 Chapter 3, Part 1 of Through the Brazilian Wilderness. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Adam Marcicic, Alexandria, Virginia, June 2009. Through the Brazilian Wilderness by Theodore Roosevelt. Chapter 3, A Jaguar Hunt on the Tackery, Part 1. The morning after our arrival at Carumba, I asked Colonel Rondon to inspect our outfit. For his experience of what is necessary in tropical travel has been gained through a quarter of a century of arduous exploration in the wilderness. It was Fiala who had assembled our food tents, cooking utensils, and supplies of all kinds. And he and Sig, during their stay in Carumba, had been putting everything in shape for our start. Colonel Rondon, at the end of his inspection, said he had nothing whatever to suggest, that it was extraordinary that Fiala, without personal knowledge of the tropics, could have gathered the things most necessary with the minimum of bulk and maximum of usefulness. Miller had made a special study of the piranhas, which swarmed at one of the camps he and Shiree had made in the Chaco. So numerous were they that the members of the party had to be exceedingly careful in dipping up water. Miller did not find that they were cannibals toward their own kind. They were cannibals, only in the sense of eating the flesh of men. When dead piranhas, even when mortally injured piranhas, with the blood flowing, were thrown among the ravenous living, they were left unmolested. Moreover, it was Miller's experience, the direct contrary of which we had been told, that splashing and a commotion in the water attracted the piranhas, whereas they rarely attacked anything that was motionless, unless it was bloody. Dead birds and mammals, thrown whole and unskinned into the water, were permitted to float off unbolested, whereas the skin carcass of a good-sized monkey was at once seized, pulled under the water, and completely devoured by the blood-crazy fish. A man who had dropped something of value waited in after it too above the knees, but went very slowly and quietly, avoiding every possibility of disturbance, and not venturing to put his hands in the water. But nobody could bathe, and even the slightest disturbance in the water, such as that made by scrubbing the hands vigorously with soap, immediately attracted the attention of the savage little creatures who darted to the place. Evidently helping to find some animal in difficulties. Once, while Miller and some Indians were attempting to launch a boat, and were making a great commotion in the water, a piranha attacked a naked Indian who belonged to the party, and mutilated him as he struggled and splashed, waist deep in the stream. Men not making a splashing and struggling are rarely attacked, but if one is attacked by any chance, the blood in the water maddens the piranhas, and they assail the man with frightful ferocity. At Karumba, the weather was hot. In the patio of a comfortable little hotel, we heard the cicadas, but I did not hear the extraordinary screaming whistle of the locomotive's cicada, which I had heard in the gardens of the house, in which I stayed at Asuncion. This was as remarkable a sound as any animal sound to which I had listened, except only the patrician-like wailing of the tree hyrax in East Africa. And like the East African mammal, this South American insect has a voice, or rather utter is a sound which, so far as it resembles any other animal sound, at the beginning remotely suggest patrician affinities. The locomotive whistle part of the utterance, however, resembles nothing so much as a small steam siren. When first heard, it seems impossible that it would be produced by an insect. On December 17, Colonel Rondon and several members of our party started on a shallow river steamer for the ranch of Sr. de Barros, Las Palmeiras, on the Rio Tecari. We went down the Paraguay for a few miles, and then up the Tecari. It was a beautiful trip. The shallow river, we were around several times, wound through a vast marshy plain, with occasional spots of higher land on which trees grew. There were many water birds, darters swarmed, but the conspicuous and attractive bird was a stately Habiru stork. Flocks of these storks whiten the marshes and line the riverbanks. They were not shy for such big birds. Before flying, they had to run a few paces, and then launch themselves on the air. Once at noon, a couple soared round overhead in wide rings, rising higher and higher. On another occasion, late in the day, a flock passed by, gleaming white with black points in the long afternoon lights, and with them were spoonbills showing rosy among their snowy companions. Caymans, always called Hakare's, swarmed, and we killed scores of the noxious creatures. They were singularly indifferent to our approach and to the sound of the shots. Sometimes they ran into the water erect on their legs, looking like miniatures of the monsters of the prime. One showed by its behavior how little an ordinary shot pains or affects these dull-nerved, cold-blooded creatures. As it lay on a sand bank, it was hit with a long .22 bullet. It slid into the water but found itself in the midst of a school of fish. It had once forgot everything except its greedy appetite, and began catching the fish. It seized fish after fish, holding its head above water as soon as its jaws had closed on a fish, and a second bullet killed it. Some of the crocodiles when shot performed most extraordinary antics. Our weapons, by the way, were good except Miller's shotgun. The outfit furnished by the American Museum was excellent, except in guns and cartridges. This gun was so bad that Miller had to use Fiala's gun, or else my Fox 12 bore. In the late afternoon, we secured a more interesting creature than the Hakare's. Kermit had charge of two hounds, which we owed to the courtesy of one of our Argentine friends. They were big-ish, nondescript animals, obviously good fighters, and they speedily developed the utmost affection for all the members of the expedition. But especially for Kermit, who took care of them. One we named Shenzhi, the name given the wild bush natives by the Swahili. The semi-civilized African porters. He was good-natured, rough, and stupid, hence his name. The other was called by a native name, Trigüero. The chance now came to try them. We were steaming between long stretches of coarse grass, about three feet high, when we spied from the deck a black object, very conspicuous against the vivid green. It was a giant ant eater, or Tamandua Bandadera, one of the most extraordinary creatures of the latter-day world. It is about the size of a rather small black bear. It has a very long, narrow, toothless snout. With a tongue it can project a couple of feet. It is covered with coarse black hair, saved for a couple of light stripes. It has a long, bushy tail, and very powerful claws on its forefeet. It walks on the sides of its forefeet, with these claws curved in under the foot. The claws are used in digging out ant hills, but the beast has courage, and in a grapple is rather unpleasant, in spite of its toothless mouth. For it can strike a formidable blow with these claws. It sometimes hugs a foe, gripping him tight, but its ordinary method of defending itself is to strike with its long, stout, curved claws, which, driven by its muscular forearm, can rip open man or beast. Several of our companions had had dogs killed by these ant eaters, and we came across one man with a very ugly scar down his back, where he had been hit by one, which charged him when he came up to kill it at close quarters. As soon as we saw the giant Tamandua, we pushed off in a rowboat and landed only a couple of hundred yards distant from our clumsy quarry. The Tamandua, throughout most of its habitat, nearly leaves the forest, and it is a helpless animal in the open plain. The two dogs ran ahead, followed by Colonel Rondon and Kermit, with me behind carrying the rifle. In a minute or two, the hounds overtook the cantering, shuffling creature, and promptly began a fight with it. The combatants were so mixed up that I had to wait another minute or so before I could fly without risk of hitting a dog. We carried our prize back to the bank and hoisted it aboard the steamer. The sun was just about to set behind Din Mountains, many miles distant across the marsh. Soon afterwards, we reached one of the outstations of the huge ranch we were about to visit and hauled up alongside the bank for the night. There was a landing place, and sheds and corrals. Several of the peons or gauchos had come to meet us. After dark, they kindled fires and sat beside them, singing songs in a strange minor key and strumming guitars. The red firelight flickered over their wild figures as they squatted away from the blaze, where the light in the shadow met. It was still and hot. There were mosquitoes, of course, and other insects of all kinds swarmed around every light, but the steamboat was comfortable and we passed a pleasant night. At sunrise, we were off for the Fazenda, the ranch of M. de Barros. The baggage went in an ox cart, which had to make two trips so that all of my belongings reached the ranch a day later than I did. We rode small, tough ranch horses, the distance was some twenty miles. The whole country was marsh, varied by stretches of higher ground, and, although these stretches rose only three or four feet above the marsh, they were covered with thick jungle, largely palmettos scrub, or else with open palm forest. For three or four miles, we splashed through the marsh, now and then crossing boggy pools where the little horses labored hard not to mire down. Our dusky guide was clad in a shirt, trousers and fringed leather apron, and worse spurs on his bare feet. He had a rope for a bridle, and two or three toes of each foot were thrust into little iron stirrups. The pools in the marsh were dry, we were filled with fish, most of them dead or dying, and the birds had gathered to the banquet. The most notable dinner guests were the great Habiru Storks, the stately creatures dotted the marsh. But Ibis and Herons abounded, the former uttered queer, quarrelous cries when they discovered our presence. The spurred black wings were as noisy as they always were. The Ibis and Plover did not pay any heed to the fish, but the black carrion vultures feasted on them in the mud. And in the pools that were not dry, small alligators, the Hakare Tinga were feasting also. In many places, the stench from the dead fish was unpleasant. Then for miles we rode through a beautiful open forest of tall, slender Karanda palms, with other trees scattered among them. Green parakeets with black heads, chattered as they flew, noisy green and red parrots climbed among the palms, and huge macaws, some entirely blue, others almost entirely red, screamed loudly as they perched in the trees, or took wing at our approach. If one was wounded, its cries kept its companions circling around overhead. The naturalists found the bird fauna totally different from that which they had been collecting in the hill country near Kurumba, 70 or 80 miles distant, and birds swarmed, both species and individuals. South America has the most extensive and most varied ava fauna of all the continents. On the other hand, its mammalian fauna, although very interesting, is rather poor in number of species and individuals and in the size of the beasts. It possesses more mammals that are unique and distinctive in type than does any other continent save Australia, and they are of higher and much more varied types than in Australia. But there is nothing approaching the majesty, beauty, and swarming mass of the great mammalian life of Africa and, in a less degree, of tropical Asia. Indeed, it does not even approach the similar mammalian life of North America and Northern Eurasia. Poor, though this is compared with the seething vitality of tropical life in the old world. During a geologically recent period, a period extending into that which saw man spread over the world in a substantially the physical and cultural stage of many existing savages. South America possessed a varied and