One Heck Of A Ride

184 Chapter 24 I Discover Argentina’s Great Hunting B uenos Aires may be much closer in miles to my home in California than, say, Johannesburg, but it’s not an easy trip if you don’t sleep well on airplanes. The nine-hour flight from Miami to the international airport in Buenos Aires was a red eye and I was tired when we landed in Buenos Aires. I needed to hurry to catch a domestic flight at the city’s other airport to hook up with Hugo Wirsky, an outfitter I’d met at an SCI convention. Getting through Customs with my gear and rifle, and transferring to the local airport in time to catch the outgoing flight took another two hours. By the time the ninety- minute local flight landed near Santa Rosa, the capital of La Pampa province, I’d been traveling nearly twenty-four hours, counting layovers. Hugo Wirsky was waiting for me at the airport and helped me retrieve my rifle and gear. We stopped briefly for lunch before traveling on to the ranch where I would spend most of the next three weeks hunting. I was surprised to see such hilly terrain on the drive because I had expected the world-famous Pampas grasslands would be flatter than Florida. After leaving my things in a bedroom in Hugo’s lodge, I joined him in the dining room The owners trophy in the home we stayed where I was introduced to my guide, a gaucho named Miguel Ramos, who spoke some English. While we were talking I noticed a grisly object on a wall behind us where the antlers of red stags and axis deer and the teeth of wild boars were mounted on plaques. When I asked about the age- yellowed human skull, I was told the father of the lodge’s owner killed a native during one of the many conflicts between indigenous Argentinians and the Europeans who suddenly arrived in the Pampas during the 1870s, and he had boiled the man’s head so he could display his “trophy.” Miguel and I left the lodge and drove only a short distance at first light the next morning before setting off on foot to sneak through jungle- like bush. We were hunting a brocket deer much like the way I’ve hunted duikers and grysbok in Africa, and Miguel obviously knew what he was doing. He lived on the ranch and knew we would find these small deer in the thickest cover where scattered palm trees grew. He also was a small and agile man, and could bend and twist under low branches. I had trouble keeping up with him even though we were moving as slowly and quietly as we could. We would take one step, look, then take another step, and look again. We were out there most of that first day and saw only a female and a young buck that Miguel said I shouldn’t shoot because it was “muy poquito.” My body was protesting the next morning after spending so many hours in tight bush, but we eventually found a nice buck the second afternoon. “Shoot!” Miguel whispered, and I shot it at less than thirty yards with my .300 Weatherby. The little buck weighed about forty pounds and was only two feet tall at the shoulder, making it slightly larger than a southern African bush