La Ruta Antigua (The Old Route)
THE PARKING LOT at the rodeo grounds in Cochrane was full of vendors selling exactly the equipment we still needed. After two years in Alaska, I was about to attempt the old horse trail to Villa O’Higgins at last. My good friend Paul and his friend Harry had agreed to join me. Open tailgates displayed handmade bridles and leather halters. Vendors laid out hobbles and spurs on colorful blankets. This rodeo happens once a year. Fortunately for us, today was the day.
A set of long narrow wooden stairs led to the bleachers above the rodeo arena. Two men on well-groomed horses waited on the sidelines. Their horses, both dark red colorados, sported roached manes, squared-off tails, deep-seated ornate saddles, and showy handwoven bridles. The men wore matching red, green, and blue striped huaso style ponchos—shorter and more brilliantly colored than those used to keep the weather off while working on the campo. The woolen beret worn on the trail was replaced by a wide brimmed straw hat. Fancy silver spurs adorned knee-high leather boots. Many teams looked to be father-son combinations. There were decades of tradition here I did not understand.
The bleachers around the arena were filled with ranchers from Cochrane and the neighboring campos. Surely someone here would have a couple of horses for sale.
Once the gate to the main arena swung open, the game was on. Horses raced to catch and pin abull calf. Facing the solid wooden fence, horses moved sideways, crossing their front legs like Greek dancers. They pushed the cow along the outside wall until they trapped it, sometimes brutally, against a padded section of the arena. “Punta buena,” the announcer called when a clean stop and turn-around were made. “Punta mala,” he said, when the job was botched. Gorgeous young women in brightly colored skirts with acres of petticoats sat sidesaddle behind the winners as they paraded around the ring.
As the crowd thinned, Harry, Paul, and I stood outside the arena, holding a sign that declared our mission: “Compra caballos mansos” (buying tame horses). Paul and Harry seemed unbothered by the stares and snickers of people passing by, but I was embarrassed to be the center of attention. No one else was making a spectacle of themselves.
Having the most Spanish, I had to do the talking, but speaking Spanish all day was still exhausting for me. At the end of the day I was mentally and emotionally beat. I had left Alaska almost a month earlier, with the promise that I would have three horses ready to go by the first of December. We were well beyond that date, and I was in possession of only one horse. The weight of my own unmet expectations hung heavy on my shoulders as I dragged myself uphill to Samuel’s cabin. We were still short two horses, but we had the next best thing, a list of people who had horses for sale.
WHEN I HAD arrived in Cochrane alone to begin organizing the trip, Sam had met me on his doorstep with great news. “A guy named Oscar who lives up the Colonia will be bringing three horses into town for you to buy.”
After working so hard to find one horse two years ago, I couldn’t believe how easily everything was falling into place.
“People call the guy el gringo pobre. He is Swiss, but he has lived here long enough to be poor like everyone else.” Sam laughed. “He is coming with your horses on November thirtieth.”
My mind ran rapid fire into the future. We were supposed to be outfitted and ready to go on December first, which gave me exactly one day’s leeway for the multitude of things that can go wrong in Patagonia.
My friend Paul was a university professor as well as my next door neighbor in Alaska. He, like most gringos on vacation, had a solid return date. Every day we were late getting out of town would have to be made up on the trail.
In less than a decade HF radios installed at every campo on the Colonia would revolutionize communication, but for now, riding two days to talk with someone was the only way to communicate.
“What if I go to Oscar’s campo on the Colonia and buy the horses there?” I asked.
“Why not just wait till Oscar comes to town?” Sam replied.
Sam had lived here longer than me. He couldn’t comprehend my haste, but he agreed that there were a plethora of problems that could arrive at the last moment.
“You will need horses to get up there,” Sam reminded me.
“I can borrow Nimbus and another horse from Washington for the trip,” I said.
“I would love to go with you, but I can’t to go up river right now. Why don’t you invite Don Leonitis Ascencio. He would love to get out in the country,” Sam recommended.
I was beginning to understand that the prefix Don applied to all respected elders. Don Leonitis Ascencio was sixty-two years old. Before the roads came, he had worked as a tropero,traveling withhuge herds of cattle cross country on horseback, sometimes for months. When the roads arrived, it became both illegal and impractical to move livestock overland. Ranchers needed to come up with the cash for a truck ride for their animals, and Don Leonitis needed a new job. These days he worked in construction.
