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It is a powerful summer day in Misiones, with all the sun, heat, and calm the season can offer. Nature, at its fullest and most open, seems satisfied with itself.

Like the sun, the heat, and the calm surroundings, the father, too, opens his heart to nature.

“Be careful, little one,” he says to his son, summing up all his warnings for the occasion in the one phrase, which his son fully understands.

“Yes, papá,” responds the child as he picks up the shotgun, fills his shirt pockets with shells, and then carefully buttons the pockets.

“Come back by noon,” his father says.

“Yes, papá,” the young boy repeats.

Balancing the shotgun in his hand, he smiles at his father, kisses him, and leaves.

The father follows him for a moment with his eyes and then returns to his day’s tasks, made happy by his young one’s joy.

He knows that his son, raised from tender infancy to be cautious in the presence of danger, can handle a firearm and hunt anything that presents itself. Although very tall for his age, he is only thirteen. And he might seem even younger if one were to judge by the purity of his blue eyes, still fresh with childish surprise.

The father doesn’t have to raise his eyes from his task to follow in his mind the son’s progress. Now, he has crossed the red path and is heading straight for the woods through the opening in the esparto grass.

He knows that hunting in the woods—hunting game—requires more patience than his son can muster. After cutting through the woods his cub will skirt the line of cactus and go to the marsh in search of doves, toucans, or perhaps a pair of herons like the one his friend Juan sighted several days ago.

Only now, a ghost of a smile touches the father’s lips as he recalls the two young boys’ love of hunting. Sometimes they get only a yacútoro, even less frequently a surucuá, and, even so, return in triumph, Juan to his own ranch with the nine-gauge shotgun that he himself has given him, and his son to their mesa with the huge sixteen-gauge Saint-Etienne—a white powder, four-lock shotgun.

The father had been exactly the same. At thirteen he would have given his life for a shotgun. Now at that age his son has one—and the father smiles.

It isn’t easy, nevertheless, for a widowed father, whose only hope and faith lies in the life of his son, to raise the boy as he has, free within his limited range of action, sure of hand and foot since he was four years old, conscious of the immensity of certain dangers and the limitations of his own strength.

The father has had to battle fiercely against what he considers his own selfishness. So easy for a child to miscalculate, to place a foot in empty space, and . . . one loses a son! Danger always exists for man at any age, but its threat is lessened if, from the time one is a child, he is accustomed to rely on nothing but his own strength.

This is the way the father has raised his son. And to achieve it he has had to resist his heart as well as his moral torments, because this father, a man with a weak stomach and poor sight, has suffered for some time from hallucinations.

He has seen visions of a former happiness—embodied in most painful illusions—that should have remained forever buried in the oblivion in which he has shut himself. He has not escaped the torment of visions concerning his own son. He has seen him hammering a parabellum bullet on the shop forge, seen him fall to the ground covered in blood—when what the boy was really doing was polishing the buckle of his hunting belt.

Horrible things. . . . But today, this burning, vital summer day, the love of which the son seems to have inherited, the father feels happy, tranquil, and sure of the future.

In that instant, not far away, a sharp crack sounds.

“The Saint-Etienne,” the father thinks, recognizing the detonation. “Two fewer doves in the woods. . . .” Paying no further attention to the insignificant event, the man once again loses himself in his task.

The sun, already very high, continues to rise. Everywhere one looks—rocks, land, trees—the air, as rarefied as if in an oven, vibrates with heat. A deep humming sound fills the soul and saturates the surrounding countryside as far as the eye can see—at this hour the essence of all tropical life.

The father glances at his wrist: twelve o’clock. And he raises his eyes to the woods.

His son should be on his way back now. They never betray the confidence each has in the other—the silver-haired father and the thirteen-year-old boy. When his son responds, “Yes, papá,” he will do what he says. He had said he would be back before twelve, and the father had smiled as he watched him set off.

But the son has not returned.

The man returns to his chores, forcing himself to concentrate on his task. It is easy, so easy, to lose track of time in the woods, to sit on the ground for a while, resting, not moving. . . .