striking fauna of enormous beasts. Sabertooth tigers, huge lions, mastodons, horses of many kinds, camel-like pachyderms, giant ground sloths, myladons the size of the rhinoceros, and many, many other strange and wonderful creatures. For some cause, concerning the nature of which we cannot at present even hazard a guess, this vast and giant fauna vanished completely. The tremendous catastrophe, the duration of which is unknown, not being consummated until within a few thousand or a few score a thousand years. When the white man reached South America, he found the same weak and impoverished mammalian fauna that exists practically unchanged today. Elsewhere civilized man has been even more destructive than his very destructive, uncivilized brothers of the magnificent mammalian life of the wilderness. For ages he has been rooting out the higher forms of beast life in Europe, Asia, and North Africa, and in our own day has repeated defeat on a very large scale, in the rest of Africa and North America. But in South America, although he is in places responsible for the wanton slaughter of the most interesting and the largest, or the most beautiful birds, his advent has meant a positive enrichment of the wild men of Malian fauna. None of the native grass-eating mammals, the Grimina boars, approach in size and beauty the herds of wild or half-wild cattle and horses, were so add to the interests of the landscape. There is every reason why the good people of South America should waken, as we of North America, very late in the day, are beginning to waken. And as the peoples of Northern Europe, not Southern Europe, have already partially waken, to the duty of preserving from impoverishment and extinction the wild life which is an asset of such interest and value in our several lands. But the case against civilized man in this matter is gruesomely heavy anyhow, when the plain truth is told and is harmed by exaggeration. After five or six hours traveling through this country of marsh and of palm forest, we reached the ranch for which we were heading. In the neighborhood of giant fig trees, singly or in groups, with dense, dark green foliage. Ponds, overgrown with water plants, lay about. Wet meadow and drier pastureland, open or dotted with palms and varied with tree-jungle, stretch for many miles on every hand. There are some 30,000 head of cattle on the ranch, besides herds of horses and droves of swine, and a few flocks of sheep and goats. The home buildings of the ranch stood in a quadrangle, surrounded by a fence or low stockade. One end of the quadrangle was formed by the ranch house itself, one story high, with whitewashed walls and red-tiled roof. Inside, the rooms were bare with clean whitewashed walls and palm-chunk rafters. There were solid wooden shutters on the unglazed windows. We slept in hammocks or in cots, and we feasted royally on delicious native Brazilian dishes. On another side of the quadrangle stood another long, low, white building with a red-tiled roof. This held the kitchen and living rooms of the upper-grade peons, the headmen, the cook, and jaguar hunters with their families. Dark-skinned men, their wives showing varied strains of white, Indian, and eagle of blood. The children tumbled merrily in the dust and were fondly tended by their mothers. Opposite the kitchen stood a row of buildings, some whitewashed dog and model, with tin roofs, others of erect palm logs with palm-leaf stach. These were the saddle room, storehouse, chicken house, and stable. The chicken house was allotted to Kermit and Miller for the preparation of the specimens, and there they worked industriously, with a big skin, like that of a giant ant eater. They had to squat on the ground, while the ducklings and wee chickens scuffled not only round the skin, but all over it, grabbing the shreds and scraps of meat and catching flies. The fourth end of the quadrangle was formed by a corral and a big wooden scaffolding, and which hung hides and strips of drying meat. Extraordinary to relate, there were no mosquitoes at the ranch. Why I cannot say, as they ought to swarm in these vast chimtenals or swamps. Therefore, in spite of the heat, it was very pleasant. Nearby stood other buildings, sheds, and thatched huts of palm logs in which the ordinary peons lived, and big corrals. In the quadrangle were flamboyant trees, with their masses of brilliant red flowers and delicately cut vivid green foliage. Noisy oven birds haunted these trees. In a high palm in the garden, a family of green parakeets had taken up their abode and were preparing to build masts. They chattered incessantly, both when they flew and when they sat, or crawled among the branches. Ibis and clover, crying and wailing, passed intermittently overhead. Hakanas frequented the ponds nearby, the peons, with a familiarity which to us seemed sacrilegious. But to them was entirely inoffensive and madder, of course, called them to Jesus Christ birds because they walked on the water. There was a wealth of strange bird life in the neighborhood. There were large papyrus marshes, with papyrus not being a fifth, perhaps not a tenth, as high as in Africa. In these swamps were many blackbirds, some uttered notes that reminded me of our own redblades. Others, with crimson heads and necks and thighs, fairly blazed, often a dozen sat together on a swaying papyrus stem, which their weight bent over. They were all kinds of extraordinary birds nests in the trees. There is still need for the work of the collector in South America. But I believe that already, so far as birds are concerned, there is infinitely more need for the work of the careful observer. Who to the power of depreciation and observation leads to the power of vivid truthful and interesting narration. Which means, as scientists know less than historians should note, that training in the writing of good English is indispensable to any learned man who expects to make his learning count for what it ought to count in the effect of his fellow men. The outdoor naturalist, the faunal naturalist, who devotes himself primarily to a study of the habits and of the life histories of birds, beasts, fish and reptiles, and who can portray truthfully and vividly what he has seen, could do work of more usefulness than any mere collector in this upper Paraguay country. The work of the collector is indispensable, but it is only a small part of the work that ought to be done. And after collecting has reached a certain point, the work of the field observer, with the gift for recording what he has seen, becomes of far more importance. End of Chapter 3, Part 1 Chapter 3, Part 2 of Through the Brazilian Wilderness This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Adam Marcicic, Alexandria, Virginia, June 2009 Through the Brazilian Wilderness by Theodore Roosevelt Chapter 3, A Jaguar Hunt on the Tackery, Part 2 The long days spent riding through the swamp. The Pantanal were pleasant and interesting. Several times we saw the Tamandua Bandaira, a giant ant bear. Kermit shot one because the naturalists eagerly wished for a second specimen. Afterward we were relieved of all necessity to molest the strange, out-of-date creatures. It was a surprise to us to find them habitually frequenting the open marsh. They were always on muddy ground, and in the papyrus swamp we found them in several inches of water. The stomach is thick walled like a gizzard. The stomachs of those we shot contained adult and larval ants, chiefly termites, together with plenty of black mold and fragments of leaves, both green and dry. Doubtless the earth and the vegetable matter had merely been taken incidentally, adhering to the viscid tug when it was roughed into the ant masses. Out in the open marsh, the Tamandua could neither avoid observation, nor fight effectively, nor make good its escape by flight. It was curious to see one lumbering off at a rocking canter. The big bushy tail held aloft. One, while fighting the dogs, suddenly threw itself on its back, evidently hoping to grasp a dog with its paws. And now and then, weird, in order to strike at its assailants. In one patch of thick jungle, we saw a black howler monkey sitting motionless in a tree top. We also saw the swamp deer, about the size of our black tail. It is a real swamp animal, for we found it often in the papyrus swamps and out in the open marsh, knee deep in the water, among the aquatic plants. The tough little horses bore us well through the marsh. Often in crossing the bayous and ponds, the water rose almost to their backs, but they splashed and waited, and if necessary, swam through. The dogs were a wild looking set, somewhere of distinctly wolfish appearance. These, we were assured, were descended in part from the big bread wolf of the neighborhood, a tall, lank animal. With much smaller teeth than a big northern wolf. The domestic dog is undoubtedly descended from at least a dozen different species of wild dogs, wolves, jackals, some of them probably belonging to what we style different genera. The degree of fecundity, or lack of fecundity between different species, varies in extraordinary and inexplicable fashion in different families of mammals. In the horse family, for instance, the species are not infertile intercede. Whereas among the oxen, species seemingly at least as widely separated as the horse, ass, and zebra species such as the domestic ox, bison, yak, and gaur breed freely together in their offspring are fertile. The lion and tiger also breed together and produce offspring which will breed with either parent stock. And tame dogs in different quarters of the world, although all of them fertile intercede, are in many cases obviously bloodkin to the neighboring wild wolf-like or jackal-like creatures which are specifically, and possibly even generically, distinct from each other. The big red wolf of the South American plains is not closely related to the northern wolves, and it was to me unexpected to find it interbreeding with ordinary domestic dogs. In the evenings after dinner, we sat in the bare ranch dining room, or out under the trees in the hot darkness, and talked of many things, natural history with the naturalists, and of all kinds of other subjects both with them and with our Brazilian friends. Colonel Rondon is not simply an officer and a gentleman in the sense that is honorably true of the best army officers in every good military service. He is also a peculiarly hearty and competent explorer, a good field naturalist and scientific man, a student and a philosopher. With him, the conversation ranged from jaguar hunting and the perils of exploration in the motto grasso, the great wilderness, to Indian anthropology, to the dangers of a purely materialistic industrial civilization, and to positivist morality. The Colonel's positivism was in very fact to him a religion of humanity, a creed which made him be just and kindly and useful to his fellow men, to live his life bravely, and no less bravely to face death, without reference to what he believed, or did not believe, or to what the unknown hereafter might hold for him. The native hunters who accompanied us were swearly men of mixed blood. They were barefooted and scantily clad, and each carried a long, clumsy spear and a keen machete, in the use of which he was an expert. Now and then, in the thick jungle, we had to cut out a path, and it was interesting to see one of them, though cumbered by his unwieldy spear, handling his half-broken little horse with complete ease while he hacked at limbs and branches. Of the two ordinary with us was one much the younger, and whenever we came to an unusually doubtful looking Ford, or piece of boggy ground, the elder man always sent the younger one on, and sat on the bank until he saw what befell the experimenter. In that rather preposterous book of our youth, the Swiss family Robinson, mention is made of a tame monkey called Nips, which was used to test all edible looking things as to the helpfulness of which the adventurer is felt doubtful, and because of the obvious resemblance of function we christen this younger hunter