Page:The birds of Tierra del Fuego - Richard Crawshay.djvu/44

xxiv at first hand—stones for anvils and hammers, shells for knives and rasps and pliers, shoulder blades of the Guanaco for spades, pumiceons tuffs and hone-shaped limestones for grinding purposes. Fire they obtain from pyrites, with dried Lycoperdon for tinder.

Shortly after my arrival at Useless Bay Settlement, when skinning a bird one morning. I saw an Ona for the first time. Conscious somehow of a strange presence. I looked round and beheld a gigantic form robed in shaggy furs from head to foot—erect, motionless, silent—regarding me with a gaze so impressive and intense, that as I encountered it, my whole being experienced a shock. A Man indeed! What an absolute reality in every respect! Every character essential to an entirely independent existence he possesses in striking degree, enabling him to live and thrive in a land where Man of another race in similar circumstance would die outright. A frame physically and constitutionally as strong as can be, resource in any emergency, determination, courage recking nothing of cost to life or limb in the achievement of purpose, untiring patience, endurance to the end, intelligence the outcome of instinct and reason so combined as to place him on equal terms alike with Man and the lower creation—all these are evident in him at a glance. What he has gone through in life is splendidly testified to in his person, whether from exposure to the elements, or in warring with his own kind—even also to a broken arm from the bullet of White Men, who afterwards dragged him from their horses with the lazo and left him for dead. But, what impresses one most of all is his magnificent dignity and reserve—so natural, as to be impossible of compromise. That stern, calm, thoughtful, deeply-lined, awfully solemn face—so full of expression of all that is greatest and best in Man, yet manifesting nothing evil—will dwell with me to my dying day.

"The solitary savage feels silently, and acutely," says Washington Irving in his generous tribute to the Red Man. "His sensibilities are not diffused over so wide a surface as those