OVERLAND

Founded 1868

MONTHLY

BRET HARTE

N ENDEAVORING to cross the Andes at any time in the fall after the first of May, one stands something more than an even chance of being turned back at the summit by a snowstorm, and such for a while appeared to be the lot of our own party. There was another light fall on the night previous to the morning set for our leaving Cuevas, and it was only after considerable deliberation that the guides would consent to make the attempt. Their reluctance, I think, was due to the state of the weather, which

(Illustrated by photographs taken specially by the author.)

was lowering and dull, rather than to any fancied difficulties to be met on the trail itself. Fortunately, also, there was waiting a bunch of five hundred cattle to go over, and these it was decided to put through first as "trailbreakers." These animals were started off at daybreak, and the passengers were not allowed to begin the ascent until the last of them had disappeared over the summit. It was also ascertained by telephone that no one was coming up the trail from the Chilean side, as a man, or even a pack

train, caught in the wild rush of a bunch of crazy cattle down a mountain-side would have but the shortest shrift.

It was on the suggestion of a young Chilean artist-also an Alpine climber of enviable record-that the two of us had our mules saddled at daylight, took our coffee with the drovers, and followed them with their cattle up to the cumbre. It was his thoughtfulness that provided an alcohol lamp, half a dozen eggs-how much they cost him and how he managed to carry them without breaking, I never knew -and four rolls. The sight was most unique, and the experience one I would not have missed for much more effort and discomfort than it cost.

The cattle were for the most part wild Pampean steers that had been brought through by fast freight from sea level in less than two days' time. Their thin coats were ill-calculated to withstand the biting cold of the higher Andes, and their respiratory apparatus still less to meet the strain of

handling the rarefied air of the very considerable altitude. They were full of life from the cold and the snappy air, and it was as amusing as pitiful to see one of them charge away at full speed for fifty yards, stop abruptly as the oxygen began to run short, and then stand still in dumb, wide-eyed amazement, its wildly-throbbing heart threatening to tear its way through the violently heaving sides. The drovers from the Pampas-typical gauchoson their plains ponies, were almost useless, both man and beast coming up quite exhausted from every sharp gallop after a stubborn stray. This threw most of the work on the mountain-bred Chilean drovers, who had come down to Cuevas to meet the bunch, and right manfully did they buckle down to their arduous task.

When the bunch would keep the trail everything was easy, but when they would begin to straggle and break away, something had to be done, and that quickly. But the breaking was always done in typical cow fashion

always by ones and two, and then only half-heartedly. If the whole bunch of steers had come at once-or even a dozen of them-they could have had everything their own way and tobogganed back to the valley without opposition worth mentioning, but there was only one of them that gained his freedom.

This was a big red rack of bones with a four-foot spread of horns and the body and legs of a race horse. Without warning, he broke from the train and came tearing down the mountainside, his raucous bellows booming out on the still air like a foghorn. There was no time to head him, so one of the plucky Chilenos did the next best thing. He reigned sharply off the trail, put his mule at a gallop and sent it full into the shoulder of the flying steer. The mule lost its feet for à moment, but the rider kept his seat; the steer went rolling, but only to come up, still running, well beyond the cordon of the drovers.

For the next minute it was about an

even break between the steer and the cowboys, with the chances favoring now one party and now the other. As the beast came up from its fall, a gaucho, one of the Pampean drovers, let fly with his bolas and sent it down again in a, tangled heap. The "tie" was not perfect, however, the great legs thrashed themselves clear of the rawhide, and just before the daredevil Chileno was upon it the steer was off again. Ten yards more and it had plunged over a ten-foot ledge into a drift of snow, and the drover reined up, vanquished. Two of the gauchos still had their bolas, and as the laboring body floundered into view, these were launched down upon it simultaneously. One set flew wide and the other, overthrown on account of the slope, only caught the tips of the spreading horns, around which they wrapped and held, crowning the brave beast as with a garland of victory.

It seemed all over but the shouting, and to this end the artist and I sacrificed a whole chestful of our carefully

conserved breath in a rousing cheer for the plucky steer. Pursuit was out of the question, and he had smooth and easy going for the rest of the distance back to the valley. But even while yet the gaunt image of the fugitive loomed large in the lenses of our binoculars, we saw it begin to waver, saw the snow before it go suddenly red, saw the sinewy legs totter and collapse, and then the whole frame sink down into a quivering heap. It must have literally torn its heart and lungs to pieces by its frantic exertions in the rarefied atmosphere.

Turning to their herd again, the drovers resumed their climb to the summit of the Uspallata Pass. Before the 12,000-foot mark was reached, most of the steers, were bleeding from the nose, and for the last two or three hundred yards up and through the great snow gate at the "cumbre," there was not a square foot of unbloodstained white on either side of the trail. There was no tendency to cut and run during this part of the jour

ney; only a heavy-footed, patient, plodding, an incessant stumbling and pitching forward and the uninterrupted drone of low, piteous moans of dis

tress.

At the summit, the cattle got a few minutes to breathe, while the drovers tightened girths for the down grade. The big red steer which broke away was the only loss to be checked against the ascent of the Argentine side, for in spite of the sufferings of the rest of the cattle, not one had dropped out by the way. Such luck as this was not to be hoped for in the more precipitous descent of the Chilean side. Not only was the trail steeper and narrower on this slope, but the snow was much heavier as well, which, coupled with the fact that cattle are about the worst adapted animals in the world for down hill work, made the remainder of the trip of a highly precarious nature.

The fact that the hoofs of the cattle were still slippery from the box-car confinement was also against their making a good passage of the down