Dance of the Dwarfs by Geoffrey Household

me.
    â€œThey will not cross water.”
    â€œCan they climb?”
    â€œIt is said they cannot.”
    That ruled out monkeys, which anyway are one of the staple foods of forest Indians and so familiar that they could not be feared. As for ground-living apes, it is certain that there are not and never were any in the Americas.
    â€œHave you ever seen one?”
    â€œNever. My father did.”
    â€œWhat did it look like?”
    â€œWho knows what he has seen in the dusk?”
    â€œThey don’t come out in the day?”
    â€œAll such things dread the sun.”
    â€œThey are duendes?”
    â€œIt could be.”
    â€œWhat else is said about them?”
    â€œThey dance.”
    I let that go. Conversation with Joaquín has the advantage that neither party is necessarily expected to say anything for minutes on end. Whether he spends the intervals thinking or merely sitting I do not know. I myself find them useful for chewing over what he has said and working out the next move. This time I had an inspiration worthy of an anthropologist.
    â€œIs that why there was no guitar in Santa Eulalia?”
    â€œThat is why.”
    â€œBut have the dwarfs ever come so far to dance?”
    â€œWho knows?”
    â€œAnd at the estancia?”
    â€œIt is said that Manuel Cisneros saw them.”
    â€œHave you ever heard that they hunt with dogs?”
    â€œWhat need would they have of dogs?”
    That was all I could get out of him. For Pedro they were real and neither more nor less to be feared than any other unapproachable tribe. For Joaquín they are clearly duendes.
    Yet his treatment of the subject differed from the matter-of-fact way in which he usually describes the various spirits which surround us. The llaneros too seem to feel a distinction. They believe, of course, in duendes but will not normally allow them to interfere with their daily life. The dwarfs do interfere. They are responsible for the llaneros’ reluctance to travel at night between Santa Eulalia and the estancia, and also for the fact that the grazing west of the marshes and the creek is never used.
    I wish Tesoro could speak. There may be some scent from the forest or some trick of the light which alarms horses. That would be enough to create a legend and to cause the abandonment of the estancia through lack of labor. If one’s only method of transport proves unreliable without any explanation, one falls back on gremlins like aircraft pilots in the last war. A pity that I cannot materialize some arms and legs on these forest fairies and put them to work on irrigation channels!
    [ April 13, Wednesday ]
    I have tackled Mario and laid down the law that he is not to frighten Chucha with a lot of nonsense. I got little of interest out of him except confirmation that dwarfs don’t climb. That is why he is always mending walls and stopping up holes which a little chap could squeeze through.
    He admitted that low morale was the reason for the estancia being deserted. Cattle grazing in the corridor between creek and forest had been lost. In the llano beyond the marshes, where the line of the trees sweeps away to the northwest, horses had vanished into the darkness and once a man. Why not, I asked, an increase in the number of jaguars following a favorable year for the game? No, the llaneros ruled out jaguars. But why in God’s name dwarfs? Because they had been seen dancing. How far away and how much light? Close to the estancia and dark. Any moon? Don’t know.
    It was all worthless evidence, with a slight bias in favor of actual, physical hunters from the forest. On a starlit night one’s eyes pick up movement at, say, seventy yards, and can vaguely recognize size and gait. That is to say, I could not distinguish with certainty a cow from a horse or a puma from a big dog, but I could distinguish a man from any of them.
    â€œSo the llaneros killed Manuel Cisneros,” I said in the hope that he