“Smuggling too. That’s when you take unbranded cattle that wander onto your
hato
. She believed in the ‘right of the noose.’ It was—it still is—a great roundup game out here. And she was good at it. Maybe the best.”
“Tell me about those roundups.”
He paused, remembering his younger days, perhaps, when a horse—usually without a saddle and ridden barefoot—meant freedom and the open plain for days on end.
“They are bloody days. You can lose horses—plenty of them. Those steers are wild. We didn’t use them for meat or milk much in the old days—only the tames ones. It was the hides that counted. Most of them are still out there, still unbranded. There aren’t many fences. What is on your property is yours. But they don’t want to belong to anybody. They like things the way they were—free and open.”
“So how do you round them up?”
He laughed and lifted his head. I could see his bright eyes flash under his straw hat.
“The trick is to get the bulls away from the herds. If they keep with the cows they lead them all into the
matas
and we lose them. So we have to get them—one by one—get him to charge you, lasso him—maybe even castrate him if there is time and then get the boys circling the herd to calm them all down. Sometimes we get some tame ones coming in from the next ranch—something about a stampede that just draws them in. So we end up with a few with other brands on them. We can fix that. We all do it.”
“Is it dangerous?”
He laughed again. “You don’t have time to worry about that with the noise. The steers are scared—and mad. They want to be back on the prairie—the bulls are mad because they’ve lost control; the cows are mad because they’ve lost their calves; there are horns and ribs crashing and horses getting bloodied up. And the men yelling—and you never know if the herd will break out again—someone not where he should be—a few seconds and they’re out of the circle and all across the plain. Then I get mad too!”
“Bet it makes you wish the rains would come.”
He paused, letting the memories subside and chuckling to himself. Finally he began again.
“The rains.” He was still chuckling. “Well—there’s no roundups deep in the rains, but at the beginning there’s the big one. All the ranchers get together and pick their best cowboys—their
centaurs—
and work each ranch rounding up for branding in the corrals. We have the
desmontrencaje
to separate the cows from the yearlings, brand them, notch their ears with the mark of the
hato
, and keep a tally on strips of leather cut with the point of a knife. Just like the old Spanish settlers. Nothing much has changed since their days. After that it’s quiet for a while. The Barinas wind brings the big storms and the lakes start to form. Then we get all the old songs—guitars,
cuatros
[ukuleles], harps, calabash rattles, the corridos—we make up verses to tunes we know, dance the
joropo
to criollo music, we roast the veal over the fire, sprinkle on the
aji de leche
, cook the bananas and yuccas—and blow cigar smoke at the mosquitoes. We called this the time of ‘guid, cup and hammock.’ Lazy days. You can’t go anywhere. Most of the tracks are gone under the lakes. Sometimes we organize a
toros coleados—
a crazy rodeo where the
llaneros
compete to throw bulls by their tails. Very crazy! But most of the time we just do nothing.”
“Don’t you get restless?”
“Restless? Maybe. But it is the way it is. It’s all we know. Things are set that way. Everything works with the seasons. After the first rains the herons and egrets return—all the
matas
and waters are covered with white birds. Way back—years ago—we called it the ‘time of the feathers’ when the molting began. Like snow. The lakes and the
matas
were covered in feathers. We’d go out in the canoes—all of us—singing like madmen—and collect them, bundle them up, and sell them to the fancy merchants in San Fernando way down the river. They called that city ‘the feather capital of the world’—people there got rich using our feathers—they even built a palace by the river, like something from Venice. And here we were fighting the alligators, the piranhas—and the malaria. That was the bad part. Malaria. You began to shiver, then you’d turn white, then green. Soon the crosses appeared on the higher ground. We lost many men that way. There was no cure in those days. Lots of praying, plenty of magic potions from the
brujos
, dancing the
joropo
to drive out the fever—but no cure.”
“The plainsmen—the
llaneros—
they were tough men?”
“Yes, tough—and they still are tough. And suspicious, superstitious, rough with women, rough even with friends. There is a saying: ‘A plainsman will be a plainsman for five generations.’ It’s true. It gets in the blood—the spirit of this plain.”