Nips. Our guides were not only hunters, but cattle herders. The coarse dead grass is burned to make room for the green young grass on which the cattle thrive. Every now and then one of the men, as he rode ahead of us, without leaving the saddle, would drop a lighted match into a tussock of tall dead blades, and even as we who were behind rode by tongues of hot flame would be shooting up and a local prairie fire would have started. Kermit took Nips off with him for a solitary hunt one day. He shot two of the big marsh deer, a buck and a doe, and preserved them as museum specimens. They were in the papyrus grove, but their stomachs contained only the fine marsh grass which grows in the water and on the land along the edges of the swamps. The papyrus was used only for cover, not for food. The buck had two big scent glands beside the nostrils. In the doe these were rudimentary. On this day Kermit also came across a herd of the big fierce white-lip peccary. At the sound of their grunting Nips promptly spurred his horse and took to his heels, explaining that the peccaries would charge them, hamstring the horses, and kill the riders. Kermit went into the jungle after the truckulent little hogs on foot and followed them for an hour, but never was able to catch sight of them. In the afternoon of this same day one of the jaguar hunters, merely ranch hands, who knew something of the chase of the jaguar, who had been searching for tracks, rode in with the information that he had found fresh sign at a spot in the swamp about nine miles distant. Next morning we rose at two and had started on our jaguar hunt at three. Colonel Rondon, Kermit, and I, with the two trailers or jaguar hunters, made up the party, each on a weedy undersized marsh pony, accompanied to traversing the vast stretches of Morass, and we were accompanied by a brown boy with saddlebags holding our lunch, who rode a long horn trotting steer which he managed by a string through its nostril and lip. The two trailers carried each along clumsy spear. We had a rather poor pack. Besides our own two dogs, neither of which was used to jaguar hunting, they were the ranch dogs, which were well nigh worthless. And then two jaguar hounds, borrowed for the occasion, from a ranch six or eight leagues distant. These were the only hounds on which we could place any trust, and they were led in leashes by the two trailers. One was a white bitch, the other, the best one we had, was a gelded black dog. They were lean, half-starred creatures with prick ears, and a look of furtive wildness. As our shabby little horses shuffled away from the ranch house, the stars were brilliant, and the southern cross hung well up in the heavens, tilted to the right. The landscape was spectral in the light of the waning moon. At the first shallow ford, as horses and dogs splashed across, an alligator, the Hakare Tinga, some five feet long, floated unconcernedly among the splashing proofs and paws. Evidently at night it did not fear us. Hour after hour we slogged along. Then the night grew ghostly with the first dim gray of the dawn. The sky had become overcast. The sun rose red and angry through the broken clouds. His disc flamed behind the tall slender columns of the palms and lit the waste fields of papyrus. The black monkeys howled mournfully. The birds awoke. Macaws, parrots, parakeets screamed at us and chattered at us as we rode by. Ibis called with wailing voices, and the plovers shrieked as they wheeled in the air. We waded across bayous and ponds, where white lilies floated on the water and thronging lilac flowers splashed the green marsh with color. At last, on the edge of a patch of jungle, in wet ground, we came on fresh jaguar tracks. Both the jaguar hounds challenged the sign. They were unleashed and galloped along the trail, while the other dogs noisily accompanied them. The hunt led right through the marsh. Evidently, the jaguar had not the least distaste for water. Probably it had been hunting for capybaras or tapers, and it had gone straight through palms and long winding narrow ditches or vials, where it must now and then have had to swim for a stroke or two. It had also wandered through the island-like stretches of tree-covered land, the trees at this point being mostly palms and taromans. The taromon is almost as big as a live oak, with glossy foliage and fruit like an olive. The pace quickened, the motley pack burst into yelling and howling, and then a sudden quickening of the note showed that the game had either climbed a tree or turned to bay in a thicket. The former proved to be the case. The dogs had entered a patch of tall tree jungle, and as we cantered up through the marsh, we saw the jaguar high among the folk limbs of a taromon tree. It was a beautiful picture, the spotted coat of the big, live, formidable cat, fairly shown as it snarled the fiance at the pack below. I did not trust the pack. The dogs were not stanch, and if the jaguar came down and started, I feared we might lose it, so I fired it once, from a distance of 70 yards. I was using my favorite rifle, the Little Springfield, which I have killed most kinds of African game, from the lion and elephant down. The bullets were the sharp pointed kind, with the end of naked lead. At the shot, the jaguar fell like a sack of sand through the branches, and although it staggered to its feet, it went but a score of yards before it sank down. And when I came up, it was dead under the palms, with three or four of the boulder dogs writhing at it. The jaguar is the king of South American game, ranking on an equalty with the noblest beasts of the chase of North America, and behind only the huge and fierce creatures which stand at the head of the big game of Africa and Asia. This one was an adult female. It was heavier and more powerful than a full grown male cougar, or African panther, or leopard. It was a big, powerfully built creature, giving the same effective strength that a tiger or lion does, but that the live leopards and pumas do not. Its flesh, by the way, proved good eating, and when we had it for supper, although it was not cooked in the way it ought to have been. I tried it because I had found cougars such good eating. I have always regretted that in Africa I did not try lion's flesh, which I am sure must be excellent. Next day came Kermit's turn. We had the miscellaneous pack with us, all much enjoying themselves, but although they could help in a jaguar hunt to the extent of giving tongue and following the chase for half a mile, calling the quarry by their clamor, they were not sufficiently staunch to be of use if there was any difficulty in the hunt. The only two dogs we could trust were the two borrowed jaguar hounds. This was the black dog's day. About 10 in the morning we came to a long, deep, winding bayou. On the opposite bank stood a capybara, looking like a blunt nose pig, its wet hide shining black. I killed it and it slid into the water. Then I found that the bayou extended for a mile or two in each direction, and the two hunter guides said they did not wish to swim across for fear of the piranhas. Just at this moment we came across fresh jaguar tracks. It was hot. We had been traveling for five hours, and the dogs were much exhausted. The black hound in particular was nearly done up, for he had been led in a leash by one of the horsemen. He lay flat on the ground, panting, unable to catch the scent. Kermit threw water over him, and when he was thoroughly drenched in freshened, thrust his nose into the jaguar's footprints. The game old hound at once and eagerly responded. As he snuffed the scent, he challenged loudly, while still laying down. Then he staggered to his feet and started on the trail, going stronger with every leap. Evidently the big cat was not far distant. Soon we found where it had swum across the bayou. Piranhas or no piranhas, we now intended to get across, and we tried to force our horses in at what seemed a likely spot. The matted growth of water plants, with their leathery, slippery stems, formed an unpleasant barrier, as the water was swimming deep for the horses. The latter were very unwilling to attempt the passage. Kermit finally forced his horse through the tangled mass, swimming, plunging and struggling. He left a lane of clear water, through which we swam after him. The dogs splashed and swam behind us. On the other bank they struck the fresh trail and followed it at a run. It led into a long belt of timber, chiefly composed of low-growing, knackery palms, with long, drooping, many fronded branches. In silhouette they suggest coarse bamboos. The nuts hang in big clusters and look like bunches of small, unripe bananas. Among the lower palms were scattered some big, ordinary trees. We cantered along outside the timber belt, listening to the dogs within, and in a moment a burst of yelling clamor from the pack told us that the jaguar was afoot. These few minutes are the really exciting moments in the chase, with hounds of any big cat that will tree. The furious baying of the pack, the shouts and cheers of encouragement from the galloping horsemen, the wilderness surroundings, the knowledge of what the quarry is, all combined to make the moment one of fierce and thrilling excitement. Besides, in this case there was the possibility the jaguar might come to bay on the ground, in which event there would be a slight element of risk, as it might need straight shooting to stop a charge. However, as soon as the long drawn howling and eager yelping showed that the jaguar had been overtaken, we saw him, a huge male, up in the branches of a great fig tree. A bullet behind the shoulder, from Kermit's 405 Winchester, brought him dead to the ground. He was heavier than the very big male horse-killing kugari shot in Colorado, whose skull, Hart Merriam, reported as the biggest he had ever seen. He was very nearly double the weight of any of the male African leopards we shot. He was nearly or quite the weight of the smallest of the adult African lionesses we shot while in Africa. He had the big bones, the stout frame, and the heavy muscular build of a small lion. He was not lithe and slender and long like a cougar or leopard. The tail, as with all jaguars, was short. While the girth of the body was great, his coat was beautiful, with a satiny gloss. And the dark brown spots on the gold of his back, head, and sides were hardly as conspicuous as the black of the equally well-marked spots against his white belly. This was a well-known jaguar. He had occasionally indulged in cattle killing. On one occasion during the floods, he had taken up his abode near the ranch house, and had killed a couple of cows in a young steer. The hunters had followed him, but he had made his escape, and for the time being had abandoned the neighborhood. In these marshes, each jaguar had a wide irregular range and traveled a good deal, perhaps only passing a day or two in a given locality. Perhaps spending a week there while game was plentiful. Jaguars love the water. They drink greedily and swim freely. In this country, they rambled through the night across the marshes and prowled along the edges of the ponds and bayous, catching the capybaras and the caimans. For these small pond caimans, the hakare tinga form part of their habitual food, and a big jaguar when hungry will attack and kill large caimans in the crocodiles if he can get them a few yards from the water. On these marshes, the jaguars also follow the peccary herds. It is said that they always strike the hindmost of the band of the fierce little wild pigs. Elsewhere, they often prey on the tapir. If in timber, however, the jaguar must kill it at once, for the squat, thick-skinned wedge-shaped taper has no respect for timber, as Colonel Rondon phrased it, and rushes with such blind headlong speed through and among the branches and trunks that if not immediately killed, it brushes the jaguar off, the claws leaving long-waking scars in the tough hide. Cattle are often killed. The jaguar will not meddle with a big bull, and is cautious about attacking a herd accompanied by a bull, but it will at