“He knows where Oscar lives and besides, he’s a good friend,” Sam said.
Early Saturday morning Don Leonitis Ascencio and I took off. We were traveling with two of Washington’s horses, but Nimbus was not one of them.
I had arrived at Washington’s campo to get Nimbus, and he had informed me that she was “away . . . at the neighbor’s.”
“Where exactly was she?” I wanted to know.
“Oh, tan lejos,” (very far ) he replied.
I suspected he had sold my mare, but I had no way to prove it. A hurt and angry feeling welled up inside me. By leaving my horse with him, I assumed that I had secured her an easy, carefree life. Had Washington sold her shortly after I left town? My anger at Washington for not honoring his promise to keep my horse was concealing my own shame. I had abandoned my horse to the care of others, something I would continue to do for years. Apparently, the easy life I had promised Nimbus at the end of our journey didn’t exist for Chilean horses. At some level I knew that in Chile, a horse that was eating and not working would not be welcome for long.
With far more questions than answers in my head, Don Leonitis Ascencio and I crossed the Baker River on the same balsa I had used two years earlier and headed up the Rio Colonia. Three symmetrical, cone-shaped peaks dominated the end of the valley. Slowly, they came into detail as the miles disappeared behind us and the sun sank low in the sky. As the glaciers at the end of the valley got incrementally closer, I could plainly see their medial and lateral moraines snaking toward the valley floor.
Sam had been right. It was a privilege to travel with Don Leonitis. Eight hours into the day, we had already covered more miles than I had accomplished in several days at the beginning of my first trip. According to Don Leonitis, Oscar’s campo was still “tan lejos,” but he seemed unconcerned, happy to be out riding.
My knees were sore and my butt hurt. Exhausted, I suggested we camp and look for Oscar the next morning. Don Leonitis would not hear of it. We would ride until we found an occupied farm where people would invite us in.
Finally we came to Oscar’s campo. The place was deserted.
“No te preocupes,” Don Leonitis told me not to worry myself. “There will be people at the next campo.”
The glaciated mountains that we had been riding toward all day faded from pink, to maroon, and into darkness.
When I had resigned myself to riding all night, a well-lit house appeared. The residents of the house came out and helped us unsaddle. Hardly a word was said until we had deposited our gear in the barn and settled into the house for maté.
“Oscar, is over on the Rio Nef,” one of the men said.
“For how long?” I asked.
“About a week,” he replied
I did some quick calculations. There was no way Oscar could make it to Cochrane by the thirtieth. I was bitterly disappointed, but apparently the night was young. Visitors didn’t come often, and there was wine to drink and meat to eat.
Eventually the conversation drifted to the reason for our journey. The owner of the campo said he might have a horse for sale. But first we would have an asado.
We moved to the barn to build a fire for cooking. The flames cast a surreal light on the ceiling. The men eating, the lambgrease dripping from their fingers, and the roosters marching overhead on the trusses blended with a Patagonia downpour thundering on the metal roof of the barn. My mind was as tired as my body, and I understood little of the conversation. But I was strangely happy in this dry place, listening to the men laughing and joking around the fire. I laid my head down on a saddle, curled up with the cat, and fell into a deep sleep in the hay.
The next morning swimming upward though the thick, warm mud of my dreams, I could hear men saddling horses. I dragged myself into consciousness and bolted outside to see my horse saddled and waiting.
Don Leonitis had over twenty years on me. Yesterday, after not being on a horse for years, he had ridden me into the ground. Last night he stayed up laughing and drinking until the first rays of dawn peaked over the horizon, and this morning he had woken up and saddled my horse while I slept. Unaccustomed to being the slow weak one on an expedition, I was mortified.
Four of us rode a mile or so to a corral where Don Leonitis and I were told to wait. The rain was over, and we sat happily for hours in the sweet morning sun.
Eventually, a big, beautiful, dun-colored gelding was driven into the corral. This horse was for sale? He was a gateaba, a blonde horse with a dark mane and tail. A dark stripe ran down the center of his back. Faint zebra-like stripes on his lower legs reminded me of the Przewalski, the last remaining species of wild equine in Mongolia.