“It still seems a hard life.”
“Of course it’s hard. But the
llanero
knows nothing else. To him it is just the way life is. The seasons as the pendulum—a great pendulum—backwards and forwards across the plain, life-death, life-death, from flood to the fires of the drought, from fires to flood.” He stretched out his arms and shrugged. “It’s all they know. For a long time it was all I knew.”
The next day, Hugo’s son, Francisco, suggested some piranha fishing on the Arauca River, a few miles from the lodge.
He was a tall man in his early thirties with the face of a boy and a quick humor. Educated at Cornell and the University of Texas, he spoke clear English.
“Can you eat piranhas?” I asked.
“Of course, if they don’t eat you first,” said Francisco. “They call them
caribes—
flesh-eaters. Another name for them is ‘donkey castrators’! Donkeys keep away from the rivers. Not much meat on piranhas, though—they’re lean so they can swim fast—but what you get is good. Want to try?”
I’m a worse fisherman than I am a hunter. I don’t get much pleasure out of hooking and shooting things. I’d rather take photographs, or just watch. The last time I’d fished for food was years back, way up on the California coast near Big Sur. Someone had told me that around sunset I’d catch all the sunfish I could eat in the sloppy surf. Bait wasn’t necessary, they said. Just a good polished hook. Sure, I thought. Another fisherman’s tale. But I tried it—just a bit of nylon line and a bright hook—and voila! Sunfish after sunfish came flapping in eagerly trying to devour the metal. After catching eight in as many minutes I gave up. It was too easy. Didn’t seem fair somehow. I cooked them and ate as many as I could to justify the slaughter. But my heart—and my stomach—weren’t convinced. It was not a memorable meal.
So—somewhat reluctantly—I went to fish for piranha.
At the place we launched the canoe the Arauca River was about a quarter mile wide. Thick and silty, it eddied like melted coffee ice cream around fallen trees in the shallows. The banks were mud ramparts, hard and cracked, pierced by the roots of jungle scrub. It was very quiet. And very hot. The breeze from the motor-powered canoe did little to reduce the sear of the sun on my skin.
We didn’t talk much. It was too hot to think. Lines of cormorants and egrets, standing on the mud flats like expectant spectators, watched us pass.
The snout of an alligator nudged through the water, followed by a couple of bulbous eyes. Iguanas, sunbathing on the bank, scurried for cover as we eased by. Colonies of rare hoatzins (fat partridge-shaped birds with disheveled arrays of head feathers) went into paroxysms of raucous cawing if we came too close to their tree perches, and climbed higher into the branches using tiny claws on their wings. Vultures, hawks, and falcons skimmed the sky in slow art nouveau curls of flight; herons and storks stood rigid as reeds on the river’s edge, pretending to be invisible.
The river had a timeless feel to it, untouched, unmolested, flowing somnolently eastward to join the Apure and eventually the great Orinoco two hundred miles farther downstream.
I felt mesmerized by the heat and the drone of the engine as we moved on against the current. In gaps between the riotous flurry of trees and thick scrub along the top of the bank I caught glimpses of the plains again, shimmering empty infinities, beguiling, beckoning with promises of…what? Freedom? Release? I never quite pinned it down. Why this fascination with nothingness? Gallegos’s “immeasurable solitude,” and “the madness of languid desolation.” But at least I wasn’t alone in my madness. The
llaneros
knew it too and gave their lives to it, generation after generation.
“We’re here,” said Francisco.
He pointed to a scrub-shaded creek on the far side of the river.
“In the floods that creek leads right to the lodge. Good fishing all the way.”
We eased out of the swirl of the main stream into this fetid backwater. Francisco cut the engine and the heat doubled in intensity. “Now, piranhas!”
He became a flurry of activity, chopping bait, fixing the hooks to our lines, and scattering nuggets of advice like bird seed.
