The whistle starts loud. Clear, melodic, a scale ascending and descending across the grassland at night. It sounds close. That means he is far away.

When the whistle grows faint, when it drops to a thread at the edge of hearing, when the frogs fall silent and the dogs begin to howl, he is standing next to you.

The cattle hands of Los Llanos, the vast tropical grasslands of Venezuela and Colombia, learn this rule early. El Silbon, the Whistler, has been walking the plains since the eighteen fifties, carrying a sack of his father's bones across a landscape so flat that the horizon is a perfect line in every direction. He is taller than any man should be. His back is a ruin of old scars. And the whistle that comes from his mouth follows the seven notes of the scale, rising and falling, as he walks.

In this episode, we trace El Silb ...