On those vast feeding-grounds of a million cattle, whose
tracks intersect each other in every direction, the herdsman can
distinguish with unerring accuracy the footprints of his own peculiar
charge. When an animal is missing from the herd, he throws himself upon
his horse, gallops to the spot where he remembers having seen it last,
gazes for a moment upon the trampled soil, and then shoots off for miles
across the waste. Every now and then he halts, surveys the trail, and
again speeds onward in pursuit. At last he reaches the limits of another
_estancia_, and the pasturage of a stranger herd. His eagle eye singles
out at a glance the estray; rising in his stirrup, he whirls the lasso for
a moment above his head, launches it through the air, and coolly drags the
recalcitrant beast away on the homeward trail. He is nothing but a common,
comparatively unskilled, _rastreador_.
The official trailer is of another stamp. Like his kinsman, the
_vaqueano_, he is a personage well convinced of his own importance; grave,
reserved, taciturn, whose word is law. Such a one was the famous Calebar,
the dreaded thief-taker of the Pampas, the Vidocq of Buenos Ayres. This
man during more than forty years exercised his profession in the Republic,
and a few years since was living, at an advanced age, not far from Buenos
Ayres.
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