Don Leonitis pronounced the big gateaba good without a second look, but I wanted to ride this horse if I was going to buy him. There wasn’t an extra saddle, so I hopped on him bareback and trotted him around the corral. He was huge by Chilean standards. The corners of the corral came up quickly. His trot was like riding a tractor, and I bounced around on my seat much to the amusement of the men. But he was incredibly powerful. I imagined crossing belly deep rivers and trudging through miles of sticky mud with this boy. This horse was exactly the kind of big, strong horse I needed for the trip to O’Higgins. A couple hundred dollars in pesos changed hands, and he was mine!
It was already afternoon. We had to return the same distance we had ridden all day yesterday and last night. Don Leonitis knew what I did not, that the last balsa to cross the river today would run at six p.m. He needed to be at his construction job the following morning at eight.
We took off for Cochrane, with Don Leonitis’s horse walking so fast I had to trot to keep up. He was towing our new additionbehind him on a rope.Suddenly, he stopped abruptly in the trail, unsaddled Washington’s horse, and tossed the saddle on our recent purchase.
I threw him a quizzical look.
“I want to ride the better horse,” he said.
A couple miles short of the balsa Don Leonitis reached into his back pocket. For the first time all trip, deep creases crossed his face. His wallet was missing.
“I got off the horse at that last gate,” he said. “Maybe it fell out there.”
Don Leonitis looked crestfallen. “It’s too far back. If I miss work tomorrow morning I could lose my job,” he explained.
A job was not an easy thing to find in Cochrane. Replacing his identification cards could take months and potentially require multiple trips to Coyhaique.
“You head for the balsa. I will ride back and find your wallet,” I said.
To my amazement he accepted my offer.
Urging Washington’s reluctant gelding into a trot in a direction he didn’t want to go was a project, but I managed to convince him to do what I wanted. At the gate I swung out of the saddle and plowed my boots through the tall grass. There beside the fence post was the wallet. I grabbed it and tore off for the balsa at a full gallop, letting the red horse run full out for home. I felt like a knight rescuing the village, as I dashed down the last hill to the river. Wallet in hand I boarded the ferry right behind Don Leonitis.
A few miles from town, I asked him if he had a name for my new horse.
“Why don’t you call him Tamango?”
Cerro Tamango was the mountain that Sam’s cabin was perched on. Tamangos were also knee-high, calf-skin boots worn by the pioneers for walking in the snow. We would be traveling in snow soon enough. Tamango it was.
When I got back I proudly showed Sam my new horse. He was not nearly as excited about my purchase as I was.
“You cannot buy horses before Oscar gets here,” Sam explained to me emphatically. “Oscar will be here on the thirtieth.”
I had my doubts, but I was Sam’s guest. He had set me and my horse up with a little cabin on a piece of land he owned outside of town. I couldn’t go against his wishes. I did my best to let go of my gringa impatience. As I did, I fell into the local rhythm of asados and fiestas. The days slipped by almost unnoticed.
On November thirtieth, Paul and Harry arrived. Oscar did not. It was time to take action. Fortunately the rodeo was in town.
THE DAY AFTER the rodeo, I started following leads. One turned out to be an unbroken two year old. Another lived out past San Lorenzo, which meant we would need to complete nearly a third of our trip in order to get a look at it. An older woman desperately wanted to sell me her horse. She lived thirty kilometers in the wrong direction. Not knowing if her horse might still be our best option, I was indecisive and indirect with her. I hated doing business with people in this manner, but the ticking of time made me feel pressured.
“Maybe we can get there,” I told her.
“Young lady, will you come tomorrow or not?” she insisted.
It felt like being reprimanded by my own grandmother. The word mal creado popped into my mind. People used the term “badly raised” for those who do not have simple basic manners. I did not want to be one of them.
“No, I do not think we can make it to your farm tomorrow. I am sorry,” I told her.
Our best option for a horse turned out to be our next door neighbor, Richardo Fernandez. He would meet me at noon. About three in the afternoon, just as I was giving up, I saw a boy on a bicycle riding up the hill towing a dang nice looking little black horse.
