THE PLAINS OF PATAGONIA 205 



the gray universal thicket, than I would find my- 

 self as completely alone and cut off from all sight 

 and sound of human occupancy as if five hundred 

 instead of only five miles separated me from the 

 hidden green valley and river. So wild and soli- 

 tary and remote seemed that gray waste, stretch- 

 ing away into infinitude, a waste untrodden by 

 man, and where the wild animals are so few that 

 they have made no discoverable path in the wilder- 

 ness of thorns. There I might have dropped down 

 and died, and my flesh been devoured by birds, and 

 my bones bleached white in sun and wind, and no 

 person would have found them, and it would have 

 been forgotten that one had ridden forth in the 

 morning and had not returned. Or if, like the few 

 wild animals there puma, huanaco, and hare- 

 like dolichotis, or Darwin's rhea and the crested 

 tinamou among the birds I had been able to exist 

 without water, I might have made myself a hermi- 

 tage of brushwood or dug-out in the side of a cliff, 

 and dwelt there until I had grown gray as the 

 stones and trees around me, and no human foot 

 would have stumbled on my hiding-place. 



Not once, nor twice, nor thrice, but day after 

 day I returned to this solitude, going to it in the 

 morning as if to attend a festival, and leaving it 

 only when hunger and thirst and the westering sun 

 compelled me. And yet I had no object in going 

 no motive which could be put into words; for 

 although I carried a gun, there was nothing to 

 shoot the shooting was all left behind in the val- 