times, where a wild game is scarce, kill every other domestic animal. It is a thirsty brew, and if it kills far from water, will often drag its victim a long distance toward a pond or stream. Colonel Rondon had once come across a horse which a jaguar had thus killed, and dragged for over a mile. Jaguars also stalk and kill the deer. In this neighborhood, they seem to be less habitual deer hunters than the cougars. Whether this is generally the case, I cannot say. They have been known to pounce on and devour good-sized anacondas. In this particular neighborhood, the ordinary jaguars molested the cattle and horses hardly at all, except now, and then to kill calves. It was only occasionally that under special circumstances, some old male took to cattle killing. There were plenty of capybaras and deer, and evidently the big-spotted cats preferred the easier prey when it was available. Exactly as in East Africa, we found guayans living almost exclusively on zebra and antelope, and not molesting the buffalo and domestic cattle, which in other parts of Africa finished their habitual prey. In some other neighborhoods, not far distant, our host informed us that the jaguars lived almost exclusively on horses and cattle. They also told us that the cougars had the same habits as the jaguars, except that they did not prey on such big animals. The cougars on this ranch never molested the foals, a fact which astonished me. As in the Rockies, they are the worst enemies of foals. It was interesting to find that my hosts, and the mixed-blood hunters and ranch workers, combined special knowledge of many of the habits of these big cats with a curious ignorance of other matters concerning them, and a readiness to believe fables about them. This was precisely what I had found to be the case, with the old-time North American hunters in discussing the puma, bear, and wolf, and with the English and Boer hunters of Africa, when they spoke of the lion and rhinoceros. Until a habit of scientific accuracy and observation and record is achieved, and until specimens are preserved and carefully compared, entirely truthful men, at home in the wilderness, with wholeheartedly accept, and repeat as monitors of gospel faith, theories which split the grisly and black bears of each locality in the United States, and the lions and black rhinos of South Africa, or the jaguars and pumas of any portion of South America, into several different species, all with widely different habits. They will, moreover, describe these imaginary habits with such sincerity and minuteness that they deceive most listeners, and the result sometimes is that an otherwise good naturalist will perpetuate these failures, as Hudson did when he wrote of the puma. Hudson was a capital observer and writer when he dealt with the ordinary birds and mammals of the well-settled districts near Buenos Aires, and at the mouth of the Rio Negro. But he knew nothing of the wilderness. This is no reflection on him. His books are great favorites of mine, and are to a large degree models of what such books should be. I only wish that there were hundreds of such writers and observers who would give us similar books for all parts of America, but it is a mistake to accept him as an authority on that concerning which he was ignorant. End of Chapter 3 Part 2 Chapter 3 Part 3 of Through the Brazilian Wilderness This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Adam Marcetich, Alexandria of Virginia, June 2009. Through the Brazilian Wilderness by Theodore Roosevelt, Chapter 3 A Jaguar Hunt on the Tackery Part 3 An interesting incident occurred on the day we killed our first jaguar. We took our lunch beside a small but deep and obviously permanent pond. I went to the edge to dip up some water, and something growled or bellowed at me only a few feet away. It was a hakari tinga where small came in about five feet long. I paid no heed to it at the moment, but shortly afterwards, when our horses went down to drink, it threatened them and frightened them, and then Colonel Rondon and Kermit called me to watch it. It lay on the surface of the water only a few feet distant from us and threatened us. We threw cakes of mud at it, whereupon it clashed its jaws and made short rushes at us, and when we threw sticks it seized them and crunched them. We could not drive it away. Why it should have shown such truculence and heedlessness, I cannot imagine, unless perhaps it was a female with eggs nearby. In another little pond, a hakari tinga showed no less anger when another of my companions approached. It bellowed, opened its jaws, and lashed its tail, yet these pan hakaris never actually molested even our dogs in the ponds, far less us on our horses. This same day, others of our party had an interesting experience with the creatures in another pond. One of them was Commander Dacunha of the Brazilian Navy, a capital sportsman and delightful companion. They found a deepish pond about 100 yards or so long and 30 or 40 across. It was tenanted by the small caimans and by Capybaras, the largest known rodent, a huge aquatic guinea pig the size of a small sheep. It also swarmed with piranhas, the ravenous fish of which I have so often spoken. Undoubtedly the caimans were subsisting largely on these piranhas, but the tables were readily turned if any caimans were injured. When a capybara was shot and sank in the water, the piranhas at once attacked it and had eaten half the carcass ten minutes later. But much more extraordinary was the fact that when a caiman about five feet long was wounded. The piranhas attacked and tore it and actually drove it out on the bank to face its human foes. The fish first attacked the wound, then as the blood maddened them, they attacked all the soft parts, their terrible teeth cutting out chunks of tough hide and flesh. Eventually they did not molest either caiman or capybara while it was unwounded, but blood excited them to frenzy. Their habits are in some ways inexplicable. We saw men frequently bathing unmolested, but there are places where this is never safe, and in any place if a school of the fish appears, swimmers are in danger, and a wounded man or beast is in deadly peril if piranhas are in the neighborhood. Ordinarily it appears that an unruined man is attacked only by accident. Such accidents are rare, but they happen with sufficient frequency to justify a much caution in entering water where piranhas abound. We frequently came across ponds tenanted by numbers of capybaras. The huge pig-like rodents are said to be shy elsewhere. Here they were tamed. The water was their home and refuge. They usually went ashore to feed on the grass, and made well-beaten trails in the marsh immediately around the water, but they must have traveled these at night, for we never saw them more than a few feet away from the water in the daytime. Even at midday we often came on them standing beside a bayou or pond. The dogs would rush wildly at such a standing beast, which would wait until they were only a few yards off, and then dash into and under the water. The dogs would also run full tilt into the water, and it was then really funny to see their surprise and disappointment at the sudden and complete disappearance of their quarry. Often a capybara would stand or sit on its haunches in the water, with only its blunt, short-eared head above the surface, quite heedless of our presence. But if alarmed it would die, for capybaras swim with equal facility on or below the surface, and if they wish to hide, they rise gently among the rushes or watery-laden leaves, with only their nostrils exposed. In these waters the capybara and small caimans paid no attention to one another, swimming and resting in close proximity. They both had the same enemy, the jaguar. The capybara is a game animal, only in the sense that a hare or a rabbit is. The flesh is good to eat, and its amphibious habits are queer nature and surrounding to make it interesting. In some of the ponds, the water had about gone, and the capybaras had become, for the time being, beasts of the marsh and the mud. Although they could always find little slimy pools, under a mass of water lilies, in which to lie and hide. Our whole stay on this ranch was delightful. On the long rides we always saw something adventurous, and often it was something entirely new to us. Early one morning we came across two armadillos, the big nine-banded armadillo. We were riding with a pack through a dry, sandy pasture country dotted with clumps of palms, around the trunks of which grew a dense jungle of thorns and Spanish bayonets. The armadillos were feeding in an open space between two of these jungle clumps, which were about a hundred yards apart. One was on all fours, the other was in a squatting position, with its four legs off the ground. The long ears were very prominent, the dogs raced at them. I had always supposed that armadillos merely shuffled along and curled up for protection when menaced, and I was almost surprised, as if I had seen a turtle gallop when these two armadillos bounced off at a run, going as fast as rabbits. One headed back for the nearest patch of jungle, which it reached. The other ran at full speed, and ran really fast too, until it nearly reached the other patch, a hundred yards distant. The dogs in full cry immediately behind it. Then it suddenly changed its mind, wheeled in its tracks, and came back like a bullet right through the pack. Dog after dog tried to seize it or stop it and turn to pursue it, but its wedge-shaped snout and armored body joined to the speed at which it was galloping, enabled it to dive straight ahead through its pursuers, not one of which could halt it or grasp it. And it reached in safety its thorny haven of refuge. It had run at speed about 150 yards. I was much impressed by this unexpected exhibition. Evidently, this species of armadillo only curls up as a last resort and ordinarily trusts to its speed, and to the protection its build and armor give it while running, in order to reach its burrow or other place of safety. Twice, while laying railway tracks near Sao Paulo, Kermit had accidentally dug up armadillos with a steam shovel. There were big ant hills, some of them huge dimensions, scattered through the country. Sometimes they were built against the stems of trees. We did not hear come across any of the poisonous or biting ants, which, when sufficiently numerous, render certain districts uninhabitable. They are ordinarily not very numerous. Those of them that march in large bodies kill nesting birds, and it once destroy any big animal unable to get out of their way. It has been suggested that nestlings in their nests are in some way immune from the attack of these ants. The experiments of our naturalists tended to show that this was not the case. They plundered any nests they came across and could get at. Once we saw a small herd of peccaries, one of Sao followed by three little pigs. They are said to have only two young, but we saw three, although of course it is possible one belonged to another Sao. The herd galloped into a massive thorny cover the hounds could not penetrate. And when they were in safety we heard them utter, from the depths of the jungle, a curious moaning sound. In one ride we passed a clump of palms, which were fairly ablaze with bird color. There were magnificent hyacinth macaws, green parrots with red splashes, two cans with varied plumage, black, white, red, yellow, green, hockmars, flaming orioles in both blue and dark red tannagers. It was an extraordinary collection. All were noisy. Perhaps there was also a snake that had drawn them by its present. But we could find no snake. The assembly dispersed as we rode up. The huge blue macaws departed in pairs, uttering their hoarse, It has been said that parrots in the wilderness are only noisy on the wing. They were certainly noisy on the wing, and those that we saw were quiet while they were feeding. But ordinarily, when they were perched among the branches, and especially when, as in the case of the little parakeets near the house, they were gathering materials for