Only five years old, the gelding was a bit edgy and lacked the confidence Tamango had, but he had an energy I liked, and his trot was the smoothest I had ever felt. Oh, I thought, if I lived here and had a campo this would be the horse for me. But would this small horse be tough enough for the trail ahead? Was he too young and flighty?
Chilean horses are strong, I told myself, and most of them are no bigger than this one. He would have Tamango to follow and learn from. I wanted this boy!
That night I sat in peace on the front step of the little puesto on Sam’s land and watched my horses. Tamango stood on a huge rock silhouetted against the evening sky, looking every bit the stallion he still was at heart. The little black horse grazed tranquilly at the base of the hill, living in a moment of green grass and comfort, unconcerned about what lay ahead. The only disturbing thing about the evening was that Harry seemed more concerned with the horse we did not have than the ones we did.
For a long time our new purchase would remain, “the little black horse,” but eventually he became “Chucao,” after one of my favorite Patagonian forest birds. I liked the sound his full name, chucao tapaculo, made when it rolled off my tongue. And the bird’s mannerisms matched our little black horse’s energy and curiosity.
The next day, we used the divide-and-conquer technique. In the morning, we each took off in a different direction with a list of things to do. The longer we stayed in town the more stuff we needed to buy. It felt like I was puking money.
Late that night we all converged at Sam’s puesto. Miles from town and exhausted, I found out we had made plans to check out two horses miles apart at the same time the following day. One of us needed to get out of bed and walk back to town to deliver a message, or someone was going to get stood up in the morning. No one did.
Again, I was doing business with people in a way that I didn’t feel comfortable with. Paul and Harry would leave the country after this trip. Months later, it would be me who would meet the sweet woman whose husband we had stood up that morning. It would be me who apologized to the pavement, unable to look her in the eye.
Mostly I was frustrated at myself. I remembered how desperately I had wanted to have a partner on my first trip, now everything felt all wrong. Paul was one of my best friends. We had a long history and had been through other trying times together. Harry and I had not.
“We are not on the trail yet. Things will get better once we are out of town,” Paul said, trying to sooth my anxiety.
My lesson, which Chile patiently teaches me over and over again, is to accept the way things are. I was too focused on getting us on the trail. There were many things to enjoy here and now. Buying horses was part of the journey. I needed to mellow out.
Fredrico Peede owned one of the largest spreads in the valley. The next morning we arrived in his truck to the front door of a large ranch style house. Branding irons hung proudly over the door. Except for the towering glaciated peaks surrounding us, the place could have been in Montana. Indeed, Fredrico had gotten his start in ranching in Montana. Like many young men, he had worked in the States for several years, earning enough money to start his own homestead. He had done well.
Fredrico excused himself, saddled a pretty dappled white gelding, and took off with one of the hired men to find the horses. I wanted to be invited to ride out with the men, but, of course, Paul and I were left to relax in the sun.
A rusted plow, meant to be drawn by horse or oxen, lay in the grass beside the barn. The bunkhouse, a long line of single rooms, each one with a wooden door, sat empty this time of year. Even Fredrico’s wife and children were living in town. I imagined the place was quite different at sheep shearing time.
Eventually, I fell asleep beneath the drooping branches of a weeping willow tree to the whisper of the ever-present Patagonian wind. I woke to the sound of thundering hooves. Dust billowed up as a hundred or more head of horses poured like a continuous wave down the hill into the corral. Duns and blacks, gateabas and tobianos, zainos, alazáns and colorados circled inside the corral in nervous excitement.
Of all these horses, two were for sale. The first was an old broken-down black mare. She was swaybacked and had the most recent of her probably numerous offspring still in tow. I was sorely disappointed.
The second was a colorado mala cara: Colorado for his rusty reddish color and male cara, or “bad face,” for the broad white stripe that ran down his face. Tall and thin, but not skinny, this gelding had lots of spirit.
“He hasn’t been ridden in a couple years,” Fredrico warned me.
I ran my hands down his strong neck and chest to his front leg and grabbed his fetlock. I picked up his foot. His front feet were flat. He hardly had an indentation between the hard cask of his hoof and the soft, calloused meat of the frog. I didn’t have the experience to know how much of a problem his feet would be or how much shoes would help, but I knew his feet weren’t great.
