One Heck Of A Ride

187 I Discover Argentina’s Great Hunting driving on to his 3,000-acre estancia and lodge near a town called Anuritay, we made a side trip to his father’s museum to see the many animal mounts and primitive objects he had collected over a lifetime of hunting all over the world. I still am impressed with the quality and quantity of what I saw that day. Until then, I had never heard of some of the animals in his collection. I also was impressed with Marcelo. It took just one day of hunting with him to realize I’d made a great choice. His hunting operation and lodge still rate five stars with me. We began my capybara hunt by launching a skiff about 3:00 PM the next day and three of us -- Marcelo, a guide, and I -- headed down a river-like canal about an hour’s drive north of the lodge. The canal was teeming with birdlife along its banks and in nearby trees. Everywhere I looked there were birds ranging from small ducks to huge storks, as well as large numbers of caiman, which certainly added interest to our hunt. Marcelo called this “no man’s land,” and asked me to stay in the boat while he and the guide cautiously approached a house where someone was living. My guides stayed outside a fence and didn’t enter the yard when Marcelo talked with the residents. From where I sat, I could see it was not a friendly situation but they soon had permission for us to continue downstream. We weren’t accosted coming or going, and I never learned what made my guides so nervous. The canal got wider as we traveled down it and eventually became a moving stream filled with fish that jumped out of the water all around us and into our boat as we passed them. These fish weighed from one to four pounds each, and it really got my attention when one of the larger ones slammed into my chest while the guide was running the outboard flat out. By 7:30 PM it was pitch dark. Our boat had lights so we could see where we were going. In all, we saw twenty-two capybaras that afternoon and evening, but shooting one proved extremely difficult. Marcelo warned me I would have to shoot quickly and instinctively when he handed me a 12-gauge pump shotgun loaded with rifled slugs earlier that day. “If the capybara see or hear us, they’re off and into the water. They submerge like a hippo and you won’t know when or where they’ll come up to breathe,” he said. “There’s very little time to aim and shoot.” He obviously knew what he was talking about, because I flubbed several chances at various capybaras before everything came together and I killed a huge female as we were drifting as quietly as we could around a bend in the little river. I was interested in inspecting the first capybara I’d ever been close enough to touch. She weighed about 165 pounds and was more than four feet long. Her hair was reddish brown and so coarse I could see bare skin through it. Her feet were webbed and there were four toes on her front legs and three on the rear. Her head was large, her ears were short, and there was only a stub for a tail. The guide had a spear with a hook on it that he used to get it out of the water and into our boat. I tried to get him to slice off a backstrap and cook it for us, but he wanted no part of that. That evening, I realized that I had been impressed with the way we hunted the world’s largest rodent, and had to agree with Jack Schwabland that it was a game animal that Author and guide with a large Capybara