Free In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin Page B

walk hard enough, you probably don’t need any other God.’
    The negro was delighted to hear this. He wanted to walk to the lake and go fishing.
    â€˜How you like my friend?’ asked Ali.
    â€˜I like him. He’s a nice friend.’
    â€˜He is my friend.’
    â€˜I’m sure.’
    â€˜He is my very good friend.‘ He pushed his face up to mine. ‘And this is our room .’ He opened a door. There was a doublebed with a stuffed doll perched on the pillow. On the wall, strung up on a leather thong, was a big steel machete, which Ali waved in my face.
    â€˜Ha! I kill the ungodly.’
    â€˜Put that thing down.’
    â€˜English is infidel.’
    â€˜I said put that thing down.’
    â€˜I only joke,’ he said and strung the machete back on its hook. ‘Is very dangerous here. Argentine is very dangerous people. I have revolver also.’
    â€˜I don’t want to see it.’
    Ali then showed me the garden and admired it. The Bahais had set their hand to sculpture and garden furniture, and the Bolivian had made a crazy-paving path.
    â€˜And now you must go,’ Ali said. ‘I am tired yet and we must sleep.’
    The Bolivian did not want me to go. It was a lovely day. He did want to go fishing. Going to bed that morning was the last thing he wanted to do.

17
    M ILTON EVANS was the principal resident of Trevelin and son of its founder. He was a round moustachioed gentleman of sixty-one, who prided himself on his English. His favourite expression was ‘Gimme another horse piss!’ And his daughter, who did not speak English, would bring a beer and he’d say, ‘Aah! Horse piss!’ and drain the bottle.
    His father, John Evans, came out on the Mimosa as a baby. He was the first of his generation to ride like an Indian. Not for him the inflexible round of field-work, chapel and tea. He settled up-country in the Cordillera, made money and built the mill. Once established he took his family to Wales on a year’s visit. Milton went to school in Ffestiniog and had a long story about fishing from a bridge.
    He directed me to the grave of his father’s horse. Inside a white fence was a boulder set in a plantation of marigolds and Christmas trees. The inscription read:
    HERE LIE THE REMAINS OF MY HORSE EL-MALACARA WHICH SAVED MY LIFE FROM THE INDIANS ON THE 14TH OF MARCH 1883 ON MY RETURN FROM THE CORDILLERA.
    At the beginning of that month, John Evans, with three companions, Hughes, Parry and Davies, rode west up the Chubut Valley. There was an old legend of a city and a new rumour of gold. They stayed in the tents of a friendly Cacique and saw the grass country beginning and the peaks of the Cordillera, but having no food they decided to return. The horses’ hooves splintered on sharp stones and set them limping. They were thirty-six hours in the saddle. Parry and Hughes hung their heads and let the reins go limp. But Evans was tougher and shot two hares, so the four did eat that night.
    Next afternoon they were crossing a valley of blinding white dust and heard the thud of hooves behind. John Evans spurred El-Malacara clear of the Indian lances, but, looking back, saw Parry and Hughes fall and Davies clinging to the saddle with a spear in his side. The horse outpaced the Indians’, but stopped dead before a gulch, where the desert floor split wide. With the Indians on him, Evans spurred again and El-Malacara took a clean jump of twenty feet, sheer over the precipice, slid down the screes and made the farther side. The Indians, who recognized a brave man, did not attempt to follow.
    Forty hours later, Evans rode into the Welsh colony and reported the deaths to the leader Lewis Jones.
    â€˜But, John,’ he said, ‘the Indians are our friends. They’d never kill a Welshman.’
    Then Lewis Jones learned of an Argentine patrol that had trespassed on Indian land and he knew that it was true. Evans led a party of forty