Fredrico saddled him up for me, and I got on. I loosened the reins and asked him to go. He took off like a racehorse, ripping across the pasture like he hadn’t run in years. I had never moved that fast on a horse in my life. The colorado showed no interest in stopping. I was both scared and thrilled.
“No problema.” Fredrico assured me he would mellow out within a day or two on the trail.
I wanted to believe him, but I didn’t want to buy a horse I couldn’t handle.
Next, Paul got on him. Paul never loosened the reins. He kept him at a nice quiet walk, never letting him break into even a trot. The lanky gelding listened well, and I learned an important lesson: If you don’t want this horse to go, don’t ask him!
I asked the horse’s name. The hired hand hesitated a second as if to consider if the question was serious and then said, “Arlequin,” which I would miss-pronounce for the rest of his life as “Arraquien.” Years later I would learn that his namemeant “Joker.” Was he named on the spot because of his flat feet, and a joke that was meant to be on me? Or had these men actually known his personality from a herd of a hundred?
That afternoon I rode back to town, not only with Fredrico’s horse but with his saddle and bridle, as well.
“You can pay me in town tomorrow,” he said, trusting and unconcerned.
That night, three fine strong horses grazed in front of the puesto. Surprisingly confident about what we were about to do, I was content to the core. By now everyone in town knew we were preparing to take the old trail to O’Higgins. Unlike two years earlier, not one person had approached me on the street to tell me I was crazy. Traveling with two male companions seemed to be doing the trick. Never mind that I was clearly the expedition leader.
On a chilly December morning, we lined up outside Sam’s house wearing nearly everything we owned. Sam took the obligatory leaving-town photo, and we were on our way. Harry rode Arraquien.I rode Chucao. Tamango, being towed along with our gear, was the pilchero of the day. Paul was walking as he would most of the expedition.
As the sun grew stronger, it warmed our bodies, and we fell into a rhythm. Ten kilometers into the trip we were congratulating ourselves on actually getting out of town, when a man carrying a fence post rounded the corner. Arraquien startled at the strange apparition of a man, with a giant, oscillating log on his shoulder, and leapt into the bushes, dragging Tamango with him. Tamango panicked and bucked. Arraquien joined him in his hysteria. At the end of our first rodeo, Harry was lying in the road, Tamango was running free, Arraquien stood forlornly with his saddle hanging from his belly, and the man with the fence post had stopped dead in his tracks with his mouth wide open. Oh, the story he will have for his wife tonight, I thought.
Harry jumped up, fortunately unhurt. We caught Tamango and calmed him down, and tried to right the saddle on Arraquien. The mandil, the thick felt pad that fit under the saddle, was nowhere to be found. The man with the fence post stood watching the show, with the post still on his shoulder, as we scrambled around looking in the bushes beside the road.
“Could the pad have come off before the rodeo?” I asked tentatively, looking down the long straight section of road behind us. Surely, that was impossible. Harry would have noticed if he was riding a horse without a pad.
Then again, I could remember galloping wildly across the steppe and looking down to find my saddle pad had slipped nearly off my horse’s butt behind me.
“Maybe you didn’t put it on this morning?” Harry told me.
I did not saddle that horse without a pad, that much I knew. The pad was behind us.
I took off down the road at a trot on Chucao. Still spunky at the beginning of the trip, he had a smooth easy trot, which was a joy to ride. I felt I shouldn’t have favorites among the horses, but already I did.
A rental car coming the other way slowed down. The father of a vacationing family from Valdivia leaned out the window and asked with a smirk, “Are you looking for something?”
I could see Arraquien’s mandil in the back seat.
“We picked up your pad six kilometers ago,” they said in disbelief.
To my complete mortification, they insisted on pictures of Chucao and me with the lost pad. No doubt, the story of the stupid gringa who lost her stuff on the road lives on in family journals in Valdivia.
We passed the place where two years earlier the bus had stopped at the end of the road. That road now snaked off into the distance. At exactly where I had watched three dogs get swept downstream as our horses crossed the river belly-deep, a new swinging bridge spanned the Rio Tranquilo. From there the road headed toward San Lorenzo. Whether he wanted it or not, there would soon be a road to Luis Soto’s campo.
An indistinct looking path took off to the south. Could this be the route to O’Higgins? It fit the description people had given us, but it looked intimidatingly inconsequential.
