In the llanos — the vast, flat grasslands that stretch across Venezuela and Colombia — there are no good places to be caught alone after dark. The land is too open. There is nowhere to hide. And El Silbón is always out there, somewhere, walking between the stars and the grass with his sack over his shoulder.
He was a boy once. The stories disagree on the details, as stories do, but they agree on the shape of it: he killed his father. Some say it was over a woman. Some say it was over an insult. Some say the boy was simply wrong inside, from birth, and the killing was inevitable. His grandfather punished him for it — lashed him, rubbed his wounds with lemon and hot peppers, and set a dog on him. Cursed him. Condemned him to wander forever, carrying the bones.
He is very tall now. He stretches as high as the trees when he wants to. He is thin as a rail and his face, if you see it, is something you will not recover from seeing.
He whistles. That is how you know he is out there. A long, high, mournful whistle — D, E, G, and then a descending phrase that sounds almost like a tune but is not quite, like a song heard through walls in a language you don't speak.
Here is the thing they teach children in the llanos, the thing that is true: when you hear the whistle far away, he is close. When you hear it right beside you, just over your shoulder, just outside the firelight — he is far away. This is the nature of El Silbón. Distance and sound work differently around him.
He is drawn to drunkards and men who have been unfaithful to their wives. He will come to your window on those nights. He will stand in the yard and open his sack and sort through the bones, counting them. If you hear the counting, and you do not make a sound, he will move on. If you make noise — if you call out, if you startle, if the baby wakes — he will stop counting.
What happens next is not agreed upon in the stories. This is because no one who has experienced it has been in a condition to report back.
A farmer near Barinas once told me he had heard the whistle for three nights in a row, each night closer than the last according to what he could hear but according to the rules farther away. On the fourth night there was no whistle. He took this as a good sign. He went to sleep.
In the morning his cattle were dead. All of them. No marks. No signs of predator or disease. Just forty-two animals lying on their sides in the field as if they had simply decided to lie down and stop.
He moved to Caracas after that. He does not go to the llanos anymore.
I asked him if he believed the story. He looked at me for a long time.
"Belief," he said, "has nothing to do with it."