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Once I went to Rosaspata with my uncle and two cousins. We went during the Feast of Pentecosts. It's a huge fair. They bring cattle to Rosaspata from many places, even from the yungas, the low eastern valleys of Bolivia. It is only in the month of June. At those times then they bring cattle that aren't familiar with totora. So then I bought two bulls, really big ones. My uncle bought six cattle. And we brought them back, the four of us. Each of us had a team. We drove them along, walking right behind them all the way to our village. We went along on a path that took us directly, from a little above the Río Ramis past the Pampa de Moro, and Huata, and Paucarcolla and Puno.
As we were passing near the shores of Lake Titicaca near Ramis, I bought a pichu [a pichu is the amount of totora that can be encircled in both arms and held tightly against the chest] of totora to give to the cattle while we were walking on the path. None of the cattle wanted to eat it, even though they were hungry. So then when we had stopped to rest, we put the cattle in a line like this. [Cirilo sweeps his arm and dips his hand repeatedly to indicate each bull in its position in line.] So then we gave a little totora to each one. Among these, one bull, one of my uncle's, begins to eat a little. So then the other bulls, they are looking at that one, and they lift up a little like this. [Cirilo lowers his head, opens and closes his mouth to imitate a bull picking up some fodder, and lifts his head] They tried it and then just left it. They wouldn't keep eating it. So then I could have killed myself from anger. Por gusto, in vain, I had bought the totora and carried it on my back. A pichu of totora is heavy, after all. I didn't want to throw it away. So we waited a while longer. We left it for the cattle, we put some for each one. Another bull of my uncle's had eaten a bit, but mine didn't want to eat a single stalk of totora. So we continued the journey, leaving some totora, throwing some down.
And then, Huata. We slept in Huata, it was already late by the time we got there. But there wasn't any totora in Huata, so we bought barley straw. Oh, did they eat a lot! Wah! [Cirilo pauses after this interjection, and then returns to the story.] Now in Huata we slept in the house of people we knew. These are the people who always put us up. Their family were compadres of our grandfathers. So the next day in the morning, around 3 in the morning, we started traveling towards Puno. Then we came to the Pampa de Illpa, the place that is also called Moro, where there was a cooperative during the time of the Agrarian Reform. [Cirilo refers to the program of the first phase of the military government from 1968 to 1975.] Illpa is higher up, Moropampa is below. We saw that there was a lot of grass. It belonged to the hacendado, the landowner, that used to be there. So we took advantage of the situation and grazed the cattle in the middle of the hacendado's pasture. Then after two hours we continued our journey to Puno. Around noon we had gotten near Paucarcolla. Then, around the time that it is now, late in the afternoon, we were near Chanu Chanu. We stayed there. The people who put us up would cut totora. They were cutting totora from K'api. We tried buying one pichu for all the cattle. Some of them wanted to eat it. They ate one, two, three stalks of totora, eating it like that. We left the cattle staked down, like this. [Cirilo makes a gesture of pounding a stake into the ground.]
The next day, we could see from the way that the totora was tossed around that some of the cattle had woken up at night and eaten it, and others had not. We continued the journey around 3 in the morning to Socca. We arrived there around 5 in the afternoon. There we gave them the totora since they were hungry, but they didn't want it. So we mixed together some barley that was still partly green with pieces of totora cut to the same length as the barley. When we woke up early the next day, we saw that the cattle had eaten the barley and the totora. They had set aside about a third of the totora that we had mixed in. That day, we did the same thing in the morning. They ate that mixture more readily. In this way, little by little, they became accustomed to totora, and they came to know totora. Within a week we gave them unmixed totora. At our house we had cows that ate unmixed totora. Watching them, the new cattle also learned how to eat.
That's how they learned. This was the year 1954 or 1955. The return journey lasted five days. From Rosaspata to Huancané, one day; from Huancané to Ramis, the second day; from Ramis to Huata, one day; from Huata to Puno, one day also; from Puno to Socca, another day [footnote 8]. To go there we it took us one day, traveling in a truck. It's very far.
This story is something that I saw directly. It's real. It's not a quotation of what other people said. Each year I would go to Rosaspata to bring cattle. But I haven't gone for the last ten years or so, because the cattle there are very expensive now. They don't bring them from the yungas in Bolivia because Peruvian money has fallen in value. It's pretty expensive to buy cattle there, and it isn't worthwhile for us.
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