We headed up the steep, narrow trail. At the next valley, we dropped down as steeply as we had climbed. The Rio Pedregroso flowed in front of us. We were on our way to O’Higgins at last.
We found a slow, wide spot to cross the Pedregroso and pulled off our first river crossing without a hitch. After our rodeo, our first day had been blessedly uneventful. Living with three horses, I soon learned to appreciate any day without major drama.
The next day, we got to where the Calluqueo Glacier was clearly shown on the map. The glacier had retreated miles up the valley, leaving a rocky scar and a tremendous milky blue lake at its base. A distinct trim line marked the level where once grinding, pulverizing ice had filled the valley. Far above the destruction, a mature Lenga forest thrived. The occasional tree, undercut by erosion, toppled back into the ice age below.
Our maps were only twenty-five years old. Most of the world’s glaciers are receding but the Ventisquero Calluqueowas diminishing at a phenomenal rate.
Mount San Lorenzo, the peak that the Calluqueo Glacier tumbles from, sits directly in the gap between the Northern and Southern Ice Fields, the solitary vestige of glaciated terrain left from the once massive ice sheet.
A narrow path etched its way along the steep morainal scree between the forest above and the glacier lake below. Not even moss had time to grow between the rocks along the trail. Accustomed to a mountain landscape with rocky slopes at the top and timberline below, looking up from non-vegetated terrain at mature forest well above our heads gave me a bizarre topsy-turvy feeling. At the top of the valley, we eked past the toe of the prehistoric ice.
Blessed with a period of good weather, we started to fall into a rhythm of long breaks midday. The horses grazed peacefully with their saddles off. The three of us sprawled out in the sun below San Lorenzo, reading, writing, and napping. That mix of tranquility and wonder that I cherished from my first trip began to filter back in. I was slowing down, noticing more of the world around me. My senses, tapped down from living in the constant drum of civilization, were opening again to the smell of calafate in bloom, and the familiar, delightful sound of the chucao tapaculo trilling through the forest.
After lunch we entered yet another magical lenga forest. Far from the devastation caused by the unending need to stock the wood piles of Coyhaique, the forest this far south was ancient, uncut, and unburned. During the last glacier maximum, small isolated populations of lenga had survived in areas along the coast, where large mountains upstream had protected them from glaciation. The entire forest we rode through had been repopulated from those few survivors.
Being virtually the first travelers of the year, the trail was barely distinguishable. The horses constantly stepped over fallen logs. When the deadfall was too broad to step or jump over, we had to pick our way through the woods and re-find the trail. For decades, this winding mountain trail had been the only overland access to the town of O’Higgins and the government had paid pobladores who lived along the route to maintain it. Two years earlier a highway was built in the next valley, over thirty kilometers away, and money for trail maintenance had stopped. Each winter trees kept falling. How long would this trail remain open?
Bong, bong . . . bong, bong, bong, a powerful pounding broke the stillness. Carpintero gigante, a nearly twenty inch version of Woody the Woodpecker clung perpendicular to a dead coihue. His shiny blue-black body was accented by a fully crested ruby head. Another more distant drumming let me know his mate was nearby. Much harder to spot, she would be black, as well, but with only a tiny bit of red around her beak. I could not find her in the thick forest.
Just before evening, a man on foot appeared on the trail. We had not seen anyone for days and there didn’t appear to be any farms nearby. The man informed us that he had seen hoofprints on the pass.
“Someone crossed about six days ago with a tropé of several horses,” he said.
That was terrific news. Chilean maps of remote areas bordering Argentina are restricted by the government. Before our trip I had managed to cobble together a strange conglomeration of Argentinean and Chilean maps of various scales. Our Argentinean maps showed only a tiny slice of the Chilean side, leaving a big blank spot right where we wanted to go. It was early in the season to be traveling this route. There would be snow in the pass. Without tracks to follow, the way would surely be lost.
