The Barbed Wire · I

For a fortnight the sorrel had searched in vain for the path by which his companion escaped from the paddock. The formidable fence of brushwood—clearing that had grown back inextricably—did not allow even the horse’s head to pass. Evidently, it was not through there that the blaze-faced horse got away.

Now he was pacing the farm again, trotting restlessly with his head alert. From the depths of the woods, the pinto answered his companion’s vibrant neighs with his own short, rapid ones, which undoubtedly held a fraternal promise of abundant food. What most irritated the sorrel was that the pinto reappeared two or three times a day to drink. The former would then resolve not to leave his companion for a single instant, and for a few hours, indeed, the pair grazed in admirable harmony. But suddenly the pinto, with his rope dragging behind him, would plunge into the scrub, and when the sorrel, realizing he was alone, dashed off in pursuit, he would find the thicket impenetrable. To be sure, from within, still very close by, the mischievous pinto would answer his desperate neighs with a full-mouthed little whinny.

Until that morning the old sorrel found the gap quite simply: Crossing in front of the scrub-growth that advanced fifty yards from the woods into the field, he saw a faint path that led him in a perfect oblique line to the woods. There was the blaze-faced horse, stripping the trees of their leaves.

The thing was very simple: the pinto, crossing the thicket one day, had found the gap opened in the woods by an uprooted incense tree. He repeated his advance through the thicket, until he came to know the entrance of the tunnel perfectly. Then he used the old path that he and the sorrel had worn along the tree line. And here was the cause of the sorrel’s confusion: the entrance to the trail formed an extremely oblique line with the horses’ path, so that the sorrel, accustomed to traveling the latter from south to north and never from north to south, would never have found the gap.

In an instant he was reunited with his companion, and together then, with no other concern than clumsily nibbling at the young palm trees, the two horses decided to move away from the ill-fated paddock they already knew by heart.

The woods, extremely thinned out, allowed for easy progress, even on horseback. Of the forest, in truth, nothing remained save a strip two hundred yards wide. Beyond it, a two-year-old clearing was tufted with wild tobacco. The old sorrel, who in its youth had roamed clearings until it spent six months lost in them, led the march, and in half an hour the nearby tobacco plants were stripped of leaves as far as a horse’s neck could reach.

Walking, eating, poking around, the sorrel and the blaze-faced horse crossed the brushwood until a wire fence stopped them.

“A wire fence,” said the chestnut.

“Yes, a wire fence,” agreed the blaze-face. And both, resting the weight of their heads on the top wire, gazed intently. From there could be seen a tall pasture in an old clearing, white with frost; a banana grove and a new plantation. All of it hardly tempting, to be sure; but the horses were intent on seeing it, and one after the other they followed the fence to the right.

Two minutes later they were passing through: a tree, dried on its stump by fire, had fallen across the strands. They crossed the whiteness of the frozen grass where their steps made no sound, and bordering the reddish banana grove, scorched by the freeze, they then saw up close what those new plants were.

“It’s yerba,” stated the pinto, making his lips tremble half a centimeter from the leathery leaves. The disappointment might have been great; yet the horses, although fond of treats, aspired above all to wander. So cutting diagonally across the yerba grove, they continued on their way, until a new wire fence stopped the pair. They skirted it with a grave and patient tranquility, thus reaching a gate, open to their delight, and the strollers suddenly found themselves in the middle of the main road.

Now then, to the horses, what they had just done had all the appearance of a feat. From the tedious paddock to their present freedom, there was an infinite distance. Yet infinite though it was, the horses intended to prolong it still further, and so, after observing their surroundings with lazy attention, they mutually nibbled the dandruff from each other’s necks, and in tame bliss continued their adventure.

The day, indeed, favored such a state of soul. The morning mist of Misiones had just completely dissipated, and beneath the suddenly pure sky, the landscape shone with resplendent clarity. From the knoll, whose crest the two horses occupied at that moment, the red-dirt road cut across the grass before them with admirable precision, descended into the valley white with frosted feather grass, to climb once more up to the distant woods. The very cold wind crystallized the clarity of the golden morning even further, and the horses, facing the sun which was still almost horizontal, half-closed their eyes against the blissful glare.

They walked on thus, alone and glorious in their freedom upon the road blazing with light, until as they rounded a point of the woods, they saw at the roadside a certain expanse of unusual green. Grass? Without a doubt. Yet in the dead of winter...

And with their nostrils dilated with greed, the horses approached the fence. Yes, fine grass, admirable grass! And they would enter it, they, the free horses!

It must be noted that since that early morning, the sorrel and the blaze-faced horse possessed a lofty opinion of themselves. Neither gate, nor wire fence, nor woods, nor clearing—nothing was an obstacle to them. They had seen extraordinary things, overcoming unbelievable difficulties, and they felt fat, proud, and empowered to make the most eccentric decision that could possibly occur to them.