nest building. They were just as noisy while flying. The water birds were always a delight. We shot merely the two or three specimens the naturalists needed for the museum. I killed a wood ibis on the wing with the handy little spring field, and then lost all the credit I had thus gained by a series of inexcusable misses at long range before I finally killed a hibiru. Kermit shot a hibiru with the luger automatic. The great splendid birds, standing about as tall as a man, show flight when wounded, and advance against their assailants, clattering their formidable bills. One day, we found the nest of a hibiru in a mighty fig tree on the edge of a patch of jungle. It was a big platform of sticks placed on a horizontal branch. There were four half-grown young standing on it. We passed it in the morning when both parents were also perched alongside. The sky was then overcast, and it was not possible to photograph it with a small camera. In the early afternoon, when we again passed it, the sun was out, and we tried to get photographs. Only one parent bird was present at this time. It showed no fear. I noticed that, as it stood on a branch near the nest, its bill was slightly open. It was very hot, and I suppose it had opened its bill just as a hen opens her bill in hot weather. As we rode away, the old bird and the four young birds were standing motionless, and with gliding flight, the other old bird was returning to the nest. It is hard to give an adequate idea of the wealth of bird life in these marshes. A naturalist could, with the utmost advantage, spend six months on such a branch as that we visited. He would have to do some collecting, but only a little. Exhaustive observation in the field is what is now most needed. Most of this wonderful and harmless bird life should be protected by law, and the mammals should receive reasonable protection. The books now most needed are those dealing with the life histories of wild creatures. Near the ranch house, walking familiarly among the cattle, we saw the big, deep-billed Ani Blackbirds. They feed on the insects disturbed by the hoofs of the cattle, and often cling to them and pick off the ticks. It was the end of the nesting season, and we did not find their curious communal mess, in which half a dozen females lay their eggs indiscriminately. The common ibises in the ponds nearby, which usually went in pairs, instead of in flocks like the wood ibis, were very tame, and so were the night herons and all the small herons. In flying, the ibises and storks stretched the neck straight in front of them. The habiru, a splendid bird on the wing, also stretches his neck out in front, but there appears to be a slight downward curve at the base of the neck, which may be due merely to the craw. The big slender herons, on the contrary, bend the long neck back in a beautiful curve, so that the head is nearly between the shoulders. One day I saw what I at first thought was a small yellow-bellied kingfisher hovering over a pond, and finally plunging down to the surface of the water after a school of tiny young fish. But it proved to be a bien to the kingbird. Curved-bill wood-hewers, birds the size and somewhat the coloration of veeries, but with long slender sickle-bills were common in the little garden back of the house. Their habits were those of creepers, and they scrambled with agility up along and under the trunks and branches, and along the posts and rails of the fence, thrusting the bill into crevices for insects. The ovenbirds, which had the carriage and somewhat the look of wood thrushes, I am sure would prove delightful friends on the close acquaintance. They are very individual, not only in the extraordinary domed mud nests they build, but in all their ways, in their bright alertness, their interest and in curiosity about whatever goes on. Their rather jerky quickness of movement, and their loud and varied calls. With a little encouragement, they become tame and familiar. The parakeets were too noisy, but otherwise were most attractive little birds, as they flew to and fro and scrambled about in the top of the palm behind the house. There was one showy kind of kingbird, or tyrant flycatcher, lustrous black with a white head. One afternoon, several score cattle were driven into a big square corral near the house, in order to brand the calves in a number of unbranded yearlings and two-year-olds. A special element of excitement was added by the presence of a dozen big bulls, which were to be turned into draught oxen. The agility, nerve, and prowess of the ranch workmen, the herders or gauchos, were noteworthy. The dark-skinned men were obviously mainly of Indian and Negro descent, although some of them also showed a strong strain of white blood. They wore the usual shirt, trousers, and fringed leather apron with Jim Crow hats. Their bare feet must had been literally as tough as horn, for when one of them roped a big bull, he would brace himself, standing back until he was almost sitting down and digging his heels into the ground, and the galloping beast would be stopped short and whirled completely round when the rope tautened. The maddened bulls, an occasional steer or cow, charged again and again with furious wrath, but two or three ropes would settle on the doomed beast and down it would go, and when it was released and rose and charged once more with greater fury than ever, the men, shouting with laughter, would leap up the sides of the heavy stockade. We stayed at the ranch a couple of days before Christmas. Hither, too, the weather had been lovely. The night before we left there was a torrential, tropic downpour. It was not unexpected, for we had been told that the rainy season was overdue. The following forenoon, the baggage started in a couple of two-wheeled ox carts. For the landing, where the steamboater waited us. Each cart was drawn by eight oxen. The huge wheels were over seven feet high. Early in the afternoon we followed on horseback and overtook the carts as darkness fell, just before we reached the landing on the river's bank. The last few miles after the final reaches of higher, tree-clad ground had been passed, we're across a level plain of low ground on which the water stood, sometimes only up to the ankles of a man on foot, sometimes as high as his waist. Directly in front of us, many leagues distant, rose the bold mountains that lie west of Carumba. Behind them the sun was setting and kindled the overcast heavens with lurid splendor. Then the last rose tints faded from the sky. The horses plotted wearily through the water, on every side stretched the marsh, vast, lonely, desolate in the gray of the half-light. We overtook the ox carts, the cattle strained in the yokes, the drivers waiting alongside cracked their whips and uttered strange cries. The carts rocked and swayed as the huge wheels churned through the mud and water. As the last light faded, we reached the small patches of dry land at the landing, where the flat bottom, side-wheeled steamboat was moored to the bank. The tired horses and oxen were turned loose to grays. Water stood in the corrals, but the open shed was on dry ground. Under it, the half-clad, wild-looking ox-drivers and horse-herders slung their hammocks, and close by they lit a fire and roasted, or scorched, slabs of legs and mutton, spitted on sticks and propped above the smoldering flame. Next morning, with real regret, waved goodbye to our dusky attendance as they stood on the bank, grouped around a little fire and beside the big empty ox carts. A dozen miles downstream, a rowboat fitted for a spritz sale put off from the bank. The owner, a countryman from a small ranch, asked for a tow to Karumba, which we gave. He had with him in the boat his comely brown wife, who was smoking very large cigar, their two children, a young man, and a couple of trunks and various other belongings. On Christmas Eve, we reached Karumba and rejoined the other members of the expedition. At Karumba, our entire party and all their belongings came aboard our good little riverboat, the Nyowak. Christmas Day saw us making our way steadily upstream against the strong current and between the green and beautiful banks of the upper Paraguay. The shallow little steamer was jammed with men, dogs, rifles, partially cured skins, boxes of provisions, ammunition, tools, and photographic supplies, bags containing tents, cots, bedding, and clothes, saddles, hammocks, and the other necessaries, for a trip through the great wilderness, the Maddo Grasso of western Brazil. It was a brilliantly clear day, and although, of course, in that latitude and at that season the heat was intense later on, it was cool and pleasant in the early morning. We sat on the forward deck admiring the trees on the brink of the sheer river banks, the lush-ranked grass of the marshes, and the many water-birds. The two pilots, one black and one white, stood at the wheel. Colonel Rondon read Thomas A. Kempis. Kermit, Sherry, and Miller squatted outside the railing on the deck over one paddle-wheel and put the final touches on the jaguar skins. Fialo satisfied himself that the boxes and bags were in place. It was probable that hardship lay in the future, but the day was our own and the day was pleasant. In the evening the after-deck, open all around, where we dined, was decorated with green boughs and rushes, and we drank the help of the President of the United States and of the President of Brazil. Now and then we passed little ranches on the river's edge. This is a fertile land, pleasant to live in, and any settler who is willing to work can earn his living. There are mines, there is water-power, there is abundance of rich soil. The country will soon be opened by rail. It offers a fine field for immigration and for agricultural, mining, and business development, and it has a great future. Sherry and Miller had secured a little owl a month before in the Chaco, and it was traveling with them in a basket. It was a dear little bird, very tame and affectionate. It liked to be handled and petted, and when Miller, its a special protector, came into the cabin, it would make queer little noises as a signal that it wished to be taken up and perched on his hand. Sherry and Miller had trapped many mammals. Among them was a Tyra weasel, whitish above and black below, as big and blood-thirsty as a fisher-martin, and a tiny opossum no bigger than a mouse. They had taken four species of opossum, but they had not found the curious water-opossum, which they had obtained on the rivers flowing into the Caribbean Sea. This opossum, which is black and white, swims in the streams like a muskrat or otter, catching fish and living in burrows which open under water. Miller and Sherry were puzzled to know why the young throve, leading such an existence of constant immersion. One of them once found a female swimming and diving freely with four quite well-grown young in her pouch. We saw on the banks screamers, big, crested waders of archaic type, with spurred wings, rather short bills, and no special affinities with other modern birds. In one meadow by a pond we saw three marsh deer, a buck and two does. They stared at us with their thickly-haired tails raised on end. These tails are black underneath instead of white as in our white-tailed deer. One of the vagaries of the ultra-concealing colorationists has been to uphold the incidentally quite preposterous theory that the tail of our deer is colored white beneath so as to harmonize with the sky and thereby mislead the cougar or wolf at the critical moment when it makes its spring. But this marsh deer shows a black instead of a white flag, and yet has just as much need of protection from its enemies, the jaguar and the cougar. In South America, concealing coloration plays no more part in the lives of the adult deer, the tamandua, the tapir, the peccary, the jaguar, and the puma than it plays in Africa in the lives of such animals as the zebra, the sable antelope, the wildebeest, the lion, and the hunting hyena. Next day we spent ascending the Sao Lorenzo. It was narrower than the Paraguay, naturally, and