That evening we camped by a shallow, warm lake. Towing the pilchero while riding Chucao all day had left me mentally and physically beat. Dragging an extra horse through difficult terrain, I was once again on a steep learning curve. I needed to feed rope out when the pilchero was slowing down for a tricky spot and take it back in before it got tangled in his feet. At the same time, I had to keep the reins of my own horse active but not tight. Several times that day, I had gotten the rope stuck under Chucao’s tail. This particular indignity threw Chucao into old-fashioned rodeo style bucking fits. Thrashing wildly, he tried to rid himself of me, anything else on his back, and that horrible thing that was now tightly clinched under his tail. If I managed to successfully hold the reins, free the rope from his tail, and hold onto the saddle with my thighs, I felt like a wild west bronc buster. If not, I either ended up in the dirt or I let go of the lead rope and had to chase a loose horse all over the countryside.
Harry had a bad hip and couldn’t walk much. Paul, although he had been a Wyoming cowboy for a short period in a previous life, chose not to ride much because riding hurt his knee. I traveled by both walking and riding and the pilchero carried the gear. It all worked out, but we were dealing day and night with six distinct individuals.
I was ready for a break. December tenth was officially still spring, but the temperature was warm. The guys cooked dinner while I slipped around the corner and eased myself into the lake. The water was cool but delightful. The warm sun and soft breeze made my skin tingle. Drying myself on the muddy bank, in no hurry to put my clothes on, I let the moment elongate. Loneliness no longer haunted me and traveling with two male companions had at last sprung me free of the “estás sola”? stigma I had suffered on my first trip, but occasionally I noticed a flip side. I found myself less immersed in the place. I had other people to talk to, other subjects to occupy my mind. Beside this lake, with only the soft croaking of frogs and the sweet smell of new lenga leaves, I luxuriated, at peace with solitude.
The next day we packed up early and started climbing under a deep blue sky toward the highest pass of the trip. The winds were blessedly calm, the sun warm and welcoming. Crossing on any other kind of day would have been impossible.
The day went fairly well, until the trail, that had been surprisingly easy to follow, disappeared on the edge of a deep canyon. A small shrine stood at the end of the path. The Santuario de San Sebastián was a small house-shaped box containing a tiny altar decorated with plastic flowers and half burned candles. It was a miniature version of monuments found all along the Chilean road system in places where a traveler’s luck needed to be blessed. This one was surrounded by a circle of bleached horse skulls. A small wooden cross behind the santuario made me suspect that horses weren’t the only ones who had perished here.
I got off my horse gingerly and peered skeptically over the edge of the canyon.
“Don’t tell me this is the trail,” I said aloud.
Tracks descended a steep rocky scree field, crossed a narrow but turbulent torrent at the bottom of the ravine, and ascended an equally steep pile of rocks on the opposite side of the river.
“I think that is the trail,” Paul said.
We scouted around on foot but could not find another way. In the end, we resigned ourselves to what we knew all along. The trail did indeed go down that terrifying precipice and into that surging gray river.
I would later learn that this spot was known as la picota, a place to literally pick your way though. Beside the shrine, a pickax with a wooden handle lay ready for use. If the constant flow of scree had closed the route since the last passerby, the next traveler used the tool to rebuild the trail. Years later, that axe handle would break, closing la picota forever, or at least until someone contributed a new handle.
Before we took off, I lit a candle in the little shrine for Arraquien, Tamango, and Chucao. I have never been a religious person, but this seemed like an appropriate moment to pray.
The horses were hesitant. I trusted them. These weren’t spoiled pets. They were Patagonian trail horses, and if they didn’t want to go, they probably had a reason at least worth considering. I decided to descend on foot, leading Arraquien. I knew that wasn’t how the gauchos would do it, but I wasn’t feeling exactly gaucho at the moment. Arraquien sat far back on his haunches, his hooves skidding in the loose sandy soil, I jumped to his uphill side to protect myself. Fully concentrating on getting my own horse to the bottom, I tried hard not to think about that pile of horse skulls.
When Arraquien and I got to the bottom, sweet relief flooded my body, only to be followed by complete horror as I saw Harry ahead of me trying to kick Chucao into the river.
I wanted to scout it first. I wanted to try a bigger horse. I wanted to rest, to get over the adrenaline still pulsing through my veins. Fear was driving my emotions. In my mind’s eye, I saw Harry and Chucao washed downstream.
“Stop it now!” I screamed.
“Why!” Harry hollered. “People here would just ride across.”
“Yes, but some of them die,” I snapped.