Stephen was thinking of these things as they walked across an accidented stretch of country when, rounding a tumble of rock, they heard the squealing neigh of a guanaco. They stopped short, and there on the left hand stood the guanaco they had heard, while still farther to the left a string of others fled at a great pace, vanishing down the slope.
The guanaco neighed again, louder, still more shrill, stamped the tall spiky ichu grass with his front feet and began rearing and waving his head in a great passion, never yielding a foot as they approached.
'He is challenging you,' said Eduardo. 'He has been fighting -look at the blood on his sides. He may attack you presently. You could not ask for a better shot; nor a better supper.'
'But I must not shoot him?'
'Why, don Esteban,' cried Eduardo, 'how can you speak so? He is no vicuna - he is much too big for a vicuna, and the wrong colour - he is a guanaco, and a perfectly fair quarry for you.'
Stephen's piece had one barrel loaded with shot, the other with ball: he knelt, which enraged the guanaco, took careful aim, and fired. The animal, struck in the heart, gave a great bound and disappeared, apparently collapsing in the long grass.
'The first day we eat steaks, minced very fine,' said Eduardo as they hurried up the slope. 'The next day, in the sun, his shoulders grow quite tender.' Eduardo could be as cheerful as any European, but it was clearly part of his ancestral code to show no adverse emotion: a Stoic calm. Yet now his look of eager expectation changed to one of plain blank undisguised dismay. The guanaco had in fact been capering on the edge of a chasm and its convulsive leap had carried it over.
Two hundred feet below them he lay, and the cliff dropped sheer. They pondered, searching in vain for any way down; they measured the declining sun, the shadows rising below them; unwillingly they turned, and as they turned first the male condor and then his mate began their first wheeling sweeps high overhead.
Another day, on the high puna yet again, coming back from a small alpine lake, the source of a stream that eventually flowed into the Amazon and so on to the Atlantic (though from here on clear mornings they could make out the gleam of the South Sea), a lake on whose frozen bank Eduardo had shown Stephen that handsome goose the huachua with a white body and dark green wings, they paused in still another group of puyas, some of them growing among rocks so conveniently placed that Stephen was able to gather seed from the lower flower. It was late, but for once the evening was as calm as the day, and the llama-train was clearly in sight on the trail below.
'Let us walk down wide,' said Eduardo, looking to his flint. 'I still have hopes.'
'Very well,' said Stephen, and they went down the slope abreast, twenty yards apart. When they were a stone's throw from the trail a fair-sized bird sprang from a tuft with a whirr of wings. It was clearly Eduardo's bird and he fired, hitting it so hard that it bounced again. 'There,' he cried, as happy as a boy, 'here is my partridge at last: or at least what the Spaniards call a partridge.'
'A very handsome bird, too, so it is,' said Stephen, turning it over and over. 'And to be sure there is a superficial resemblance to a partirdge: though I doubt it is a gallinaceous bird at all.'
'So do I. We call it and its cousin tuya.' 'I believe it is one of Latham's tinamous.' 'I am sure you are right. A very curious thing about the tuya is that the cock-bird broods the eggs, sometimes the eggs of several hens, like the rhea. Possibly there is some connexion.'
'Sure the bill is not unlike... But you will never tell me you have rheas at this exorbitant height?'
'We certainly have, and higher still. Not the blundering great rheas of the pampas, but fine grey birds that stand no more than four feet high and run like the wind. God willing I shall bring you in sight of some on the altiplano, soon after we leave the monastery.'
'How good and kind you are, dear Eduardo. I look forward to it with the keenest anticipation,' said Stephen; and having felt the bird's skeleton under its plump breast, 'I fairly long to dissect him.'
'That would mean fried guinea-pig again,' observed Eduardo.
'Not if we confine our attention to his bones,' said Stephen. 'A bird, very gently seethed for some hours, will always leave his bones in the pot. You will say that his flesh is not that of the same bird roasted, which is very true; but how much better, even so, than our eternal guinea-pig.'
The monastery of which Eduardo had spoken was five days journey to the south-east, but the prospect of the altiplano rheas, the salt lakes with their different kinds of flamingo, and the unending deserts of pure white salt itself lent Stephen Maturin wings and, helped by unnaturally kind weather, they reached the high lonely mission in four although they were loaded with the spoils of Lake Titicaca - the skins of two flightless grebes, two different species of ibis, a crested duck and some rails, together with plants and insects.
Eduardo and his train appeared well after what little dusk there was in such a latitude and at such a height. They had to hammer on the outward gate and bawl a great while before it opened; and when at last they were admitted, worried and discontented looks received them. The building had been a mission belonging to the Society of Jesus until that order was suppressed; now it was inhabited by Capuchins, and the friars, though no doubt good-hearted, pious men, lacked both the learning and the dissimulation often attributed to the Jesuits. 'We did not expect you until tomorrow,' said the Prior. 'Today is Wednesday, not Thursday,' said the Sub-Prior. 'There is nothing to eat,' said a friar in the dim background. 'Juan Morales was to bring up a roasted pig tomorrow, and several hens - why did you not send to say you were coming today?' 'If you had sent yesterday morning we could have asked Black Lopez to tell Juan to bring the hog up today.' 'Black Lopez was going down in any case.' After a silence the Brother Porter said, 'Well, there may be a few guinea-pigs left in the scriptorium.' 'Run, Brother Jaime,' cried the Prior. 'Let us lift up our hearts. And at least there is always some wine.'
''There is always some wine,' cried the Prior, my dear,' wrote Stephen, 'and I cannot tell you how well it went down. Nor can I tell you how much I look forward to the next few days, when my amiable companion promises me the wonders of the altiplano, perhaps even of the edge of the Atacama, where rain falls but once in a hundred years. He has already shown me little bright green parakeets in the desolation of bare rock at fifteen thousand feet, mountain viscachas, fat creatures like rabbits with a squirrel's tail that live among the boulders, piping and whistling cheerfully, and many other delights in those prodigious solitudes with snowy peaks on every hand, some of them volcanoes that glow red by night; and he promises more to come, for extreme conditions beget extremities in every form of life. I could however wish that one of the extremities was not the guinea-pig or cavy. He is neither beautiful nor intelligent, and he is the most indifferent eating imaginable -barely edible at all, indeed, after the first half dozen braces. Unhappily he is readily domesticated; he dries, smokes or salts easily; and he can be carried for ever in this dry, dry cold air - a cold air in which the native potato too can be and alas is dried, frozen, dried again and so packed up. I have tried to make this dish a little more palatable by adding mushrooms, our ordinary European mushrooms, Agaricus campestris, which to my perfect stupefaction I found growing here in alpine meadows: but my dear companion told me I should certainly drop down dead, his followers too assured me
