kept harping back to certain topographical details of the Belgrano Glacier.
She eyed me in a peculiar way. She asked a number of penetrating questions about our research fundâwhich was most unlike her. She even asked questions about our Swiss accounts. I can safely say that my face was a total blank until she gave up and reverted to her superior manner. She then spoke of Vaino Mustanojaâs Patagonian Researches , published in English, in Helsinki, in 1939.
âYouâll love old Mustanoja,â she said. âHis prose style is simply entrancing.â
Now Estelle knew nothing about prose style and her choice of the word âentrancingâ lay far outside her usual range of adjectives.
âIâve got to have it photostatted,â she went on. âI promised old Shirokogoff a copy. Know something? Peabodyâs got the only copy in existence. Think! The Finns donât even have a copy.â
Excusing myself, I hurried to the library of the Peabody Museum and withdrew the quarto volume whose existence I had overlooked. The pink paper cover was charmingly illustrated with Mustanojaâs own copper plate engraving of the Belgrano. Rustic letters, of nothofagus twigs, formed the tides. Around the borders were vignettes of the ethnographical specimens he collected from the Tehuelche Indians on his 1934 expedition and presented to the Rovaniemi Museum.
It touched me to think of these southerly artefacts in that northernmost city. I turned to pp. 141â2. The stroke of a razor, two neat folds and the sheet was in my pocket. Mustanojaâs prose style, it so happens, is outstanding for a Finn:
From Lago Angostura the track led across a plain denuded by wind erosion and sparsely covered with xerophytic plants. Stunted bushes of calafate ( Berberis Darwinii ) managed to exist, but the region was wild and poor, deserted by guanacos, unsuitable for sheep. After marching twenty-three miles with dust from the salt-pans streaming into my eyes, the wooded valley of the Rio Tannhäuser came into view. Beyond, I could see the pink and green strata of the Meseta Colorado; beyond that, the azure ice-caps of the Andean Cordillera.
A descent of two hours brought me into the logging camp of Puesto Ibáñez, where I had hoped to purchase a meal from the inhabitants. For a week my diet had been reduced to grilled military starlings (Trupialis militaris), which were by no means easy to shoot, having exceptionally hard crania for birds of their size.
The settlement, however, was in ruins, thanks to the activities of a Chilean bandit. A woman squatted before the charred remains of her cottage, holding a dead baby and pointing with an expression of abject misery at the half-dug grave of her husband.
This dismal scene was offset, somewhat, by a magnificent Embothrium coccineum ablaze with scarlet flowers. Along the riverbank were groves of fuchsia (F. Magellanica ), bamboos (Chusquea Cumingia) and of Saxegothaea conspicua . An alstromeria was in bloom, as were yellow violets, calceolarias, the snowdrop orchis and an orange mimulus, which proved to be a new species and which my friend, Dr Bjorn Topelius of Uppsala, has named M. Mustanojensis in my honour.
Three miles upstream I came on a burnt timber shack, fresh evidence of the banditâs work, from which I removed an interesting human calvarium. I pitched camp on an inviting meadow where, to my satisfaction, I noticed the fresh spoor of some Huemul deer and walked off to shoot my dinner.
I had not gone three hundred yards when a doe came into my sights: I dispatched her with a single shot. A fawn then rushed up to its dead mother: I dispatched it as well. I had not, however, noticed that the buck had come within range of the fawn. My second shot passed through the skull of the latter and carried away the symphysial region of the lower jaw of the former. I was thus obliged to kill the third animal and exterminate the family.
In the morning,
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