Yaguaí · I

Now then, it could not be anywhere else. Yaguaí sniffed the stone—a solid block of iron ore—and made a cautious turn around it. Beneath the midday sun of Misiones, the air vibrated over the black crag, a phenomenon that failed to seduce the fox terrier. Down there, however, was the lizard. He circled it again, snorted into a crevice, and, to the honor of the breed, scratched the scorching block for an instant. Having done so, he returned at a lazy pace, which did not preclude a systematic sniffing on both sides.

He entered the dining room, stretching out between the sideboard and the wall, a cool refuge that he considered his own, despite the opposing opinion of the entire household. But the gloomy nook, admirable when atmospheric depression is accompanied by a lack of air, became impossible on a north wind day. This was a brand-new realization for the fox terrier, in whom still struggled the heritage of the temperate country—Buenos Aires, the homeland of his grandparents and his own—where precisely the opposite happens. He therefore went outside and sat beneath an orange tree, right in the midst of the fire-wind, which nonetheless immensely facilitated breathing. And since dogs perspire very little, Yaguaí duly appreciated the evaporating wind over his dangling tongue put out in its path.

The thermometer reached 40° at that moment. But well-bred fox terriers are singularly fallacious where promises of quiet are concerned. Beneath that fiery midday, upon the volcanic plateau that the red sand rendered even more calcining, there were lizards.

With his mouth now closed, Yaguaí crossed the wire fence and found himself in the open hunting grounds. Since September he had achieved no other occupation during the fierce siestas. This time he tracked four of the few that still remained, hunted three, lost one, and then went off to bathe.

A hundred meters from the house, at the base of the plateau and on the banks of the banana grove, there existed a well in live rock of original design and shape, for having been started with dynamite by a professional, an amateur had finished it with a pointed shovel. True enough, it measured no more than two meters in depth, stretching out in a long slope on one side, like a watering pond. Its spring, although superficial, resisted two-month droughts, which is quite meritorious in Misiones.

There the fox terrier bathed, first his tongue, then his belly sitting in the water, to conclude with a swimming expedition. He would then return to the house, provided no trail crossed his path. At sundown, he would return to the well; hence Yaguaí suffered vaguely from fleas, and quite easily from the tropical heat for which his breed had not been created.

The combative instinct of the fox terrier manifested itself normally against dry leaves; he later rose to butterflies and their shadow, and finally settled on lizards. Even in November, when he already had all the house rats in check, his great delight was the saurians. The peons who happened to arrive during the siesta always admired the dog’s obstinacy, snorting in little caves beneath a fiery sun, even though their admiration did not go beyond the hunting grounds.

“That,” said one of them one day, gesturing toward the dog with a turn of his head, “is only good for little critters...”

Yaguaí’s master heard him:

“Perhaps,” he replied, “but none of your famous dogs would be capable of doing what that one does.”

The men smiled without answering.

Cooper, however, knew monte dogs well, and their marvelous aptitude for running chase, which his fox terrier ignored. Teach him? Perhaps; but he had no way of doing it.

Precisely that same afternoon a peon complained to Cooper about the deer that were finishing off the beans. He asked for a shotgun, because although he had a dog, he could only sometimes hit them with a stick...

Cooper lent the shotgun, and even proposed going that night to the clearing.

“There is no moon—objected the peon.”

“It doesn’t matter. Unleash the dog and we’ll see if mine follows him.”

That night they went to the plantation. The peon unleashed his dog, and the animal immediately darted into the darkness of the monte in search of a trail.

Upon seeing his companion depart, Yaguaí tried in vain to force the caraguatá barrier. He finally succeeded and followed the other’s tracks. But within two minutes he returned, very pleased with that nocturnal escapade. That much was certain: not a single little hole went unsnuffed within a ten-meter radius.

But hunting by scent, in the monte, at a gallop that could very well last from dawn until three in the afternoon, that no. The peon’s dog found a trail, very far away, which he lost immediately. An hour later he returned to his master, and all together they returned to the house.

The test, if not conclusive, discouraged Cooper. He forgot about it afterward, while the fox terrier continued hunting rats, some lizard or fox in its den, and lizards.

Meanwhile, the days followed one another, blinding, heavy, in an obstinacy of north wind that bent the garden greens into limp rags, beneath the white sky of the torrid noons. The thermometer hovered at 38–40°, without the remotest hope of rain. For four days the weather grew heavy, with an asphyxiating calm and increased heat. And when at last the hope was lost that the south would return in torrents of water all the fire-wind received a full month from the north, the people resigned themselves to a disastrous drought.

The fox terrier lived from then on seated beneath his orange tree, because when the heat transcends a certain reasonable limit, dogs do not breathe well lying down. With his tongue out and his eyes half-closed, he witnessed the progressive death of everything that was spring budding. The vegetable garden perished rapidly. The cornfield passed from light green to a yellowish whiteness, and by late November only truncated little columns remained of it upon the desolate blackness of the clearing. The cassava, heroic among them all, resisted well.

