Last Cowboys at the End of the World: The Story of the Gauchos of Patagonia

Chapter One Middle Cisnes Duck and Edith lived with their three small children in a tiny two-room cabin in Middle Cisnes, Chilean Patagonia. They were twenty minutes on horseback from the nearest neighbors, who were rumored to be cattle thieves, and an hour from the next nearest neighbor. Inside of the main room of the cabin, there was a cabinet, a wood-burning stove, a table, five chairs, and a couch. There was no bathroom and no electricity; seven candles stuck together in their own drippings on the table provided the light. Duck was behind me with a wad of my long hair in one hand, the same hand in which he also held a knife, and he was using my hair like a handle with which to force my neck into the crook of his arm; I could see his shadow on the bedroom door, against which I'd braced my arms. An hour before, Edith had barricaded herself and the children in the bedroom with a fifty-pound barrel of flour. I could hear them in there. Duck, who was a gaucho, a Patagonian cowboy, had been drinking nonstop for five hours. I had been drinking with him, first to keep from offending him and then, as he got more and more violent, so that he would pass out. I was hopelessly drunk; Duck was not. I had tried once already to walk out of the cabin. Duck had been sharpening his knife; he had sharpened it so many thousands of times before slaughtering a ewe that he did it by feel, watching me instead of the knife as he went. If I looked left--at the stove, for instance, wondering if I could get to it and open the door to retrieve a burning log before Duck stabbed me or sliced my hamstring--or right--at the guitar on the wall or the sharp-lipped frying pan he'd thrown on the floor--Duck looked, too. There was no way to get outside. "Sit down," he said. When I didn't move, he nodded at the chair behind me. "Sit down," he'd said again, and I did. Behind Duck was a chair we called the throne, which Duck had fashioned with a hatchet from the trunk of a coigue tree and covered in sheep skins. He'd sat on the throne and said, "Why are you here?" Then he had dropped the whetstone and thrown the newly-sharpened knife so that it stuck in the floor between us. He had reached for the liter bottle of beer next to the throne and drank from it, watching me watch the knife. "Why are you here?" he had repeated. The knife had been closer to me than to him. For two months, I'd been living in a tent in the pasture outside of Duck's cabin. He'd taken me with him on a long cattle drive and shown me how to make chaps from the skin of a butchered ewe--things gauchos have done for three centuries. Now a road had been built that connected Duck to central Patagonia's only town and, by virtue of this fact, connected the eighteenth century to the twenty-first. I'd come to Patagonia to see what would happen to men like Duck. I told him, "I came because of the road, che." Duck had passed me the bottle of beer at the same time that he had see-sawed the point of the knife out of the floor. It was hard to believe I'd let him have it that easily. He said, "That's correct, Skinny. Because of the road." Then Duck had picked up two of the plates that had spilled out of the cabinet when he'd pulled it down onto the floor, He held one plate in each hand, like cymbals, then put one plate over the other and thrown the bottle of beer into the air. "There I am," he said, and watched the bottle fall to the floor. "Duck!" he had yelled. "Hold on," he'd said, "I forgot a part of the trick." Starting over, Duck had tossed the bottle in the air and, when it passed in front of him, had crushed it between the plates. The plates had shattered, though the bottle had not. Duck had looked at the floor "There I am," he'd said. He'd looked at me. That's when I got up from the chair and tried to make it to the door, but Duck had caReding, Nick is the author of 'Last Cowboys at the End of the World: The Story of the Gauchos of Patagonia' with ISBN 9780609810040 and ISBN 0609810049.