from the blood of the kill, sucked or lapped.

The bullock was a mile further on, still attached to its bush. It appeared to welcome my arrival, though not to the extent of standing to be patted. I left it to look after itself and walked on wearily over the llano to the Mother and Child.

Alvar turned up at ten with Tesoro and was surprised to see me. I wouldn't say he was pleased. Men are not when beliefs as well as caution are shown up to be exaggerated. No doubt he also expected to be able to keep Tesoro, who would never be much use as a cow pony but at least would win him some silver in bets if he cared to ride as far as Venezuela.

I said that the dwarfs had so frightened the bullock that he had torn out his bush and was now ranging the llano. Alvar asked if I had seen them, to which I replied that I had even seen them dancing and that I hoped to persuade them to work on my irrigation channels. I shall not give it out that they are animals until I am dead certain what they are. Meanwhile let it be dwarfs with whom the learned doctor is nearly on speaking terms! That cuts them down to size and might enable me to get some active help if I need it.

I told him to take the bullock back to the herd and keep it for me. I do not think I shall want it again. This sitting up over a beast is a romantic idea borrowed from books. To be successful one would have to know far more about the habits of the creature one is observing. I had amazing luck in making contact at all, due to my hunch that the bay was regularly hunted and that the tunnel was their way in and out of the forest wall.

The next move must be to try to get a sight of this pair on their home ground in daylight, and I must not play their game when I “feel” their presence. I believe that Joaquín is on to an actual fact related to their method of hunting and general ecology. They produce what one might call a Declaration of Intent which is detectable by horse, man and even jaguar, to say nothing of peccary. So does man himself. His murderous presence signals a warning to all his four-footed cousins, and nothing but a tired, old man-eater will call his bluff. So I hope I can safely assume some timidity in the duendes, or at least the normal strong objection to starting trouble. Pedro's death does not prove that he was deliberately chased and killed. More probably he took them by surprise on a track which they considered their own territory and did not retreat when told unmistakably to do so.

[
May 8, Sunday
]

When I rode in yesterday afternoon, supposedly coming from Santa Eulalia, I had no need to invent a story and truthfully said that the canoe had called. I could not pretend it had not, thus leaving myself free to be absent from the estancia for more nights, since Chucha saw all the new letters I was carrying. I keep her out of nowhere and out of nothing she can understand. Love and youth are privileged.

I noticed a flicker of disquiet at the arrival of so much evidence that I had another, more permanent life. She can only guess at it, but of course she fears it. Sometime I have to go, and to what does she return then? I presume she thinks it inconceivable that I would hand her over to Joaquín, for that is a standing joke between us. But she must anticipate an end not far off Valera's solution: that she will be passed with a kiss and a dowry to some fellow like Alvar. I cannot bring myself to tell her that we shall never be separated. I wish I could.

There is no limit to the oddities of the sort of human thinking which isn't thinking. Mario, Chucha and Teresa now take the dwarfs as fact. Mario begs me to be very careful and gives me tips on how to approach untamed Indians. I am never, never to surprise them, he says. That goes for more than dwarfs.

He has been digesting the question I asked him: whether in fact the dwarfs had ever killed so much as a hen in or around the estancia. The answer is no. He even points out to me that all we know of Cisneros is that he was ruined and rode away. He may not have been killed by the dwarfs. He and his horse may be anywhere in the Americas. Everything is turned a little too much upside down. It is now I who have to impress it on Mario that at night all doors and windows have to be kept shut and that the horses must never be left in the corral.

I have been right round the perimeter with him and insisted that adobe rubble on the outside must be dug away and piled on top of the wall. To avoid alarm I play up the new legend of the pitiable pygmy. Suppose the poor little sods, I suggested, came in to steal or kill horses and were surprised at the job. Then we might not be able to avoid mutual bloodshed and enmity. So keep them out till they know us better! He never asked why, if they are men, they cannot climb a half-ruined wall like ours. All the traditions of the duende remain in force, though the duende itself is exploded.

The mystery has grown up because—at any rate in the open—the duende is nocturnal, and the secret presence of a nocturnal animal can only be detected by its kill. The llaneros, since they stayed clear of the forest edge, very seldom saw a kill. When they did, it was unfamiliar and inexplicable, probably the work of man. Combine this with the rare glimpse of an upright figure in deep dusk and the terror of horses communicated to their riders, and there you have the origin of the dancing dwarfs.

My next problem is to find out where they drink. When the creek had water in it, they did occasionally come as far: the horses knew it if the wind was the right way. But they do not hunt on the open llano. That is certain. I think that they move out from the ridge in the late afternoon when I was stalked—or merely investigated—and that they watch the forest border when the game moves out to graze on what is left of the grass or to browse on leaves which the sun has packed with nourishment. Whether they kill within the gloom of the forest during the day I do not yet know. It looks as if they do, when tempted or disturbed.

