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52 j C H A P T E R T W E N T Y- F O U R A Jaguar Causes an Uproar Between the Spaniards and the Indians As night was approaching, the Governor and his party were traveling along the edge of a thick forest. Suddenly, a jaguar jumped into the middle of the Indians, causing a tremendous commotion. The Spaniards quickly took up their arms, believing that the Indians were about to attack them, and charged, yelling, “Santiago!” 1 They injured a number of the Indians in the ensuing fray. The Indians fled into the forest after wounding the Governor with a couple of shots from their harquebuses that went through the lower part of his face. They shot him quite maliciously, and it was clear they were trying to kill him just to please Domingo de Irala, whom the Governor had replaced as commandant of the province. (You see, Irala had gotten used to being in command.) At any rate, all the Indians ran off into the woods. The Governor knew he would have to placate them and make amends for this whole disgraceful business, and he would have to do so by himself. He got down from his horse and strode off through the forest into the midst of the Indians, telling them to take heart, that the jaguar lay behind all the confusion and uproar and the Spaniards were their friends and brothers and fellow vassals of Your Majesty. “Everyone,” he said, “must now move forward to throw our enemies out of the country. By the way, they’re just ahead.” When the Indians saw the Governor himself among them, they listened to his words and settled down. Then they walked out of the forest with him. The case in point in those dire straits was that we were certainly about to lose the field. If the aforementioned Indians had fled to their homes, neither they nor their friends or relatives would ever have trusted the Spaniards again. A Jaguar Causes an Uproar Between the Spaniards and the Indians j 53 So, the Indians emerged from the forest, with the Governor calling all the chiefs by name. The chiefs, of course, had fled to the jungle with the other tribesmen, and they had all been very frightened. The Governor told them they might come back to the rest of the party with nothing to fear at all. “However, if the Spaniards wanted to kill you just now,” he said, “you yourselves were the cause. You took up your arms so quickly, you know, and they believed themselves to be under immediate threat of death. But, as everyone now knows, it was that jaguar jumping into the middle of you that created all this turmoil and frightened people out of their wits.” Well, everybody became friends again, and the Indians returned to the party. But it began to dawn on them that this war we were about to wage would touch them quite personally. And it was the Spaniards who were about to fight it on their behalf. The situation was this: the Guaycurues had never seen the Spaniards nor had anything to do with them, had never expressed any anger toward them or done them any harm. But to protect and defend the Guaranis and keep them out of harm’s way, the Spaniards were now campaigning against the Guaycurues. Beseeched by the Governor and persuaded with honeyed words, they finally put themselves into his hands and emerged trembling from the forest . They were much traumatized, thinking at first that their enemies, for whom they had just recently been searching, had sprung out of the woods to ambush them. They had rushed around intending to take refuge among the Spaniards, and that had been the sole cause of the entire altercation. With the Guarani chiefs calm at last, the rest of the Indians came back. Not a single person had been killed. With them all together, the Governor then ordered that the Indians take the rear guard, while from that point on the Spaniards would be in the vanguard. The cavalry would interpose itself between the Spaniards and the “Spanish Indians.” Everyone was to march along in this order to make the Guaranis a little happier, and we would all see how this would improve their spirit when it came to facing the Guaycurues. “They’ll likely forget their recent fears this way,” said the Governor. You see, if we had broken faith...

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