W. H. Hudson

“ The house, when I approached it next morning, strongly reminded me of the old home of the family many leagues away, only it was if possible more lonely and dreary in appearance, without even an old half-dead acacia tree to make it less desolate. The plain all round as far as one could see was absolutely flat and treeless, the short grass burnt by the January sun to a yellowish-brown colour; while at the large watering-well, half a mile distant, the cattle were gathering in vast numbers, bellowing with thirst and raising clouds of dust in their struggles to get to the trough. ”

“ There was a field of alfalfa about half an acre in size, which flowered three times a year, and during the flowering time it drew the butterflies from all the surrounding plain with its luscious bean-like fragrance, until the field was full of them, red, black, yellow, and white butterflies, fluttering in flocks round every blue spike.
Canes, too, in a large patch or "brake" as we called it, grew at another spot; a graceful plant about twenty-five feet high, in appearance unlike the bamboo, as the long pointed leaves were of a glaucous blue-green colour. ”

“ Oh, what a delight it would be to get up there, above the nest, and look down into the great basin-like hollow lined with sheep's wool and see the eggs, bigger than turkey's eggs, all marbled with deep red, or creamy white splashed with blood-red! For I had seen carancho eggs brought in by a gaucho, and I was ambitious to take a clutch from a nest with my own hands. It was true I had been told by my mother that if I wanted wild birds' eggs I was never to take more than one from a nest, unless it was of some injurious species. ”

“ I was at home again, back in the plantation among my beloved birds, glad to escape from the noisy dusty city into the sweet green silences, with the great green plain glittering with the false water of the mirage spreading around our shady oasis, and the fact that war, which for the short period of my own little life and for many long years before I was born, had not visited our province, thanks to Rosas the Tyrant, the man of blood and iron, had now come to us did not make the sunshine less sweet and pleasant to behold. ”

“ In August the peach blossomed. The great old trees standing wide apart on their grassy carpet, barely touching each other with the tips of their widest branches, were like great mound-shaped clouds of exquisite rosy-pink blossoms. There was then nothing in the universe which could compare in loveliness to that spectacle. I was a worshipper of trees at this season, and I remember my shocked and indignant feeling when one day a flock of green paroquets came screaming down and alighted on one of the trees near me. This paroquet never bred in our plantation ”

“ That was my last sight of Cipriana; what her end was I never heard, nor what was done with the Paja Brava after the death of Don Evaristo, who was gathered to his fathers a year or so after my visit. I only know that the old place where as a child I first knew him, where his cattle and horses grazed and the stream where they were watered was alive with herons and spoonbills, black-necked swans, glossy ibises in clouds, and great blue ibises with resounding voices, is now possessed by aliens, who destroy all wild bird life and grow corn on the land for the markets of Europe. ”

“ Probably the most glorious moment of his life was when he rode to a race-meeting or cattle- marking or other gathering of the gaucho population of the district, when all eyes would be turned to him on his arrival. Dismounting, he would hobble his horse, tie the glittering reins to the back of the saddle, and leave him proudly champing his big native bit and tossing his decorated head, while the people gathered round to admire the strangely-coloured animal as if it had been a Pegasus just alighted from the skies to stand for a while exhibiting itself among the horses of the earth. ”

“ To the gaucho who lives half his day on his horse and loves his freedom as much as a wild bird, a thistle year was a hateful period of restraint. His small, low-roofed, mud house was then too like a cage to him, as the tall thistles hemmed it in and shut out the view on all sides. On his horse he was compelled to keep to the narrow cattle track and to draw in or draw up his legs to keep them from the long pricking spines. In those distant primitive days the gaucho if a poor man was usually shod with nothing but a pair of iron spurs. ”

“ To this day it gives me a thrill, or perhaps it would be safer to say the ghost of a vanished thrill, when I remember the relief it was in my case, albeit I was never so tied to a horse, so parasitical, as the gaucho, after one of these great thistle-levelling pampero winds. It was a rare pleasure to ride out and gallop my horse over wide brown stretches of level land, to hear his hard hoofs crushing the hollow desiccated stalks covering the earth in millions like the bones of a countless host of perished foes. ”

“ At this time of my boy-life most of the daylight hours were spent out of doors, as when not watching the birds in our plantation or asked to go and look at the flock grazing somewhere a mile or so from home, in the absence of the shepherd or his boy, I was always away somewhere on the plain with my small brother on egg-hunting or other expeditions. In the spring and summer we often visited the lagoons or marshes, the most fascinating places I knew on account of their abundant wild bird life. ”

