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Outside Magazine, August 2004

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El Último Vaquero Habla Español (The Last Cowboy Speaks Spanish)

By Nick Reding


	COMPAÑEROS KELLYE AND RENÉE AT HOME IN GOODING. (Joshua Paul)

RENÉ AND NICANOR'S camp sat beneath pine trees alongside a creek, an hour's ride from the logging road where Julian had dropped their supplies. Their dirt-floor, canvas tent was held up by Douglas fir saplings. Inside were two fold-up cots, each with a sleeping bag and a rolled jacket for a pillow; a wood-burning stove; a frying pan; two aluminum mixing bowls; a bag of dog food for the Australian shepherds that guarded the sheep; and two buckets of grain for the horses. A side of ewe hung off one of the fir poles, leathery and dry. A piece of fat the size of a baseball mitt was nailed below, which René and Nicanor used to season the pan. Some men, if you added up all the eight- and nine-month stints they'd done on multiple Western Range contracts, had spent a solid decade, or even two, living like this.

On the surface, two less compatible tentmates could hardly exist. Peruvians and Chileans still remember that in 1882, Chile invaded Peru and seized hundreds of square miles of nitrate-rich desert whose mineral extraction has since helped drive Chile's economy. Add to this the fact that many Chileans look down on the indigenous Peruvians as "docile" (to use René's word), not to mention tight with money when sober and cheats when drunk, too sympathetic toward animals, and overly fond of chicken instead of mutton, which gauchos eat three times a day.

Even so, the two men got along well here in the mountains, where the politics of survival superseded those of culture and history, and where René, with his experience, was clearly the boss. In the mornings and evenings, René rode out to count and check the sheep; every three to five days, depending on how quickly the animals grazed an area, René decided to move them. Nicanor cooked the meals, which he had waiting each morning and night.

The afternoon we left Julian, René and Nicanor had moved the herd roughly a mile, though Nicanor was unsure if they'd ended up in the right place—a constant source of tension, given that, if they veered off course, they would miss Julian and his supplies in another ten days. Nicanor kept looking suspiciously in the direction of the bubbling creek, as though it were whispering lies.

"I told you, pequeño," said René, "we're at the right creek." He pointed to the soft flesh of the aspens all around, where men had cut their initials and nationalities like prisoners marking the passage of time—a sign that the site was often used by herders.

"Then why is that creek so low, cuñado?" said Nicanor. He was worried that there wouldn't be enough water for the sheep. "Just trust me," said René.

Nowhere were the complexities of René and Nicanor's relationship more evident than in the way they spoke, a mixture of two of the most distinctive Spanish dialects in Latin America, cut occasionally with Mexican-influenced Spanglish. René, though he was shorter and younger than Nicanor, called his companion pequeño, "little one." Nicanor called René cuñado, "brother-in-law." Together they referred to themselves as compañeros de tenta, "tent partners." And in a biting allusion to the fact that two young men would be stuck together so long without hope of even seeing a woman, they changed this occasionally to compañeros de tentación, "partners in temptation."

René talked incessantly about what he'd left behind, filling in Idaho's alien space with a familiar Chilean landscape. As we talked that first night, sitting beside the fire, he began telling the tale of how his grandfather, a carpenter, came to Patagonia in the 1930s from northern Chile and became a gaucho. As he told the story, he whittled a stick with a knife his grandfather had given him: a long, slender blade whose black handle was fashioned from the enormous middle toe of an ostrich. Nicanor watched René stop to drink from a jug of Carlo Rossi white Grenache, his reward from the ranch for killing a black bear the week before.

Racism was a favorite topic of René's, and he ended by saying, "In Chile, my grandfather could become a gaucho; he could become anything. It's not like here, che, with all the discrimination." "Really?" asked Nicanor. As a Peruvian of indigenous descent, he'd seen his share of bigotry.

"Yes. Really."

"Cuñado," said Nicanor, "what do you know about Chile?" When René looked at him, Nicanor quietly returned his stare.

"The reason you think there's no racism in your country," Nicanor continued, "is because you've never seen your country. It sounds like there's no one in the part of Chile you come from."

He was right: Less than 2 percent of Chile's population lives in Patagonia. "If there's no one to hate," Nicanor concluded, "no one will hate them."

For a while, René was quiet. "Esta no es vida," he said finally, looking at the shadows of the campfire's flames moving against the tent and, above that, the millions of stars in the sky.

"Yes," Nicanor countered, "this is a life." When René looked at him, angry about having been challenged again, Nicanor smiled brightly in the firelight. "It's just a shitty one," he said.

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