the swirling brown current was, if anything, more rapid. The strange tropical trees standing densely on the banks were matted together by long bush ropes, lianas or vines, some very slender and very long. Sometimes we saw brilliant red or blue flowers or masses of scarlet berries on a queer palm-like tree, or an array of great white blossoms on a much larger tree. In a lagoon bordered by the taquera bamboo, a school of big otters were playing. When they came to the surface, they opened their mouths like seals and made a loud hissing noise. The crested screamers, dark gray and as large as turkeys, perched on the very topmost branches of the tallest trees. Hyacinth macaws screamed harshly as they flew across the river. Among the trees was the guan, another peculiar bird as big as a big grouse and with certain habits of the wood grouse, but not akin to any northern game bird. The windpipe of the male is very long, extending down to the end of the breastbone and the bird utters queer guttural screams. A dead caiman floated downstream with a black bolter devouring it. Capybaras stood or squatted on the banks. Sometimes they stared stupidly at us. Sometimes they plunged into the river at our approach. At long intervals we passed little clearings. In each stood a house of palm logs with a steeply pitched roof of palm thatch and nearby were patches of corn and manioc. The dusky owner and perhaps his family came out on the bank to watch us as we passed. It was a hot day. The thermometer on the deck in the shade stood at nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Biting flies came aboard even when we were in midstream. Next day we were ascending the Kayaba River. It had begun raining in the night and the heavy downpour continued throughout the forenoon. In the morning we halted at a big cattle ranch to get fresh milk and beef. There were various houses, sheds and corrals near the river's edge and fifty or sixty milk cows were gathered in one corral. Spurred plover or laugh wings strolled familiarly among the hens. Parakeets and red-headed tannagers lit in the trees over our heads. A kind of primitive houseboat was moored at the bank. A woman was cooking breakfast over a little stove at one end. The crew were ashore. The boat was one of those which are really stores and which travel up and down these rivers, laden with what the natives most need and stopping wherever there is a ranch. They are the only stores which many of the country dwellers see from years end to years end. They float downstream and upstream are pulled by their crew, or now and then get a tow from a steamer. This one had a house with a tin roof. Others barehouses with thatched roofs or with roofs made of hides. The river wound through vast marshes broken by belts of woodland. Always the two naturalists had something of interest to tell of their past experience, suggested by some bird or beast we came across. Black and golden orioles, slightly crested, of two different species were found along the river. They nest in colonies, and often we pass such colonies. The long, pendulous nests hanging from the boughs of trees directly over the water. Sherry told us of finding such a colony built round a big wasp nest several feet in diameter. These wasps are venomous and irritable, and few foes would dare venture near birds' nests that were under such formidable shelter. But the birds themselves were entirely unafraid and obviously were not in any danger of disagreement with their dangerous protectors. We saw a dark ibis flying across the bow of the boat, uttering its deep, two-syllable note. Miller told how on the Orinoco these ibises plunder the nests of the big river turtles. They are very skillful in finding where the female turtle has laid her eggs, scratch them out of the sand, break the shells, and suck the contents. It was astonishing to find so few mosquitoes on these marshes. They did not in any way compare as pests with the mosquitoes on the lower Mississippi, the New Jersey coast, the Red River of the North, or the Coutenay. Back in the forest, near Carumba, the naturalists had found them very bad indeed. Sherry had spent two or three days on a mountaintop which was bare of forest. He had thought there would be few mosquitoes, but the long grass harbored them. They often swarm in long grass and bush, even where there is no water. And at night they were such a torment that as soon as the sun set he had to go to bed under his mosquito netting. Yet on the vast marshes they were not seriously troublesome in most places. I was informed that they were not in any way a bother on the grassy uplands, the high country north of Kayaba, which from thence stretches eastward to the coastal region. It is at any rate certain that this inland region of Brazil, including the state of Mano Grasso, which we were traversing, is a healthy region, excellently adapted to settlement. Railroads will speedily penetrate it, and then it will witness an astonishing development. On the morning of the twenty-eighth we reached the home buildings of the great Sao Hau Fizenda. The ranch of Sr. Hau de Costa Marques are host himself and his son Dom Hau the Younger, who was state secretary of agriculture, and the latter's charming wife, and the president of Mano Grasso, and several other ladies and gentlemen, had come down the river to greet us, from the city of Kayaba several hundred miles farther upstream. As usual we were treated with wholehearted and generous hospitality. Some miles below the ranch house the party met us on a sternwheel steamboat and a launch, both decked with many flags. The handsome white ranch house stood only a few rods back from the river's brink in a grassy opening dotted with those noble trees, the royal palms. Other trees, buildings of all kinds, flower gardens, vegetable gardens, fields, corrals, and enclosures with high white walls stood near the house. A detachment of soldiers, or state police, with a band, were in front of the house and two flag poles, one with the Brazilian flag already hoisted. The American flag was run up on the other as I stepped ashore while the band played the national anthems of the two countries. The house held much comfort and the comfort was all the more appreciated because even indoors the thermometer stood at ninety-seven degrees Fahrenheit. In the late afternoon heavy rain fell and cooled the air. We were riding at the time. Around the house the birds were tame, the parrots and parakeets crowded and chattered in the treetops. Jacanas played in the wet ground just back of the garden. Ibises and screamers called loudly in the swamps a little distance off. Until we came actually inside of this great ranch house we had been passing through a hot, fertile, pleasant wilderness where the few small palm-roofed houses, each in its little patch of sugarcane, corn, and manioc, stood very many miles apart. One of these little houses stood on an old Indian mound exactly like the mounds which formed the only hillocks along the lower Mississippi and which are also of Indian origin. These occasional Indian mounds made ages ago are the highest bits of ground in the immense swamps of the upper Paraguay region. There are still Indian tribes in this neighborhood. We passed an Indian fishing village on the edge of the river with huts, scaffoldings for drying the fish, hammocks, and rude tables. They cultivated patches of bananas and sugarcane. Out in a shallow place in the river was a scaffolding on which the Indians stood to spear fish. The Indians were friendly, peaceable souls for the most part dressed like the poorer classes among the Brazilians. Next morning there was to have been a great rodeo or roundup and we determined to have a hunt first where there are still several kinds of beasts of the chase, notably tapers and peccaries, of which the naturalist desired specimens. Dom Howe, our host, and his son accompanied us. Thers is a noteworthy family. Born in Matagrosso in the tropics, our host had the look of a northerner and although a grandfather he possessed an abounding vigor and energy such as very few men of any climate or surroundings do possess. All of his sons are doing well. The son who was with us was a stalwart, powerful man, a pleasant companion, an able public servant, a finished horseman, and a skilled hunter. He carried a sharp spear, not a rifle, for in Matagrosso it is the custom in hunting the jaguar for riflemen and spearmen to go in at him together when he turns at bay. The spearman holding him off if the first shot fails to stop him so that another shot can be put in. All together our host and his son reminded one of the best type of American ranchmen and planters, of those planters and ranchmen who are adepts in bold and manly field sports, who are capital men of business, and who also often supply to the state skilled and faithful public servants. The hospitality the father and son extended to us was patriarchal. Neither, for instance, would sit at table with their guests at the beginning of the formal meals. Instead they exercised a close personal supervision over the feast. Our charming hostess, however, sat at the head of the table. At six in the morning we started all of us on fine horses. The day was lowering and overcast. A dozen dogs were with us, but only one or two were worth anything. Three or four ordinary countrymen, the ranch hands, or vaqueros, accompanied us. They were mainly of Indian blood and would have been called peons or caboclos in other parts of Brazil. But here were always spoken to and of as camaradas. They were, of course, chosen from among the men who were hunters, and each carried his long, rather heavy and clumsy jaguar spear. In front rode our vigorous host and his strapping son, the latter also carrying a jaguar spear. The bridles and saddles of the big ranchmen and of the gentle folk generally were handsome and were elaborately ornamented with silver. The stirrups, for instance, were not only of silver but contained so much extra metal in ornamented bars and rings that they would have been awkward for less-practiced riders. Indeed, as it was, they were adapted only for the tips of boots with long pointed toes and were impossible for our feet. Our host's stirrups were long, narrow, silver slippers. The camaradas, on the other hand, had Jim Crow saddles and bridles and rusty little iron stirrups into which they thrust their naked toes. But all, gentry and commonality alike, rode equally well and with the same skill and fearlessness. To see our host's gallop at headlong speed over any kind of country toward the sound of the dogs with their quarry at bay, or to see them handle their horses in a morass, was a pleasure. It was equally a pleasure to see a camarada carrying his heavy spear, leading a hound in a leash and using his machete to cut his way through the tangled vine-ropes of a jungle, all at the same time and all without the slightest reference to the plunges and the odd and exceedingly jerky behavior of his wild half-broken horse. For on such a ranch most of the horses are apt to come in the categories of half-broken or else of broken down. One dusky, tattered demalion, wore a pair of boots from which he had removed the soles, his bare, spur-clad feet projecting from beneath the uppers. He was on a little devil of a stallion which he rode blindfold for a couple of miles, and there was a regular circus when he removed the bandage, but evidently it never occurred to him that the animal was hardly a comfortable riding-horse for a man going out hunting and encumbered with a spear, a machete, and other belongings. The eight hours that we were out we spent chiefly in splashing across the marshes with excursions now and then into vine-tangled belts and clumps of timber. Some of the bayous we had to cross were uncomfortably boggy. We had to lead the horses through one, waiting ahead of them, and even so two of them were mired down and their saddles had to be taken off before they could be gotten out. Among the marsh plants were fields and strips of the great caiti-rush. These caiti-flags towered above the other in