Will you see your compadre and ask him to sell it to me?”

The woodsman lifted towards him his trusting and sternly devoted eyes.

“We’re not selling you anything, not I or my compadre. With us you’ve been different from the rest. The lion is yours.”

“Thanks,” answered Longhi gravely. “When can it be here?”

“Next week. He has to be the one to do it.”

The following Monday the lion arrived. It was a lioness, but already grown to a husky size. Longhi had prepared a strong cage, where he installed the beast, who roared when she saw that she was separated from her master.

This was going on in February. In June the lovely feline, now fully developed, wouldn’t part for an instant from her new owner.

It’s unbelievable what wonders of patience, willpower, and self-control Longhi had to perform to attain that domesticity. Under the sway of his affection and unshakable disposition, the lioness had been transformed into a big dog full of docility and tenderness towards her master. Longhi had achieved what almost all trainers do: he’d taught the beast to be quiet. A stern hiss would make her fall silent; but it must be said that in this terrible struggle for control—control the feline was fated to resist—Longhi was twice on the verge of losing his life. He had five deep scars from her claws on his shoulder. Finally, however, he had succeeded in subduing her.

What was Longhi’s purpose in exerting his awful will to teach a lioness something in no way indispensable, and certainly very dangerous?

One night in August—which is to say: six months after the day that Alves made Longhi pay, in the way we’ve seen, for his noble fairness toward the laborers—Longhi was standing on the central trail, unmistakably waiting for someone. After a while, a woeful cry of pain rang out in the distance, and was answered at once by a muffled roar to his left. Longhi turned quickly toward the woods and hissed. The noise subsided.

A moment later Guaycurú appeared on the trail. The Indian, saved by the panic aroused in the ants by the boom of the explosion, had taken much more time than Longhi to recuperate. There had been four months of interminable pain, wounds that kept reopening, pustules that ate him alive, an atrocious convalescence—only for him to return, barely recovered, to the same mute work as before, and with Alves’ threat to begin the affair of the ants again at his slightest mistake.

Out of prudence Longhi hadn’t wanted to go see him. But now that he had a mature plan it was necessary to see him, so he’d had the logger take him the message.

No sooner were they together, they who had suffered the most abominable of tortures, than a torrent of emotions welled up in both their breasts. They looked hard at each other, and a moment later Longhi again felt the Indian’s lips on his hands. Between them now there was a common bond, impossible to undo: their having suffered together and the inner fire of the same dark longing for retaliation.

They had hardly begun to talk when a horrifying roar quite close to them caused Guaycurú to jump.

“Damn you!” yelled Longhi angrily, turning toward the woods. “What’s the matter with you?”

“What is it, boss?”

“Nothing, a lion I own. That stupid . . .”

And he went in among the trees. Right away Guaycurú heard the ill-tempered voice of Longhi scolding. An instant later he came out with the lioness.

And now we go back to the first part of this story, to the stormy night in which Longhi, Guaycurú, and the lioness were walking toward the logger’s hut.

The ex-inspector had asked Guaycurú to send him news, by way of the logger, of the first trip to the port that Alves might undertake. In the afternoon the woodsman got in touch with Longhi, and the object of their nocturnal meeting was to bring his plan to a conclusion.

Once arrived at the hut they talked for quite a while, and when dawn was upon them Guaycurú went back to the camp. The following night he returned to the trail, where Longhi was already waiting for him. Alves had to go by that point, on his way to the port.

The cold, clear weather favored Longhi’s designs. The moon was shining down on the trail, painting a quiet white stripe amid the gloomy woods.

“Are you really sure he said at one in the morning?” Longhi asked.

“Yes, at one. The steamboat went upstream the day before yesterday in the afternoon, and it’ll come by today at dawn.