“They’re fast. When you feel the bite, jerk hard. Watch their teeth; they’ll take chunks out of your fingers. Hit them hard with this”—he showed me a thick wooden club—“very hard. And they still may not be dead. Sometimes they’ll bite even when they are dead. Be careful. Don’t let them flap around the boat. Put them in the bucket. They can leap high. Take your ear off….”
I wish I’d stayed back at the ranch.
But it was too late now. Francisco was showing me how to cast. First try and my hook stuck in the side of the canoe. He was patient. I sweated and learned. After three limp casts I began to get the feel of it.
At first nothing much happened.
“It can take time,” Francisco whispered. “But when they know there’s food they’ll be all around us.”
Still nothing.
And then, suddenly, the first bite. More of a violent grab, actually. I jerked my line and the hook shot out of the water like a bullet, almost hitting Francisco in the face. The bait was gone. A big chunk of chicken neck gobbled right off the hook, leaving nothing but a tiny remnant of wet skin.
He laughed softly. “You have to jerk much faster. They’re clever—and always hungry.”
Then it was his turn for a bite. I saw his line go taut. He pulled back instantly and the surface of the water broke. Something silver and orange flew across the surface of the creek, flailing and writhing, scattering spray. Then it vanished. Then it was back, this time closer to the canoe. A very angry little creature indeed, trying to bite itself off the line with two white rows of half-inch-long dagger-shaped teeth. Francisco carefully lowered the flailing creature onto the floor of the boat, where it continued to flap in paroxysms of rage. A quick club to its head and there was silence. He removed the hook cautiously, never taking his eyes off those teeth, and dropped the supposedly dead creature into the bucket. Only it wasn’t dead. With a massive show of determination it leapt clean out and tried to attack my sneakers.
“Watch out,” shouted Francisco, as he pounded its head fiercely again with the club. After that it didn’t move. But I didn’t trust it and eased farther down the boat away from the bucket.
Francisco laughed. “Wise move.”
Two minutes later it was my turn. A big one this time, eight inches from teeth to tail, angrier than the first and beautifully marked with highlights of sunset red on its sparkling silver-gold body. I wasn’t up to the clubbing, so I passed the flailing fish to Francisco, who quickly silenced it and added it to the bucket.
They were hungry, these piranha. Our catch accumulated quickly, but the bait supply dwindled rapidly as the lucky ones grabbed lunch and escaped before either of us was fast enough to jerk the line. Peering over the side of the boat I occasionally saw them streaking like skinny torpedoes through the shallows. Francisco watched them too.
“Last month a woman was lost in the river. It does not happen often. She must have cut herself, maybe grazed her foot on a sharp branch. They say she slipped and the piranhas attacked. Like sharks they go crazy when there’s blood in the water. Her husband was there on the bank. He heard her shout and before he could get to the river she was gone.”
“What happened?”
He shrugged. “They never found her.”
I felt nervous. “I wish you hadn’t told me that.”
“It’s best you know. This river is very dangerous. Many of the alligators have been killed by poachers—Indians—but there are a few left, the big, mean ones. And stingrays, electric eels—even anacondas. The old ones can grow to fifty feet.”
I looked long and hard at the river. It eased on past the creek, its smooth surface benignly placid in the hot silence. I remembered that Gallegos line—“The Llanos is at once lovely and fearful.” A fickle place, a place of violent and sudden death in the midst of sweeping beauty. Even under that blazing sun, cold shivers scampered up and down my spine.
I looked again at the river. There was movement now, out there in the middle, far beyond the swirls and eddies of the shallows. Something black, cutting the surface and then disappearing. More than one. Things with fins.
“Dolphins,” said Francisco. “Freshwater dolphins.”
“Dolphins too?”
“Oh, yes. And manatees. They play here. There are many. Sometimes you see the dolphins leap. Sometimes you just see a fin. They’re lazy today.”
A strange and wonderful place, this Llanos.
Francisco declared fifteen piranha and one rather weary catfish to be enough for dinner and suggested we make our way back. That was fine. Fishing still didn’t hold much fascination for me.
There was no need to start the engine. The current carried us downstream and the breeze was refreshing after the wet heat of the creek. The dolphins followed us for a ways playfully and then vanished.