lesser marsh plants. They were higher than the heads of the horsemen. Their two or three huge banana-like leaves stood straight up on end. The large, brilliant flowers, orange, red, and yellow, were joined into a singularly shaped and solid string or cluster. Hummingbirds buzzed around these flowers. One species, the sickle-billed Hummer, has its bill especially adapted for use in these clearly shaped blossoms and gets its food only from them, never appearing around any other plant. The birds were tame, even those striking and beautiful birds which, under man's persecution, are so apt to become scarce and shy. The huge jabiru-storks, stalking through the water with stately dignity, sometimes refused to fly until we were only 100 yards off. One of them flew over our heads at a distance of 30 or 40 yards. The screamers, crying, kuru, kuru, and the ibises wailing dolefully came even closer. The wonderful hyacinth macaws in twos and threes accompanied us at times for several hundred yards, hovering over our heads and uttering their rasping screams. In one wood we came on the black howler monkey. The place smelt almost like a menagerie. Not watching with sufficient care I brushed against a sapling on which the venomous fire ants swarmed. They burnt the skin like red-hot cinders and left little sores. More than once in the drier parts of the marsh we met small caimans making their way from one pool to another. My horse stepped over one before I saw it. The dead carcasses of others showed that on their wanderings they had encountered jaguars or human foes. We had been out about three hours when one of the dogs gave tongue in a large belt of woodland and jungle to the left of our line of march through the marsh. The other dogs ran to the sound and after a while the long barking told that the thing, whatever it was, was at bay or else in some refuge. We made our way toward the place on foot. The dogs were bang excitedly at the mouth of a huge hollow log and very short examinations showed us that there were two peccaries within, doubtless, abhor, and sow. However, just at this moment the peccaries bolted from an unexpected opening at the other end of the log, dove into the tangle and instantly disappeared with the hounds in full cry after them. It was twenty minutes later before we again heard the pack bang. With much difficulty and by the incessant swinging of the machetes we opened a trail through the network of vines and branches. This time there was only one peccary, the boar. He was at bay in a half hollow stump. The dogs were about his head, raving with excitement, and it was not possible to use the rifle, so I borrowed the spear of Dom Howe, the younger, and killed the fierce little boar therewith. This was an animal akin to our collared peccary, smaller and less fierce than its white-jawed kinsfolk. It is a valiant and truculent little beast nevertheless, and if given the chance will bite a piece the size of a teacup out of either man or dog. It is found singly or in small parties, feeds on roots, fruits, grass, and delights to make its home in hollow logs. If taken young it makes an affectionate and entertaining pet. When the two were in the hollow log we heard them utter a kind of moaning or menacing grunt long-drawn. End of Chapter 4 Part 1 of Through the Brazilian Wilderness by Theodore Roosevelt Recording by Joelle Peebles Chapter 4 Part 2 of Through the Brazilian Wilderness This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Joelle Peebles. Through the Brazilian Wilderness by Theodore Roosevelt Chapter 4 The Headwaters of the Paraguay Part 2 An hour or two afterward we unexpectedly struck the fresh tracks of two jaguars and at once loosed the dogs who tore off yelling on the line of the scent. Unfortunately just at this moment the clouds burst and a deluge of rain drove in our faces. So heavy was the downpour that the dogs lost the trail and we lost the dogs. We found them again only owing to one of our cabal clothes, an Indian with a queer Mongolian face and no brain at all that I could discover, apart from his special dealings with wild creatures, cattle, and horses. He rode in a huddle of rags, but nothing escaped his eyes and he rode anything anywhere. The downpour continued so heavily that we knew the rodeo had been abandoned and we turned our faces for the long dripping, splashing ride homeward. Through the gusts of driving rain we could hardly see the way. Once the rain lightened and half a mile away the sunshine gleamed through a rift in the leaden cloud mass. Suddenly in this rift of shimmering brightness there appeared a flock of beautiful white egrets with strong graceful wingbeats the birds urged their flight, their plumage flashing in the sun. They then crossed the rift and were swallowed in the gray gloom of the day. On the marsh the dogs several times roused capybaras. Where there were no ponds of sufficient size the capybaras sought refuge in flight through the tangled marsh. They ran well. Kermit and Fiala went after one on foot full speed for a mile and a half with two hounds which then baited, literally baited for the capybara fought with the courage of a gigantic woodchuck. If the pack overtook a capybara they of course speedily finished it but a single dog of our not very valorous outfit was not able to overmatch its shrill, squeaking opponent. Near the ranch house about forty feet up in a big tree was a Jabiru's nest containing young Jabiru's. The young birds exercised themselves by walking solemnly round the edge of the nest and opening and shutting their wings. Their heads and necks were down covered instead of being naked like those of their parents. Fiala wished to take a moving picture of them while thus engaged and so after arranging his machine he asked Harper to rouse the young birds by throwing a stick up to the nest. He did so whereupon one young Jabiru hastily opened its wings in the desired fashion at the same time seizing the stick in its bill. It dropped it at once with an air of comic disappointment when it found that the stick was not edible. There were many strange birds round about. Toucans were not uncommon. I have never seen any other bird take such grotesque and comic attitudes as the Toucan. This day I saw one standing in the top of a tree with the big bill pointing straight into the air and the tail also cocked perpendicularly. The Toucan is a born comedian. On the river and in the ponds I saw the Finnfoot, a bird with feet like a grebe and bill and tail like those of a darter but like so many South American birds with no close affiliations among other species. The exceedingly rich bird fauna of South America contains many species which seem to be survivals from a very remote geologic past whose kinsfolk have perished under the changed conditions of recent ages, and in the case of many like the Hotson and Screamer their like is not known elsewhere. Herons of many species swarmed in this neighborhood. The handsomest was the richly colored Tiger Bitterne. Two other species were so unlike ordinary herons that I did not recognize them as herons at all until Sherry told me what they were. One had a dark body, a white speckled or oscillated neck, and a bill almost like that of an ibis. The other looked white but was really mauve colored with black on the head. When perched on a tree it stood like an ibis and instead of the measured wing-beats characteristic of a heron's flight it flew with a quick vigorous flapping of the wings. There were queer mammals too as well as birds. In the fields Miller trapped mice of a kind entirely new. Next morning the sky was leaden and a drenching rain fell as we began our descent of the river. The rainy season had fairly begun for our good fortune we were still where we had the cabins aboard the boat and the ranch house in which to dry our clothes and soggy shoes. But in the intensely humid atmosphere, hot and steaming they stayed wet a long time and were still moist when we put them on again. Before we left the house where we had been treated with such courteous hospitality the finest ranch house in Maddo Grosso and each ranch where there are some 60,000 head of horned cattle. The son of our host Dom Chau the Younger the Jaguar Hunter presented me with two magnificent volumes on the palms of Brazil. The work of Dr. Barboso Rodriguez one-time director of the botanical gardens at Rio de Nero. The two folios were in a box of native cedar no gift more appropriate in the future value more as a reminder of my stay in Maddo Grosso could have been given me. All that afternoon the rain continued it was still pouring in torrents when we left the Cayaba for the Sao Lorenzo and steamed up the ladder a few miles before anchoring. Dom Chau the Younger had accompanied us in his launch the little river steamer was a very open build as is necessary in such a hot climate and to keep things dry necessitated also keeping the atmosphere stifling. The German taxidermist who was with Colonel Rondon's party Reynish a very good fellow from Vienna sat on a stool alternately drenched with rain and sweltering with heat and muttered to himself, ah, schweiner eye. Two small caimans of the common species with prominent eyes were at the bank where we moored and betrayed an astonishing and stupid tameness neither the size of the boat nor the commotion caused by the paddles in any way affected them. They lay inshore not twenty feet from us, half out of water they paid not the slightest heed to our presence and only reluctantly left when repeatedly poked at and after having been repeatedly hit with claws of mud and sticks and even then one first crawled up on shore to find out if thereby he could not rid himself and caused him. Next morning it was still raining but we set off on a hunt anyway going afoot. A couple of brown camaradas led the way and Colonel Rondon, Dom Jau, Kermit and I followed. The incessant downpour speedily wed us to the skin. We made our way slowly through the forest. The machetes playing right and left up and down at every step for the trees were tangled in a network of vines and creepers. Some of the vines were as thick as a man's leg. Mosquitoes hummed about us. The venomous fire ants stung us. The sharp spines of a small palm tore our hands. Afterwards some of the wounds festered. Hour after hour we thus walked on through the Brazilian forest. We saw monkeys, the common yellowish kind, a species of seabass. A couple were shot for the museum and the others raced off among the upper branches of the trees. Then we came on a party of coatties which looked like reddish long-snouted, long-tailed, lanky raccoons. They were in the top of a big tree. One, when shot at and missed, bounced down to the ground and ran off through the bushes. Kermit ran after it and secured it. He came back to find us peering hopelessly up into the tree-top trying to place where the other coatties were. Kermit solved the difficulty by going up along some huge twisted leonas for forty or fifty feet and exploring the upper branches, whereupon down came three other coatties through the branches, one being caught by the dogs and the other two escaping. Coatties fight savagely with both teeth and claws. Miller told us that he once saw one of them kill a dog. They feed on all small mammals, birds, and reptiles, and even on some larger ones. They kill iguanas. Sherry saw a rattling chase through the trees, a coattie following an iguana at full speed. We heard the rush of a couple of tapirs as they broke away in the jungle in front of the dogs and headed according to their custom for the river. But we never saw them. One of the parties shot at a bush deer, a very pretty graceful creature, smaller than our white-tailed deer, but kin to it and doubtless the southernmost representative of the white-tailed group. The white-tailed deer, using the word to designate a group of deer, which can neither be called a subgenus with many species, nor a widely spread species diverging into many varieties, is the only North American species which has spread down into and has outlying representatives in South America. It has