Raul had stayed in a peasant hut during the rain, a thatched room where woven fronds, carefully herringboned, shut out most of the downpour. A pig slept in a corner. Raul sat on a wooden chest; the owner and his wife squatted on a mat. Above the pig, in a sisal hammock, swung a child. Another hammock was looped over a peg, its pouch resembling a gray moth's case. The deluge shut out nearly all light. Through the open doorway mist drubbed. Nobody tried to talk. Raul dozed. When the rain stopped, he thanked the pair, accepted a chunk of sugar cane for Chico, and got on his horse and rode off. Chico trotted briskly, whiffing the rain-washed air as they followed a trail through pastureland where knots of Herefords grazed. Belly high to the horse, a stone wall paralleled the trail, iguanas here and there. At a bend, Chico whirled sidewise, and pain from his bullet wound shot through Raul. He thought he might topple, but somehow managed to keep his saddle, as the horse pirouetted. Shouting, commanding, he dug his spurs. The horse screamed. Then, Raul saw the snake, a good-sized rattler. Dragging violently at the bit, he checked Chico underneath some orange trees and dismounted, thoroughly disgusted. "You fool. Haven't you ever seen a rattler before? You ought to learn a thing or two. You crazy fool--you're no colt!" The snake slithered away through the grass. At the dam, the foreman told Raul that they had less than a week's work, though the cracks in the dam appeared formidable. Raul sucked his pipe, nodded his head, simply agreeing. The place oozed gnats and flies. Sandpipers paraded the shallows. Remaining on his horse, Raul chatted with the workers, all of them in breechclouts or shorts. A number wore conical hats of a nearby mountaineer clan. The southerners had bodies like chocolate. Some spoke no Spanish. Through the years, Raul had acquired an Indian vocabulary of sorts and he tried to josh the men but none of his jokes got across. He slapped at gnats, and left as soon as he could. On his way home, he felt a sense of freedom. The breadth of the land affected him. Uncle Roberto had said: "It does something to a man to live on a place you can't ride across in days." Though Raul had been born at Petaca, he realized there were parts he had never seen, hill country, mountain fields, lava terrain, streams. A subforeman insisted that a lake existed in Sector 25. Recently someone told of Indians camping in 31, thatched huts in a valley of willows.