Dance of the Dwarfs (22 page)

I asked if there were nothing else. Vicente said he had noticed tracks of a big otter.

“Webbed feet?”

Vicente, trying hard to sound more polite than ironical, remarked that it was known otters had webbed feet.

“But, with your permission, did you notice the web?”

Alvar broke in impatiently to say that on leaves, especially where they stuck to whatever touched them, you couldn't tell if the Virgin herself had webbed feet. As for otters, wherever there was new water, they journeyed to look at it. They were bored like the rest of us.

All these excuses were nonsense. They had not examined anything closely, but were not going to admit it. However, they put the identity of the assassin beyond a doubt, and this was the time to tell them what I myself had known for a week past.

“Look, friends! I have seen the animal which made the tracks and I have killed one,” I said. “It is, if you like, a sort of big otter. It is also the dwarf. And it crouched by Jacinto while he was sleeping and tore his throat open.”

They would not believe it. I may have been too sudden and dramatic. They could neither give me the lie nor laugh at me, which would have ended the conversation; but their general attitude was that I, a mere man of book learning—though, yes, I recognized one end of a horse from the other—could not know more of forest creatures than they who lived in Santa Eulalia. The dwarf could not be an animal, for who ever heard of an animal which could dance or one that drank the blood without eating the flesh?

They trotted out the lot. Live on the other side of the creek. Never go far from the edge of their forest. Do not cross water.

“Well, if all this is so, why would none of you ride alone to the estancia after dark even when there was water in the creek? And why does Joaquín dislike a guitar in Santa Eulalia?”

My obstinacy roused them out of their usual reluctance to talk. It was not true, they said, that none of them would ride alone to the estancia. They were all valiant. It was just that a man on a long ride at night, with no cattle to claim his attention, liked a companion to talk with. It could be there were dwarfs on the other side of the creek, or it could not. But the place was unhealthy. That was known. One had only to observe old Mario who made himself a prisoner every night. As for the guitar, who the devil believed that it could attract dwarfs all the way to Santa Eulalia? Only Joaquín! Good! That did not mean they thought it was true.

“When a priest comes here,” Arnoldo explained, “we do not believe all he says. There is much that is very improbable. But he is a man who might speak with the Most Holy Virgin tomorrow or the next day. So a wise man will show some faith. The same with Joaquín.”

I replied that I understood all that very well. The beast, however, was so real that it had killed my golden Tesoro before I shot it. I hesitated to say that I had hit it on the nose with a machete.

I now had their instant, warm sympathy. Poor Tesoro! What a loss! Perhaps it had been a jaguar of a strange color. Men had seen such which had more yellow than black in their skins. There was even a story of a white jaguar. Or it could have been a puma, bolder and stronger than usual. They would ride out to see what was left of the carcass and tell me which it was.

“And besides,” Alvar pronounced in the true spirit of science, “why look for dwarfs and duendes when we all know that these communists, as they call themselves, killed Jacinto?”

It was no use. Even if they saw the bones of the mustelid, they would swear it was a jaguar with short legs, seeing what they were determined to see and anyway having little knowledge of anatomy beyond that of cattle and horses. If the flooded creek were passable, curiosity might lead one or two of them to the scene; but, as it is, the journey round the marshes, down to the south and back, could not be completed in a day—and, valiant or cautious, not one of them would spend a night in that haunted country.

I had in my saddlebag a couple of bottles of rum for Joaquín and hoped to get some sense out of him before they took effect. He had had to put up with Indian cassava beer for some time and was sure to pass off into the spirit world—a pun which to him would not be one at all—an hour after the corks were pulled.

I told him the story from the time I watched the mustelid at the pool below the ridge up to the death of Tesoro. I told it very slowly with long pauses and invited his comments on the Declaration of Intent. It was difficult to illustrate my meaning by the parallel of the stoat. Small animals in this immensity are ignored, and there is no reliable, intimate natural history. I think it likely that the hunting methods of our
hurón
resemble those of the stoats and weasels, but Indians are only interested in food animals and pets.

