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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


NICANOR, MEANWHILE, had gone home and come back again. After his first three-year contract with Western Range expired in the fall of 2001, he'd returned to Huancayo, bought a van, and started ferrying tourists around the city. But by March 2002 his business had failed, and he was back working for Faulkner. I visited him that September. He was camped in a patch of alfalfa near Fairfield, with 1,500 sheep and a new compañero de tentación: a window installer from Lima named Gabriel.

It was hot when I reached their camp, and Nicanor and Gabriel were sitting in the dusty shade of a carrocampo—a sort of horse-drawn covered wagon. Nicanor wore a multicolored striped oxford shirt with the tails tied at his waist. He'd gotten a new gold cap on one of his incisors, a decorative touch that flashed when he smiled.

Nicanor was now the camp boss, and with the new responsibility there was a boldness about him—even a hardness: When I asked about a mule deer skin stashed in a corner of the carrocampo, intact save for a large bullet hole where the ribs would have been, he simply said that he and Gabriel had gotten sick of mutton.

"I'll never kill another bear, though," he said. "The last one—I cut off his paw as a keepsake, and it really upset me." I asked him why. "It looked like a human hand," he told me, "with long fingers and wrinkly palms. I wish I'd never killed one."

Gabriel was a slight young man of 21 who looked even younger. He had wide, wet, black eyes and wore the practiced look of someone trying to appear more stern than he was. Then he'd say something funny—quickly, with a nodded affirmation to himself—and break into a broad and easy smile.

Watching Gabriel next to Nicanor, I thought of something Faulkner had told me about the herders. "They're their own worst enemies," he'd declared. "One or two will do the same thing every spring: run off and start working construction in some town somewhere. Winter comes and they're starving to death, so they come back here. Happens all the time."

What Faulkner wasn't saying was that someone like René or Nicanor takes a huge gamble in order to have a better life. They lose touch with everything they've ever known. And when it becomes clear that all of their suffering has ended in disappointment, there are only two options: Go home or keep gambling. René, for one, had come too far to go home.


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