To kill the creatures with bullets at a distance was no
satisfaction to him: he must with his own hands drive the shaft into
the quivering flesh--he must feel its quivering and see the blood gush
up beneath his hand. One smiles at a vision of the gentle Richard
Jefferies slaughtering wild cattle in the palaeolithic way, but that
feeling and desire which he describes with such passion in his _Story
of My Heart_, that survival of the past, is not uncommon in the hearts
of hunters, and if we were ever to drop out of our civilization I
fancy we should return rather joyfully to the primitive method. And so
in those dark times in the Argentine Republic when, during half a
century of civil strife which followed on casting off the Spanish
"yoke," as it was called, the people of the plains had developed an
amazing ferocity, they loved to kill a man not with a bullet but in a
manner to make them know and feel that they were really and truly
killing.
As a child those dreadful deeds did not impress me, since I did not
witness them myself, and after looking at that stain of blood on the
grass the subject faded out of my mind. But as time went on and I
heard more about this painful subject I began to realize what it
meant. The full horror of it came only a few years later, when I was
big enough to go about to the native houses and among the gauchos in
their gatherings, at cattle-partings and brandings, races, and on
other occasions.
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