But they must have water on their home ground. Blood alone is, I imagine, too salty to quench thirst. The big felines lap it as it flows, but appear to need water in large quantities. Obviously I have not been far enough into the forest. Somewhere below the southwest slope of the ridge must be pool or spring. The presence of that swamp deer proved it. And the tapir which I saw crossing the long glade must have cool forest water in which to drink and wallow.

Chucha and Pichón are now so sure of each other that she can ride with me to the new southern passage tomorrow and lead Estrellera home while I explore the swamp deer country on foot. She does not object so much as I expected to my wandering in the forest without a horse. She is conditioned by her whole life not to interfere with men's business. And Samuel of course always walked.

[
May 9, Monday
]

That has settled classification, though not much more. Without a doubt they belong to the family of the Mustelidae, not the Viverridae.

Through the leaves I watched Chucha ride away. She showed some signs of agitation—which she never does when I am with her—and took it out on Estrellera when the mare tried to get her head down to eat. There was no further question who was boss.

Starting from this now familiar entry into the forest, navigation was easy. The blazed trees led me straight to Pedro's body. I was very reluctant to look at it again, but forced myself to do so. The forest was beginning to clean up in its own way. The bones were already greenish in color. A Desmoncus liana growing in the well-fertilized soil had actually disarticulated and picked up the pelvis on its hooked spines, lifting it a foot clear of the ground. If the growth had been through the eye sockets of the skull, the macabre effect would have terrified anyone, Indian or not. I wonder if many of the duende stories may not be due to the fact that there are no wild dogs or hyenas in this country to destroy what the birds cannot crack or carry.

Since I knew that by walking due west I must somewhere pick up the escarpment of the ridge, I did not bother to take the long glade. The timber was big and well-spaced and the going easy, though melancholy, monotonous and oppressively silent. It was hard to believe—it always is—that a hundred and fifty feet above my head was sunshine so merciless that the domes of leaf and blossom were wilting and the tree dwellers asleep in the perfumed shade.

When I met rising ground I followed the contours, leaving on my right the ridge itself and the many ravines up one of which I had climbed with Estrellera. Eventually I was stopped by thickening ground vegetation, a sure sign that somewhere ahead the sun penetrated the canopy. I began to climb directly upwards in the hope that I should be able to see into the clearing from the top of the ridge and find an easier route to it.

The tangle of ground creepers and stone was the worst I had hit yet, especially difficult because I thought it wise to take the rifle off my back and carry it. I was moving across the herringbone of erosion, climbing down and out of one cleft after another. After three hundred yards of this—which took me nearly an hour—I saw a gleam of water below me between the leaves. Cutting a way to it over the flat was going to be quicker than scrambling across rock to the head of the pool or stream, so I took the first practicable ravine down to the forest and then continued westwards.

The ground became spongy and the vegetation mostly soft. One satisfying swipe with the machete was enough to bring down stems as thick as one's calf. I came out at last into the no-man's-land of swampy forest, where what you tread on may be a root, may be floating or may be mud.

I have never seen such a concentration of brightly colored life, animal and vegetable. The branches which hung out over the still water were loaded with epiphytes. There were yellow-flowering cassia, orange bignonia, several species of short-stemmed nymphaeaceae and a very fine purple ranuncula which may be unknown. Hummingbirds and green-and-blue tree creepers were everywhere, and there were enough butterflies to keep old Samuel busy for a month. Nature's passionate exhibitionism, always repressed under the trees, had been hurled on stage by the sun.

It was impossible to follow the shore of the swamp or to make out its general shape. However, a fallen tree offered a sort of pier running out a hundred feet into clear water. I tested it cautiously and found that it was not yet rotten enough to let me through or to be frequented by the varied and sometimes unpleasant creatures which make their homes in hollow trees. There was only a nest of hornets towards the top of a branch, which I was careful not to disturb.

From the end of the tree I had a view up and down the pool. I could see the stream which fed it and hear a fall tumbling down the lower slope of the ridge. In the rainy season the stream evidently burst out with sufficient force to clear all soil from a shallow rock basin just above the point where it entered the swamp. On one side was a beach of sand or mud which I intended to examine for tracks, but for the moment I was very content to sit at the end of my pier and watch, reckoning that if I kept still I could pass as a thick dead branch. The only animal life in sight—beyond insects—was a small and enterprising alligator. After all the noise I had made in cutting my way to the bank it was unlikely that I should see anything else for hours.

There was a very slight current, showing that the swamp drained into the Guaviare or a tributary. In the rainy season the width of the lower stream must be enough to stop the duendes crossing. That they do not in fact cross water has been pretty well proved by the creek. It follows that their permanent habitat ought to be on a watershed from which they can move in any direction.

The ridge meets their requirements. The faint runways bear this out; so do all those clefts and holes without even a guinea pig or reptile—snapped up for a snack in passing, with enough fragments left to encourage the ants. Additional evidence, for what it is worth, is my instinctive aversion to the ridge when I first visited the north side.