Middle Cisnes

Duck and Edith lived with their three small children in a tiny two-room cabin in Middle Cisnes, Chilean Patagonia. They were twenty minutes on horseback from the nearest neighbors, who were rumored to be cattle thieves, and an hour from the next nearest neighbor. Inside of the main room of the cabin, there was a cabinet, a wood-burning stove, a table, five chairs, and a couch. There was no bathroom and no electricity; seven candles stuck together in their own drippings on the table provided the light. Duck was behind me with a wad of my long hair in one hand, the same hand in which he also held a knife, and he was using my hair like a handle with which to force my neck into the crook of his arm; I could see his shadow on the bedroom door, against which I'd braced my arms. An hour before, Edith had barricaded herself and the children in the bedroom with a fifty-pound barrel of flour. I could not hear them in there.

"Reding's book begins with [a gaucho] holding a knife to Reding's throat and asking him again and again, 'Why are you here?' The book never loses this drumroll of menace and evil, this sense that something's about to snap and somebody's not going to get out alive." -- Anthony Brandt, National Geographic Adventure magazine

Duck, who was a gaucho, a Patagonian cowboy, had been drinking nonstop for five hours. I had been drinking with him, first to keep from offending him and then, as he got more and more violent, so that he would pass out. I was hopelessly drunk; Duck was not. I had tried once already to walk out of the cabin. Duck had been sharpening his knife; he had sharpened it so many thousands of times before slaughtering a ewe that he did it by feel, watching me instead of the knife as he went. If I looked left--at the stove, for instance, wondering if I could get to it and open the door to retrieve a burning log before Duck stabbed me or sliced my hamstring--or right--at the guitar on the wall or the sharp-lipped frying pan he'd thrown on the floor-- Duck looked, too. There was no way to get outside.

"Sit down," he said. When I didn't move, he nodded at the chair behind me. "Sit down," he'd said again, and I did. Behind Duck was a chair we called the throne, which Duck had fashioned with a hatchet from the trunk of a coigue tree and covered in sheep skins. He'd sat on the throne and said, "Why are you here?" Then he had dropped the whetstone and thrown the newly-sharpened knife

 

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