over breakfast we talked with patti about how argentina was the friendliest place we’d been, it’s people going well out of their way for us without the slightest expectation of ever receiving anything in return. chileans had also been kind, but we felt sometimes their motivation lay in national pride. she said although once they had been treated unwelcomingly in santiago, in the south everyone was patagonian and the variety of countries from which settlers had come made people tolerant. secluded estancia life in harsh areas forces people to get on.
we drove around the immense grounds, watched galloping wild horses and a pair of eagles swooping down then climbing above. sheep scattered in panic as we slowly rolled past and rheas nervously ran from the road or along the road or on to the road or just ran a lot.
back at telken, we made room on the rear seats for Tigo’s box and his new estancia donated litter box. we watched him chase invisible insects in the garden. he was not a natural hunter, and although he immitated a wild cat creeping through tall grass before the kill, he was missing an arguably essential component of the hunt: prey. later we put him in front of a lizard on roadside and he was easily outwitted. with Tigo on e-j’s lap, we set off to see the hand paintings, declared a world heritage site in 1999.
the paintings from patagonian cavemen almost 12,000 years ago were immaculately preserved in the porous rock. a guide took us on a path around the cave, explaining the three different styles of pictures and the phases they represented. most of them were hand silhouttes belonging to men and women (deteremined by relative width vs length), from young and old (the big ones were very big) and one even had 6 fingers. he suggested that the pictures may have predated spoken language, the hunting scenes of men and guanaco perhaps used to explain strategies amongst comrades. on the opposite side of the canyon to the cave, three paths led from the higher plains down to the river below. these natural paths were used by guanaco when they got thirsty after a day’s grazing and here they would be surrounded by cavemen and attacked with spears and rocks on leather ropes. it was very cool to be standing outside a real caveman’s cave, the ceiling still blackened from the smoke of their fires, guanaco bones and small obsidian flints still littered around what was once their winter refuge.
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on our way out, we half jokingly asked the lady who had sold us our entrance tickets whether she wanted a kitten. a girl in her 20’s with a big smile overheard the conversation and came running out from her office. she’d love to take him in, and he’d make great friends with her 2 month old puppy, Manchita. we assessed Tigo’s potential new home: permanent caring staff, archaeologist’s dorms and kitchen (so maybe mice?) and a constant stream of tourists so possible tit-bits too. we felt like parents taking a child to boarding school. the facilities were good, the teachers were caring, and a world heritage site carried a definite prestige. we were sad to say goodbye so quickly, but it was an opportunity not to miss. we brought down his boxes, his kit-e-kat and raw meat from telken and we left our email address for his new owner Sol to send us photos when he was a little older.
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the car felt a lot emptier without tiny Tigo, and we instantly missed him. a lorry passed and a stone left a bullet-hole shaped dent in the windscreen. we arrived in bajo robles, a moderately miserable one-horse town and set up camp in the cold evening wind. a cup of nettle tea and a vegetable minestrone packet soup under unnaturally beautiful skies and things weren’t quite so bad. we crawled up to bed and were soon warm and snoring.