Joaquín at least did not doubt the facts. I had seen the duende and was none the worse. His father, who also saw the duende, had been sick for days.

“So I have always known it was a duende, not a dwarf,” he said.

I continued to insist that it was a flesh-and-blood animal, less powerful than the jaguar but ferocious and without respect for man.

“That is the shape which the fear takes.”

“But duendes don't die when one blows their brains out, and they don't kill horses.”

“If they did not, horses would never die.”

We had some more rum while I worked out that fantastic statement. I translate it as meaning that whatever the cause of death—time, worms, the misfortune of breaking a leg—there is always a duende behind it. One cannot prove it isn't so, for we have no machine which will detect the presence or absence of the malevolent duende of ill luck. The virus, that little devil of all devils, was hardly more than a word till the electron microscope revealed its material existence.

This, of course, is afterthought. At the time I was more exasperated than analytical.

“But this duende died,” I repeated.

“Why not?”

He whispered in my ear, lest invisible listeners under the thatch should hear him, that he too had killed duendes.

I had another shot at it.

“Friend Joaquín, imagine that a jaguar is tearing open your belly with its claws! Do you say that your fear is real and the jaguar is not?”

“Man, what foolishness!”—rum was taking over from politeness—“I should feel no more fear.”

He may be right. Fear is over, leaving only submission to death.

“Then anything a man is afraid of is a duende?”

“If you came at me with a knife, I should be afraid of you. But you are not a duende.”

So there! Logic demands that the moment he fears me I
am
a duende. However, he won't have it. The fact is that he makes no clear distinction between imagined fear and fear of material danger. Thus, when it comes to the mustelid/duende which produces what I call “superstitious” fear, it would take a theologian to define the difference between us.

The power of myth is vaster than I ever imagined. The llaneros will not have it that Jacinto was killed by an animal because they won't admit there could be an animal which they do not know. For Joaquín we are all spirits and the physical shape of the fiend is unimportant. In maintaining that all is illusion he has a better case than the fundamentalist llaneros who are emotionally bound to the old facts and refuse to accept new ones. To fill up the measure of human oddities I can add the Dominican who would at once and sanely accept the mustelids but shuddered at Pedro's corpse.

Now that I am here in silence, except for the patter of the rain and the bird song of Teresa and Chucha in the kitchen, I begin to suspect that I too may be making myths for myself. I could be wrong in assuming that it was a fang, not a knife, which ripped open Jacinto's throat. Those fanatics of the National Liberation Army do not shrink from terrorism. They could have found Jacinto sleeping soundly in the ceiba grove and decided that a further lesson would be good for Santa Eulalia. My suggestion that they did not spend the night in the trees but rode straight off over the llano is, after all, mere guesswork.

I must go and see for myself.

[
May 17, Tuesday
]

Today I took Pichón down the east side of the creek. The turbulent yellow river was impassable all the way. I rode Pichón into it at several likely points and we were both very glad to turn tail as soon as he was up to the cinch. Neither man nor beast could have swum across, though it was narrower than it had been at the time of the flood. Acres of mud, smooth and desolate as a sandbank at low tide, stretched along the creek without even the flotsam and jetsam of a beach. There is so little on the llano which can be carried away except dead grass and topsoil.

Where the creek entered the Guaviare jungle the water had torn down everything in its way, piling up trunks and debris, roaring over and round the obstruction, clearing an avenue through the forest like a troop of bulldozers in line abreast. No accidental bridge or causeway could ever have existed for a minute.

This side of the creek was very different from the dark but open forest to the west through which the mustelids had chased Tesoro. There were only a few outlying trees and groves before one came right up against the green wall. In the shattered woodland the areas of mud showed no tracks but those of birds, proving that the llaneros were right and that the belt between Santa Eulalia and the creek was empty of ground life.

