And cried in that
strange sibilant language, rising to shrieks when a gale was blowing,
now gave out a larger volume of sound, more continuous, softer,
deeper, and like the wash of the sea on a wide shore.
The other trees would follow, and by and by all would be in full
foliage once more, and ready to receive their strange beautiful guests
from the tropical forests in the distant north.
The most striking of the newcomers was the small scarlet tyrant-bird,
which is about the size of our spotted flycatcher; all a shining
scarlet except the black wings and tail. This bird had a delicate
bell-like voice, but it was the scarlet colour shining amid the green
foliage which made me delight in it above all other birds. Yet the
humming-bird, which arrived at the same time, was wonderfully
beautiful too, especially when he flew close to your face and remained
suspended motionless on mist-like wings for a few moments, his
feathers looking and glittering like minute emerald scales.
Then came other tyrant-birds and the loved swallows - the house-
swallow, which resembles the English house-martin, the large purple
martin, the _Golodrina domestica_, and the brown tree-martin. Then,
too, came the yellow-billed cuckoo - the _kowe-kowe_ as it is called
from its cry. Year after year I listened for its deep mysterious call,
which sounded like _gow-gow-gow-gow-gow,_ in late September, even as
the small English boy listens for the call of _his_ cuckoo, in April;
and the human-like character of the sound, together with the
startlingly impressive way in which it was enunciated, always produced
the idea that it was something more than a mere bird call. Later, in
October when the weather was hot, I would hunt for the nest, a frail
platform made of a few sticks with four or five oval eggs like those
of the turtledove in size and of a pale green colour.
There were other summer visitors, but I must not speak of them as this
chapter contains too much on that subject. My feathered friends were
so much to me that I am constantly tempted to make this sketch of my
first years a book about birds and little else. There remains, too,
much more to say about the plantation, the trees and their effect on
my mind, also some adventures I met with, some with birds and others
with snakes, which will occupy two or three or more chapters later on.
CHAPTER V
ASPECTS OF THE PLAIN
Appearance of a green level land - Cardoon and giant thistles - Villages
of the Vizcacha, a large burrowing rodent - Groves and plantations seen
like islands on the wide level plains - Trees planted by the early
colonists - Decline of the colonists from an agricultural to a pastoral
people - Houses as part of the landscape - Flesh diet of the gauchos -
Summer change in the aspect of the plain - The water-like mirage - The
giant thistle and a "thistle year" - Fear of fires - An incident at a
fire - The _pampero_, or south-west wind, and the fall of the thistles
- Thistle-down and thistle-seed as food for animals - A great pampero
storm - Big hailstones - Damage caused by hail - Zango, an old horse,
killed - Zango and his master.
As a small boy of six but well able to ride bare-backed at a fast
gallop without falling off, I invite the reader, mounted too, albeit
on nothing but an imaginary animal, to follow me a league or so from
the gate to some spot where the land rises to a couple or three or
four feet above the surrounding level. There, sitting on our horses,
we shall command a wider horizon than even the tallest man would have
standing on his own legs, and in this way get a better idea of the
district in which ten of the most impressionable years of my life,
from five to fifteen, were spent.
We see all round us a flat land, its horizon a perfect ring of misty
blue colour where the crystal-blue dome of the sky rests on the level
green world. Green in late autumn, winter, and spring, or say from
April to November, but not all like a green lawn or field: there were
smooth areas where sheep had pastured, but the surface varied greatly
and was mostly more or less rough. In places the land as far as one
could see was covered with a dense growth of cardoon thistles, or wild
artichoke, of a bluish or grey-green colour, while in other places the
giant thistle flourished, a plant with big variegated green and white
leaves, and standing when in flower six to ten feet high.
There were other breaks and roughnesses on that flat green expanse
caused by the _vizcachas,_ a big rodent the size of a hare, a mighty
burrower in the earth. _Vizcachas_ swarmed in all that district where
they have now practically been exterminated, and lived in villages,
called _vizcacheras,_ composed of thirty or forty huge burrows - about
the size of half a dozen badgers' earths grouped together. The earth
thrown out of these diggings formed a mound, and being bare of
vegetation it appeared in the landscape as a clay-coloured spot on the
green surface. Sitting on a horse one could count a score to fifty or
sixty of these mounds or _vizcacheras_ on the surrounding plain.
On all this visible earth there were no fences, and no trees excepting
those which had been planted at the old estancia houses, and these
being far apart the groves and plantations looked like small islands
of trees, or mounds, blue in the distance, on the great plain or
pampa. They were mostly shade trees, the commonest being the Lombardy
poplar, which of all trees is the easiest one to grow in that land.
And these trees at the estancias or cattle-ranches were, at the time I
am writing about, almost invariably aged and in many instances in an
advanced state of decay.
