The Tongue Stick, primitive version.

Here is one of the best stories my father told, readapted to his true origin ... that origin of which I barely have memory, and which sometimes seems to have never existed. But like my father, I miss it when I listen to the cicadas.

It was from the edge of the ravine that he saw it fly, in the twilight of the sentence. It looked like an elongated heron descending through the Las Trancas, towards the meetings with the river Araute. Since it was backlit, the sunset resigned him to believe provisionally in the story of the dark wader that sought the round pose, where there are high ravines, where the Torogoz lives.

But the next day the news awoke the legend: a dead cow in the Vargas plain, without scratches, without blows, without a tongue. It was then that Don Marcos, who then called him Maco (as his grandmother used to say), remembered the story and told it to me, for another penultimate time.

It was a dark summer night, with the heat dripping in the ribs and the itinerant singing of the guacos in search of disobedient hens in the trees of balls. The silence grillolento it broke, not boring cicadas; it was like the roar of a bull, bellowing desperately in the blurred distance. Maco sat up and walked to the edge, behind the latrine; the night was even blacker, with no new stars, like any bored April without love, and his wife's voice in the echo of silence:

- That bull is crying, it must have become entangled in a wire.

His distant hopes that Uncle Noah could attend the res ended when he decided to tie his left shoe securely, returned home with his twenty-two rifle, hunter's lamp and ammunition box.
He went down to the door, shook the lamp to wake his fire, while taking the right by the ranch Don Catarino; just falling to the ground La Cachirula.
He listened to the silence of the chaste eunuch while another song was sung but with the same chorus:

- Ah! Catocho, again you took the night in the Church.

He went down carefully, remembering old slips flavored with furtive kisses, the breath of ocote and congratulated landings from the rush of potential in-laws. Sooner still he was crossing the river, he turned off the lantern for the well-known cult of custom, while repeating it in the liver.

- You remember the best copying with the clarity of the foam and the noise of the stones.

When you reach the stage of the bull, a few meters trapiche, tried to reason the equation; the animal ran around a thicket and each third of the ellipse let out its deadly scream. Maco, in the dark, approached the path, ready to light the lamp that had already been placed on his forehead. Rifle in hand, he tried to solve the derivative of the animal, which after half an hour of threshing the grass already had a lane marked.

If only he had looked up, he would have seen the mysterious wing, which from above controlled the bull with a narcotizing scent that descended like a dew and penetrated the nose to the rhythm of a disparate owl flutter in the box.
It was the saccharine, who in his wrong attempt to vary the genre chose a bull resistant to dogma; a cow would have fallen asleep in minutes, and then it would have gently descended, it would have covered the neck in double turn with its serpentine jafa, squeezing until the tongue came out in marketable size. It would taste and remove the bad taste to rumina eating its tender udder like dessert.

The minutes of the feathered serpent ended prematurely; Maco switched on the lamp, while aiming at the bull, which, without options, reacted by letting itself go tangent to the farm. Uncle noah. When he reached the gate, he screamed and another when he jumped, the sound of broken branches did not stop at a great distance as he crossed the cane, down the tree. quit court. When Maco, belatedly looked up, looking to illuminate the winged reptile, it was gone. Only its dew descended and he could barely rescue a stoned gray feather that, due to its foul smell, definitely belonged to the tongue extractor.

Maco returned as a sleepwalker, trying to line his ring while a cold line of sweat showed his back upright. He arrived at the house, put away the rifle, the shoes and the lamp, impotent to such a puzzle he fell asleep and dreamed that he bathed in the pool. The Little Mermaid, with a sky sailed by animals from the movie Avatar, but in 2D.

The next day a brown cow was dead on the farm. Don Jesús Orellana, without footprints, without blood, no tongue.