In this state of grandiloquence, they saw a hundred meters away several cows standing by the roadside, and heading over there they reached the gate, closed with five sturdy logs. The cows were motionless, staring fixedly at the unattainable green paradise.

“Why don’t you go in?” the chestnut asked the cows.

“Because you can’t,” they replied.

“We pass through everywhere,” asserted the chestnut, haughtily. “For a month now we’ve been passing through everywhere.”

With the glow of their adventure, the horses had genuinely lost all sense of time. The cows did not even deign to look at the intruders.

“Horses can’t,” said a restless young heifer. “You say that and you don’t pass through anywhere. We certainly pass through everywhere.”

“They have a tether,” added an old mother cow without turning her head.

“Not I, I have no rope!” the sorrel replied briskly. “I lived in the brush and just passed by.”

“Yes, behind us! We pass through and you can’t.”

The restless heifer chimed in again:

“The master said the other day: horses are held by a single strand of wire. And what about that?... Don’t you fail to pass?”

“No, we aren’t getting through,” replied the pinto simply, convinced by the evidence.

“We do!”

It suddenly occurred to the honest pinto, however, that the cows, bold and cunning, impenitent invaders of farms and of the Rural Code, didn’t cross the gate either.

“This gate is a bad one,” objected the old mother. “Him, yes! He moves the logs with his horns.”

“Who?” asked the chestnut.

All the cows turned their heads toward him in surprise.

“The bull, Barigüí! He’s stronger than bad fences.”

“Fences?... Does he get through?”

“Everything! Barbed wire too. We go through afterwards.”

The two horses, having returned now to their peaceful condition as animals whom a single strand contains, felt themselves naively dazzled by that hero capable of facing barbed wire, the most terrible thing the desire to press onward can encounter.

Suddenly the cows stirred mildly: the bull was arriving at a slow pace. And before that flat and stubborn forehead directed in a calm straight line toward the gate, the horses humbly understood their inferiority.

The cows moved aside, and Barigüí, slipping his snout beneath a crossbeam, tried to shove it to one side.

The horses pricked their ears in admiration, but the beam did not budge. One after another, the bull tested his intelligent effort without result: the farmer, happy owner of the oat plantation, had secured the logs with wedges the previous afternoon.

The bull tried no more. Turning away lazily, he sniffed in the distance with half-closed eyes, and then skirted the wire fence, emitting muffled, whistling bellows.

From the gate, the horses and cows watched. At a certain spot, the bull passed its horns beneath the barbed wire, violently lifting it up with its forehead, and the huge beast passed through, arching its back. In four more steps it was among the oats, and the cows then headed that way, trying to squeeze through in their turn. But the cows evidently lacked the masculine determination to permit bloody scratches on their hide, and no sooner did they insert their necks than they quickly pulled them back with a dizzying toss of the head.

The horses kept watching.

“They won’t get through,” remarked the brockle.

“The bull got through,” replied the sorrel. “It eats a lot.”

And the pair headed in their turn to skirt the fence out of sheer habit, when a bellow, clear and bleating now, reached them: inside the oat field, the bull, prancing in a fake attack, bellowed before the farmer, who was trying to reach it with a stick.

“Darn it!... I’ll teach you to hop around...” shouted the man. Barigüí, constantly dancing and bleating before the man, dodged the blows. They maneuvered thus for fifty meters, until the farmer managed to force the beast against the fence. But the latter, with the heavy and brute determination of its strength, plunged its head between the strands and passed through, amidst a sharp violin-like screech of wires and staples flung twenty meters away.

The horses saw how the man hurriedly returned to his shack, and came out again with a pale face. They also saw him jump the fence and head in their direction, whereupon the companions, seeing that resolute step advancing, retreated along the path toward their own farm.

As the horses walked tamely a few paces ahead of the man, they managed to arrive together at the farm of the bull’s owner, and were thus able to overhear the conversation.

It is evident, from what can be gathered, that the man had suffered unspeakably on account of the Pole’s bull. Plantations, no matter how inaccessible they might have been within the scrubland; fences, no matter how great their tension and infinite the number of strands, the bull overran everything with its thieving habits. It can also be deduced that the neighbors were fed up with the beast and its owner, due to the former’s incessant destruction. But since the region’s settlers rarely report animal damages to the Justice of the Peace, however hard they may be, the bull kept on eating everywhere except in the yard of its owner, who, on the other hand, seemed to derive a great deal of amusement from this.

Thus, the horses saw and heard the irritated farmer and the sly Pole.

“This is the last time, Mr. Zaninski, that I come to see you about your bull! It just trampled all my oats. I can’t take any more!”

The Pole, tall and with small blue eyes, spoke in an extraordinary and honeyed falsetto.

“Ah, bull, bad! Me not can! Me tie, escapes! Cow has fault! Bull follows cow!”

“I don’t have cows, and you know it well!”

“No, no! Cow Ramírez! Me goes crazy, bull!”

“And the worst part is it loosens all the strands, you know that too!”