“ At all events on the last day of my vain efforts to procure golden plover, a big, bearded gaucho, with hat stuck on the back of his head, rode forth from the house on a large horse, and was passing at a distance of about fifty yards when he all at once stopped, and turning came at a gallop to within a few feet of me and shouted in a loud voice: "Why do you come here, English boy, frightening and chasing away God's little birds? Don't you know that they do no harm to any one, and it is wrong to hurt them?" ”

“ Slaughtering a cow was grand sport for them, and the more active and dangerous the animal, the more prolonged the fight, the better they liked it; they were as joyfully excited as at a fight with knives or an ostrich hunt. To me it was an awful object-lesson, and held me fascinated with horror. For this was death! The crimson torrents of blood, the deep, human-like cries, made the beast appear like some huge, powerful man caught in a snare by small, weak, but cunning adversaries, who tortured him for their delight and mocked him in his agony. ”

“ To kill the creatures with bullets at a distance was no satisfaction to him: he must with his own hands drive the shaft into the quivering flesh—he must feel its quivering and see the blood gush up beneath his hand. One smiles at a vision of the gentle Richard Jefferies slaughtering wild cattle in the palaeolithic way, but that feeling and desire which he describes with such passion in his Story of My Heart, that survival of the past, is not uncommon in the hearts of hunters, and if we were ever to drop out of our civilization I fancy we should return rather joyfully to the primitive method. ”

“ Buenos Ayres is now the wealthiest, most populous, Europeanized city in South America: what it was like at that time these glimpses into a far past will serve to show. Coming as a small boy of an exceptionally impressionable mind, from that green plain where people lived the simple pastoral life, everything I saw in the city impressed me deeply, and the sights which impressed me the most are as vivid in my mind to-day as they ever were. ”

“ The picture that most often presents itself is of the cattle coming home in the evening; the green quiet plain extending away from the gate to the horizon; the western sky flushed with sunset hues, and the herd of four or five hundred cattle trotting homewards with loud lowings and bellowings, raising a great cloud of dust with their hoofs, while behind gallop the herdsmen urging them on with wild cries. ”

“ I had heard of death—I knew there was such a thing; I knew that all animals had to die, also that some men died. For how could any one, even a child in its sixth year, overlook such a fact, especially in the country of my birth—a land of battle, murder, and sudden death? I had not forgotten the young man tied to the post in the barn who had killed some one, and would perhaps, I had been told, be killed himself as a punishment. I knew, in fact, that there was good and evil in the world, good and bad men, and the bad men—murderers, thieves, and liars—would all have to die, just like animals ”

“ That little sweetness was enough to set us all digging the bulbs up with table knives, but even little children can value things for their beauty as well as taste. The macachina was like the wood-sorrel in shape, both flower and leaf, but the leaves were much smaller and grew close to the ground, as the plant flourished most where the grass was close- cropped by the sheep, forming a smooth turf like that of our chalk downs. ”

“ The flock we used to have about our plantation numbered many thousands, and you would see them like a cloud wheeling about in the air, then suddenly dropping and vanishing from sight in the grass, where they fed on small seeds and tender leaves and buds. On going to the spot they would rise with a loud humming sound of innumerable wings, and begin rushing and whirling about again, chasing each other in play and chirping, and presently all would drop to the ground again. ”

“ That such a feeling can survive in any man, or that there was ever a time since his infancy when he could have regarded this visible world as anything but what it actually is—the stage to which he has been summoned to play his brief but important part, with painted blue and green scenery for background—becomes incredible. Nevertheless, I know that in me, old as I am, this same primitive faculty which manifested itself in my early boyhood, still persists, and in those early years was so powerful that I am almost afraid to say how deeply I was moved by it. ”

“ She was of a yellowish parchment colour, the skin tight-drawn over the small bony aquiline features, and it would have seemed like the face of a corpse or mummy but for the deeply-sunken jet-black eyes burning with a troubled fire in their sockets. There was a tremor and strangely pathetic note in her thin high-pitched voice, as of a woman speaking with effort between half-suppressed sobs, or like the mournful cry of some wild bird of the marshes. ”

“ When I recall this event I am less astonished at my ignorance than at the intensity of the feeling I experienced, the terrible darkness it brought on so young a mind. The child's mind we think, and in fact know, is like that of the lower animals; or if higher than the animal mind, it is not so high as that of the simplest savage. He cannot concentrate his thought—he cannot think at all; his consciousness is in its dawn; he revels in colours, in odours, is thrilled by touch and taste and sound, and is like a well-nourished pup or kitten at play on a green turf in the sunshine. ”