I thought of following the forest edge eastwards to inspect the scene of Jacinto's death, but decided against it. I did not know the country and might spend hours looking for the ceiba grove without any certainty that I had found the right one even if it fitted the description of Alvar and Vicente. I suspect also that my worrying sense of guilt had a subconscious effect. I did not want to know. So I turned for home following the highest mark of the flood.

I had been riding along the tracks for quarter of a mile before I noticed and at once recognized them. All five claws clearly imprinted, which excluded felines. No web, which ruled out otter. There could be no doubt. After I wounded it, the mustelid crossed the creek. My failure to follow up cost Jacinto his life.

I dismounted and tethered Pichón to a stranded tree in a good open position where I could keep him covered if he began to show signs of alarm. Then I explored on foot to see if the spoor—a fine, professional word, that!—could be persuaded to tell any kind of story. My first impression was that the mustelid had come out of the forest to drink. But why take to the open llano when there were plenty of pools and rivulets in cover?

It had followed the edge of the flood plain and three times turned to the water. The level of the creek was now lower, proving that the tracks were made yesterday night or the night before. Twice the animal had chosen spits of land curving out into the torrent, and there was some evidence that it had cautiously paddled. It had then bounded off into the llano where I quickly lost the spoor. Both its gaits, the walk and the high canter, were distinguishable.

Its movements appeared aimless. Repeated drinking was unlikely, so what about a search for carrion brought down by the flood? All the evidence of diet suggested that it touched nothing which was not freshly killed, and only the blood and delicacies of that. Could it have been trying to panic cattle knee-deep in the water? There were no hoof-marks and indeed no sign that cattle had been in this corner for months. The drought had devastated the grazing on this side of the creek as on the other.

I started home, having made no useful deductions at all. We had jogtrotted along in the steaming, sleepy heat when we came to a loop of the creek. On my way down I had cut straight across the base, but I now decided to follow the course of the stream. At the height of the flood the loop had been wiped out, leaving a layer of silt, now dried to powder, which showed indefinite tracks. They were worth following, for the peninsula pointing westwards resembled the configuration of the two spits which the mustelid had visited.

The spoor was there—straight down to the edge of the water and straight back again. I still could not find the answer to what the mustelid was doing out on the open llano when even at night it never moved far from the trees. So it seemed worthwhile to return to the forest and ride slowly along the edge to see if the damp ground in the shade showed anything of interest. This was a productive move. I discovered a clear set of prints where the beast had reentered the trees. It had chosen the same way in that I would myself—a thicket of low, soft growth through which a body could push fairly easily.

Since the mustelid had done what I would do on this occasion, I thought the principle might hold. Suppose I wanted to return to the forest from the creek and did not feel like going back over the desolate mud where there was no hope of bagging even a duck, what would I do? Obviously I would choose a line through high grass which would hide my movements. But there was none. The only cover I could find was a depression about deep enough to keep me off the skyline if I crawled. I rode back to have a look at it. The bottom was boggy, and the prints were there, even the mark of a tail touching the ground. After this triumph of teach-yourself-tracking I was able to pick up occasional paw marks between depression and peninsula.

The vast clouds which had been towering in the south broke open. Once the lightning had moved away, the downpour was refreshing—a cold shower after a Turkish bath. It allowed my brain to short-cut a little and to appreciate that there were too many tracks. If there had been fewer, I could make a neater story. But nature—to the ignorant—is never neat.

The truth, or part of the truth, seems to be this. After I wounded it, the mustelid crossed the creek, which was then a chain of disconnected pools, and lay up in the Guaviare forest. It started to wander east, possibly attracted by the presence of men and horses. After killing Jacinto and finding no other prey it turned back to the familiar territory of the ridge and the unfailing supply of deer and peccary. But it could not get there. The sudden spate had cut it off from home. Those movements down to the water were exploratory. It was looking for a crossing, a route to the west.