Suddenly the noonday light, the tropical hum, and the father’s heart skip a beat at the thought he has just had: his son resting, not moving. . . .

Time has gone by: it is 12:30. The father steps out of his workshop, and, as he rests his hand on the mechanic’s bench, the explosion of a parabellum bullet surges from the depths of his memory; and instantly, for the first time in three hours, he realizes he has heard nothing since the blast from the Saint-Etienne. He has not heard stones turning under a familiar step. His son has not returned, and all nature stands arrested at the edge of the woods, awaiting him. . . .

Ah! A temperate character and blind confidence in the upbringing of a son are not sufficient to frighten away the specter of calamity that a weak-sighted father sees rising from the edge of the woods. Distraction, forgetfulness, an unexpected delay: his heart cannot accept any of these reasons; none would delay his son’s return.

One shot, one single shot, has sounded, and that a long time ago. The father has heard no sound since, has seen no bird; not one single person has come out of the opening in the esparto grass to tell him that at a wire fence . . . a great disaster. . . .

Without his machete, distracted, the father sets out. He cuts through the opening in the grass, enters the woods, skirts the line of cactus—without finding the least trace of his son.

All nature seems to stand still. And after the father has traveled the well-known hunting paths and explored the marsh in vain, he knows surely that each step forward carries him, fatally and inexorably, toward the body of his son.

Nothing even to reproach himself for, poor creature. Only the cold, terrible, and final realization: his son has killed himself going over a . . .

But where . . . where! There are so many wire fences and the woods are so foul. Oh, so very foul . . . ! If one is not careful crossing a fence with a shotgun in his hand . . .

The father stifles a shout. He has seen something rising. . . . No, it isn’t his son, no . . . ! And he turns in a different direction, and then another and another. . . .

Nothing would be gained here by showing the pallor of the man’s skin or the anguish in his eyes. The man still has not called his son. Although his heart clamors for him, his mouth remains mute. He is sure that the mere act of pronouncing his son’s name, of calling him aloud, will be the confession of his death.

“Boy!” escapes from him abruptly. . . .

No one, nothing, responds. The father, who has aged ten years, walks down the sun-reddened paths searching for the son who has just died.

“Sonny! My little boy!” The diminutive rises from the depths of his soul.

Once before, in the midst of happiness and peace, this father had suffered the hallucination of seeing his son rolling on the ground, his forehead pierced by a bullet. Now, in every dark corner of the woods he sees sparkling wire; and at the foot of a fence post, his discharged shotgun at his side, he sees . . .

“Son! My little boy!”

Even the forces that submit a poor hallucinated father to the most atrocious nightmares have their limits. And our father feels his reason slipping away—when suddenly he sees his son step out of a cross path.

The look on the face of a father in the woods without his machete is enough to cause a thirteen-year-old boy to hasten his step, his eyes moist.

“My little boy,” the man murmurs and drops exhausted to the white sand, clasping his arms about his son’s legs.

The child stands, his legs encircled, and, as he understands his father’s pain, slowly caresses his head, “Poor papá. . . .”

Time begins again. Soon it will be three o’clock. Together now, father and son undertake the return home; and if one can admit to tears in the voice of a strong man, let us mercifully close our ears to the anguish crying in that voice.

“Why didn’t you watch the sun to keep track of the time?” the father murmurs.

“I looked, papá. . . . But as I started back I saw Juan’s herons and I followed them. . . .”

“What you have put me through, my son . . . !”

“Pah-pah . . . ,” the boy murmurs, too.

After a long silence: “And the herons, did you kill them?” the father asks.

“No. . . .”

An unimportant detail, after all. Under the blazing sky, in the open, cutting through the esparto, the man returns home with his son, his arm resting happily on the boy’s shoulders, almost as high as his own. He returns bathed in sweat, and, though broken in body and soul, he smiles with happiness. . . .

He smiles with hallucinated happiness. . . . Because this father walks alone. He has found no one, and his arm is resting upon empty air. Because behind him, at the foot of a fence post, with his legs higher than his body, caught in a wire fence, his beloved son, dead since ten o’clock in the morning, lies in the sun.