A Golden Legend

Chapter 35

Marcelo followed exhausted Huacman´s agile steps; the ground had become steep and they had to climb a strong slope. Despite the prevailing cold, drops of sweat rolled down the front of the young man, introduced by the neck and fell through his chest. Noticing the fatigue of his companion, Huacman decided to wait for him once he had come to a small plateau covered with stones. When Marcelo reached it, both sat on a rock to recover the breath. While the young man rested the guide walked a few steps in the small plain in a downward direction, where some thick bushes grew , behind which the man planned to get covered to urinate. Something caught his attention and he bent down to see it.

“Marcelo... look” said in a voice that startled the man, who rose immediately overcoming his fatigue. The Peruvian was exhibiting an object covered with dust and thorns in his right hand, which he could soon recognize as a hat. His stomach twisted as he acknowledged it.

“It's Teresa hat!”  he said in a faint voice. He took the object in his hands and examined it.

“There are no bloodstains, but the clamping chin strip is torn. It was pulled out with violence.”  the finding produced him a strong uneasiness.

Huacman had gone farther through the bushes and soon produced an exclamation. At the bottom of a Canyon, a body lay partially covered by vegetation. Marcelo felt his heart beating forcefully in his temples, but something told him that what lay below was the body of a man. He tied a long rope to a dry trunk after verifying its robustness, and both went down in turn. As they got to the bottom they approached the body; Marcelo confirmed that it was a male body laying among leaf litter with relative relief. Huacman approached the corpse and turned it, leaving the face exposed.

“Is he one of us? Do you know him?” eagerly claimed Marcelo.

The aborigine nodded his head.

“He was the guide going with Francisco and woman.”  then showed him a clearly fatal wound on the chest of the man. His shirt was covered with dried blood.

“It is a bullet, possibly from a heavy caliber” said Marcelo  “if he  was the guide of Teresa and Francisco, these are lost in the mountain”  this time Huacman nodded with a grunt.

Marcelo tried to contact Miguel by radio, but did not succeed to do it.

“Perhaps the mountains interfere with the communication. We will climb to the top to try again.”

Fortunately in the mountain top the communication efforts were successful. Then he told Miguel of the findings.

“Well, do not despair” replied Miguel in a comforting voice – can you  determine your position?” as Marcelo answered negatively, he asked “ let me talk to Huacman.”

He then kept a conversation in quechua with the surprised guide, who obviously did not expect to speak by electronic means in his language. Then he handed over again the radio to the young man.

“Marcelo. I am not going to insist asking you to stay in the place you are, for I can understand your anxiety. But I demand you do not run unnecessary risks. There has already been enough misfortune in this expedition. I want that you call me every two hours without exception. You have to know that we are preparing a reinforcement column to go after your steps, so it is essential to know where you are.”

After a new survey in the surrounding area to determine which of the traces was fit to follow, Huacman opted by a course that crossed the bushes through, a very hard road that could only have been chosen randomly in the middle of a hasty escape. At the beginning this added to Marcelo’s concerns, but Huacman reported at the end of a stretch.

“Man and woman alone... the others did not follow.”

The tracks from there were particularly difficult to track, because countless obstacles presented by emerging rocks and bushes had forced the fugitives to frequent changes of direction, so finding the trail again and again put in check Huacman skills.

“Well” Marcelo comforted himself “ they are complicating our life, but in this way they lost the pursuers.”

By an abrupt slope downhill, they arrived at the course mountain stream only a few feet wide. There the tracks got lost since the refugees had not left by the other side. After half an hour of exploration, Huacman found the point where had left the course of the stream, a few hundred yards from the place where they had entered. Obviously it was fruit of an evasive maneuver, to hinder the prosecution.

“This is not pure improvisation. They are using manual evasive tactics. This man Francisco probably has some training; makes me be revive a certain expectation of finding them safe” Marcelo's face showed a certain relief. “However by having no guide will be moving a bit at random.”

As in the previous days, they walked until the shadows began hiding the traces, increasing risks to follow false tracks as well as the possibilities of missteps in the vicinity of dangerous chasms, so they should give priority to safety over anxiety. Anyway, it was evident that the fugitives would have done so, so that they expected that the distance between them was not increasing. They lit a fire with dry branches and after a frugal collation they covered themselves with blankets and lay to rest with the back attached to the wall of rock. By observing the sky, Huacman pointed to a very dark cloud that quickly progressed through the valley opposite them and ran to search for logs and broken branches of trees and shrubs in the surrounding area. Marcelo rushed to imitate him, trusting in the wisdom of the indigenous to move within that territory. When they had accumulated a high pile of timbers, Huacman began to weave a vegetable network under a ledge cantilever on the hillside; he fixed the base of the branches with stones to give consistency to the cover and indicated with signs to Marcelo to join him in the narrow refuge thus built. Just in time, since a couple of minutes later they heard a roar that emanated from the bottom of the Valley and stretched by its slopes while a curtain of water unloaded unexpectedly over the landscape, accompanied by thunder and lightning. The protrusion in the hillside protected them from the water falling through it as if they were in a cave, but not from the rain falling from the front, which was only partially intercepted by the vegetation cover that had been erected.

Marcelo appreciated the effectiveness of the shelter made by Huacman, mixture of wit and knowledge of the natural environment.

The rain lasted half an hour, after which the temperature fell rapidly, which occurs frequently in the mountain jungle. Still damp, they laboriously ignited a  new fire using branches that had not been hit by water, in order to avoid hypothermia and to cook their food. Both sat with their backs against the rock, feeding the fire with wet branches, sizzling before they turned on. Marcelo was finally overcome by sleep, tiredness and the relative warmth of the fire. The two men were barely a dark spot in a minimum landing in the middle point of the steep slope. Andean night fell on the travelers who had dared to go to the mountains.