TEHUELCHE METHODS OF HUNTING 109 



dislike and implacability, but rather the result of the infamous ill- 

 faith which leavened the dealings of the very earliest visitors to 

 the coasts of Tierra del Fuego. 



I must confess that all my sympathies are on the side of the 

 primitive races, who on coming into contact with the white man 

 suffer those outrages on their best feelings which, I am sorry to 

 say, are only too common. You must understand, however, that I 

 in no way refer to the settlers of this generation. My remarks 

 must be taken to refer to the first pioneers. At the present day 

 — so Burbury, who has had a great experience of Tierra del 

 Fuego, informed me — the Indians there are treacherous and 

 absolutely implacable, and do endless harm in their periodical 

 raids upon the "white guanaco," as they call the sheep. They 

 do this not only when hunger presses them, but at all times out of 

 a spirit of revenge. Sometimes they drown the sheep and leave 

 them in the ice, where they keep good for weeks, during which 

 time the Onas feast on them. 



Patagonia bears upon its length the clear-cut and long-drawn 

 initial of the Tehuelche race. By this I mean the Indian trail, 

 which can be followed from water to water, from good camp to 

 good camp, stretching from Punta Arenas in the south to Lake 

 Buenos Aires in the north and beyond it. Up and down this trail 

 and along others, less extended, generations of Indians have 

 wandered with their wives and children, their tents and horses. 

 We struck it when travelling south from Lake Buenos Aires, in 

 the early January of 1901. It was hard to distinguish the 

 Indian road from any parallel series of guanaco-tracks, which 

 here line the country in numbers, and, indeed, it was only by 

 keeping a sharp look-out for the hoof-prints of horses that we were 

 able to follow the trail at all. It runs along under the Cordillera at 

 a varying distance of about twenty or thirty miles from their bases. 

 It was a sad remark that an Indian made to us while talking about 

 the ancient wanderings of his people. " Once," he said, " we had the 

 sea upon the one side of us, and upon the other the Cordillera. 

 But this is not so now. The white man is ever advancing upon one 

 side and the Cordillera remains ever unchanging upon the other. 

 Soon there will be no place for us ; yet once the land was ours." 