The fox terrier’s well—its spring exhausted—lost its greenish water day by day, and so hot that Yaguaí went to it only in the morning, though now he found traces of cavies, agoutis, and ferrets, which the drought of the monte forced toward it.

Upon returning from his bath, the dog would sit down again, watching the wind gradually increase, while the thermometer, refreshed to 15° at dawn, reached 41° at two in the afternoon. The dryness of the air drove the fox terrier to drink every half hour, having to battle then with the wasps and bees that invaded the buckets, dying of thirst. The hens, with their wings on the ground, panted, sprawled in the triple shade of the banana trees, the arbor, and the red-flowered vine, not daring to take a step upon the scorching sand, and beneath a sun that instantly killed the red ants.

All around, as far as the fox terrier’s eyes could encompass, the blocks of iron, the volcanic gravel, the monte itself, danced, dizzy with heat. To the west, at the bottom of the wooded valley, sunken in the depression of the double ridge, the Paraná lay dead at that hour in its zinc water, waiting for the fall of dusk to revive. The atmosphere, then, slightly smoky until that hour, veiled itself on the horizon in dense vapor, behind which the sun, falling upon the river, held itself asphyxiated in a perfect circle of blood. And while the wind ceased completely and in the still scorching air Yaguaí dragged his tiny white spot across the plateau, the palm trees, cutting themselves out motionless against the ruby-clotted river, infused the landscape with a sensation of a luxurious and gloomy oasis.

The days followed one another alike. The fox terrier’s well dried up, and the harshness of life, which until then had spared Yaguaí, began for him that very afternoon.

For some time past, the little white dog had been much in demand by a friend of Cooper, a woodsman whose many idle hours were spent in the forest after peccaries. He had three magnificent dogs for this chase, though much inclined to track coatis, which, while involving a waste of time for the hunter, also constituted the possibility of a disaster, for a coati’s bite systematically cuts the throat of any dog that fails to seize it properly.

Fragoso, having seen the fox-terrier work one day in an affair with an irara, which Yaguaí forced to remain definitively still, deduced that a little dog with that special talent for biting precisely between withers and neck was no ordinary dog, however short his tail might be. Therefore he repeatedly urged Cooper to lend him Yaguaí.

“I will teach him well for you, sir,” he would tell him.

“There is time,” Cooper would reply.

But in those oppressive days—Fragoso’s visit reviving the memory of it—Cooper handed over his dog so that he might teach him to run.

He ran, undoubtedly, much more than Cooper himself would have desired.

Fragoso lived on the left bank of the Yabebirí, and in October he had planted a cassava patch that did not yet produce, and half a hectare of corn and beans, which was a total loss. The latter, specific to the hunter, was of very little importance to Yaguaí, whereas the new diet completely upset him. He, who at Cooper’s house would wag his tail before simply boiled cassava so as not to offend his master, and would sniff the locro from three or four sides so as not to break completely with the cook, came to know the anguish of eyes bright and fixed upon the master who eats, ending up by licking the plate that his three companions had already polished while anxiously awaiting the handful of boiled corn they were given each day.

The three dogs went out at night to hunt on their own account—a maneuver that entered into the hunter’s educational system;—but hunger, which naturally drove the former into the forest to track for food, immobilized the fox-terrier in the hut, the only place in the world where he could find food. Dogs that do not devour their quarry will always be bad hunters; and precisely the breed to which Yaguaí belonged has hunted since its creation for mere sport.

Fragoso attempted some training with the fox-terrier. But since Yaguaí was much more detrimental than useful to the unconstrained work of his three dogs, he relegated him from then on to the hut in expectation of better times for that instruction.

Meanwhile, the previous year’s cassava was beginning to run out, the last ears of corn rolled across the ground, white and without a single grain, and hunger, already harsh for the three dogs born with it, gnawed at Yaguaí’s vitals. In that new life he had acquired with astonishing rapidity the humbled, servile, and treacherous appearance of the country dogs. He learned then to prowl around neighboring huts at night, advancing with caution, his legs bent and elastic, sinking slowly to the foot of a clump of esparto grass at the slightest hostile rumor. He learned not to bark no matter how much fury or fear he felt, and to growl in a particularly muffled way when a ranch cur defended the place from pillage. He learned to visit the henhouses, to separate two stacked plates with his snout, and to carry off a tin of grease in his mouth in order to empty it in the impunity of the tall grass. He came to know the taste of greased rawhide thongs, of grease-smeared work boots, of the sticky soot of a pot, and—upon occasion—of honey gathered and kept in a piece of bamboo. He acquired the necessary prudence to step aside from the path when a traveler approached, following him with his eyes, crouched low in the grass. And by the end of January, of the fiery gaze, the ears firm above the eyes, and the high and provocative tail of the fox-terrier, there remained only a mangy little skeleton, with ears laid back and tail tucked and treacherous, that trotted furtively along the roads.