been contended that the species has spread from South America northward. I do not think so, and the specimen thus obtained a probable refutation of the theory. It was a buck and had just shed its small antlers. The antlers are therefore shed at the same time as in the north, and it appears that they are grown at the same time as in the north. Yet this variety now dwells in the tropics south of the equator, where the spring and the breeding season for most birds comes at the time of the northern fall in September, October, and November. That the deer is an intrusive immigrant, and that it has not yet been in South America long enough to change its mating season in accordance with the climate as the birds. Geologically doubtless, very old residents have changed their breeding season, is rendered probable by the fact that it conforms so exactly in the time of its antler growth to the universal rule which obtains in the great where deer of many species abound and where the fossil forms show that they have long existed. The marsh deer, which has diverged much further from the northern type than this bush deer, its horns show a likeness to those of a black tail, often keeps its antlers until June or July, although it begins to grow them again in August. However, too much stress must not be laid on this fact, inasmuch as the wapiti and the cow caribou both keep their antlers until spring. The specialization of the marsh deer, by the way, is further shown in its hooves, which, thanks to its semi-aquatic mode of life, have grown long, like those of such African swamp antelopes, as the lechwe and cititunga. Miller, when we presented the monkeys to him, told us that the females, both of these monkeys and of the howlers themselves, took care of the young, the males not assisting them, and moreover that when the young one was a male he had always found the mother keeping by herself away from the old males. On the other hand, among the marmosets he found the fathers taking as much care of the young as the mothers. If the mother had twins, the father would usually carry one and sometimes both around with him. After we had been out for four hours, our camaradas got lost. Three several times they traveled round in a complete circle and we had to set them right with the compass. About noon the rain, which had been falling almost without interruption for forty-eight hours, let up and in an hour or two the sun came out. We went back to the river and found our rowboat. In it the hounds, a motley and rather worthless lot, and the rest of the party were ferried across to the opposite bank while Colonel Rhondon and I stayed in the boat on the chance that a taper might be roused and take to the river. However, no taper was found. Kermit killed a collared peckery and I shot a capybara representing a color phase the naturalists wished. Next morning, January 1st, 1914, we were up at five and had a good New Year's Day breakfast of hard tack, ham, sardines, and coffee before setting out on an all-days hunt on foot. I much feared that the pack was almost or quite worthless for jaguars, but there were two or three of the great spotted cats in the neighborhood and it seemed worthwhile to make a try for them anyhow. After an hour or two we found the fresh tracks of two and after them we went. Our party consisted of Colonel Rhondon, Lieutenant Rogasiano, an excellent man himself a native of Madagrasso, of old Madagrasso stock. Two others of the party from the Sao Jiao Ranch, Kermit and myself, together with four dark-skinned camaradas, cowhands from the same ranch. We soon found that the dogs would not by themselves follow the jaguar trail, nor with the camaradas, although they carried spears. Kermit was the one of our party who possessed the requisite speed, endurance, and eyesight and accordingly he led. Two of the dogs would follow the track half a dozen yards ahead of him, but no farther and two of the camaradas could just about keep up with him. For an hour we went through thick jungle where the machetes were constantly at work. Then the trail struck off straight across the marshes for jaguars swim and wade as freely as marsh deer. It was a hard walk. The sun was out. We were drenched with sweat. We were torn by the spines of the innumerable clusters of small palms with thorns like needles. The hosts of fire ants and by the mosquitoes, which we scarcely noticed where the fire ants were found, exactly as all dread of the latter vanished when we were menaced by the big red wasps of which a dozen stings will disable a man and if he is weak or in bad health will seriously menace his life. In the marsh we were continually wading, now up to our knees, now up to our hips. Twice we came to long bayous so deep that we had to swim them, holding our rifles above water in our right hands. The floating masses of marsh grass and the slimy stems of the water plants doubled our work as we swam, cumbered by our clothing and boots and holding our rifles aloft. One result of the swim, by the way, was that my watch, a veteran of Cuba and Africa came to an indignant halt. Then on we went, hampered by the weight while our soggy boots squelched as we walked. There was no breeze. In the undimmed sky, the sun stood almost overhead. The heat beat on us in waves. By noon I could only go forward at a slow walk and two of the party were worse off than I was. Kermit, with the dogs and two camaradas close behind him, disappeared across the marshes at a trot. At last, when he was out of sight and it was obviously useless to follow him, the rest of us turned back toward the boat. The two exhausted members of the party gave out and we left them under a tree. Colonel Rondon and Lieutenant Rogaciano were not much tired. I was somewhat tired, but was perfectly able to go for several hours more if I did not try to go too fast, and we three walked on to the river, reaching at about half past four, after eleven hours stiff walking with nothing to eat. We were soon on the boat. A relief party went back for the two men under the tree, and soon after it reached them, Kermit also turned up with his hounds and his camaradas trailing weirdly behind him. He had followed the jaguar until the dogs were so tired that even after he had bathed them and then held their noses in the fresh footprints they would pay no heed to the scent. A hunter of scientific tastes, a hunter naturalist, or even an outdoors naturalist, or faunal naturalist, interested in big mammals with a pack of hounds such as those with which Paul Rainey hunted lion and leopard in Africa, or such a pack as the packs of Johnny Goff and Jake Bora, with which I hunted cougar, lynx and bear in the Rockies, or such packs as those of the Mississippi and Louisiana planters with whom I have hunted bear, wildcat, and deer in the cane-breaks of the lower Mississippi, would not only enjoy fine hunting on the marshes of the upper Paraguay, but would also do work of real scientific value as regards all the big cats. Only a limited number of the naturalists who have worked in the tropics have had any experience with the big beasts whose life histories possessed such peculiar interest. Of all the biologists who have seriously studied the South American fauna on the ground, Bates probably rendered most service, but he hardly seems even to have seen the animals as the hunters fairly familiar. His interests and those of the other biologists of his kind lay in other directions. In consequence, in treating of the life histories of the very interesting big game, we have been largely forced to rely either on native report in which acutely accurate observation is invariably mixed with wild fable, or else on the chance remarks of travelers or mere sportsmen who had not the training to make them understand even what it was desirable to observe. Nowadays there is a growing proportion of big game hunters of sportsmen who are of the shilling, celus, and shiurus type. These men do work of capital value for science. The mere big game butcher is tending to disappear as a type. On the other hand, the big game hunter who is a good observer, a good field naturalist, occupies at present a more important position than ever before, and it is now recognized that he can do work which the closest naturalist cannot do. The big game hunter of this type and the outdoors faunal naturalist, the student of the life histories of big mammals, have opened to them in South America a wonderful field in which to work. The fire ants, of which I have above spoken, are generally found on a species of small tree or sapling with a greenish trunk. They live with the whole body as they bite, the tail and head being thrust downward. A few seconds after the bite, the poison causes considerable pain. Later it may make a tiny festering sore. There is certainly the most extraordinary diversity in the traits by which nature achieves the perpetuation of species. Among the warrior and predacious insects, the prowess is in some cases of such type as to render the possessor practically immune from danger. In some cases, the condition of its exercise may normally be the sacrifice of the life of the possessor. There are wasps that prey on formidable fighting spiders, which yet instinctively so handle themselves that the prey practically never succeeds in either defending itself or retaliating, being captured and paralyzed with unerring efficiency and with entire security to the wasp. The wasps' safety is absolute. On the other hand, these fighting ants, including the soldiers even among the termites, are frantically eager for a success, which generally means their annihilation. The condition of their efficiency is absolute indifference to their own security. Probably the majority of the ants that actually lay hold on a foe suffer death in consequence. Certainly, they not merely run the risk of, but eagerly invite death. The following day, we descended the salarenzo with its junction with the Paraguay and once more began the ascent of the ladder. At one cattle ranch where we stopped, the troupiales, or big black and yellow orioles, had built a large colony of their nests on a dead tree near the primitive little ranch house. The birds were breeding. The old ones were feeding the young. In this neighborhood, the naturalists found many birds that were new to them, including a tiny woodpecker no bigger than a ruby-crowned kinglet. They had collected two night monkeys, nocturnal monkeys, not as agile as the ordinary monkey. These two were found at dawn, having stayed out too late. The early morning was always lovely on these rivers, and at that hour many birds and beasts were to be seen. One morning, we saw a fine marsh buck holding his head aloft as he stared at us. His red coat vivid against the green marsh. Another of these marsh deer swam the river ahead of us. We went at it as it landed, and ought to have got it, but did not. As always with these marsh deer, and as with so many other deer, I was struck by the revealing or advertising quality of its red coloration. There was nothing in its normal surroundings with which this coloration harmonized, so far as it had any effect whatever, it was always a revealing and not a concealing effect. When the animal fled, the black of the erect tail was its original revealing mark, although not of such startlingly advertising quality as the flag of the white tail. The white tail, in one of its forms, and with the ordinary white tail custom of displaying the white flag as it runs, is found in the immediate neighborhood of the swamp deer. It has the same foes. Evidently it is of no survival consequence whether the running deer displays a white or black flag. Any competent observer of big game must be struck by the fact that in the great majority of the species the coloration is not concealing and that in many it has a highly revealing quality. Moreover, if the spotted or striped young represent the ancestral coloration and if, as seems probable, the spots and stripes have on the whole some slight concealing value, it is evident that in the life history of most of these large mammals, both among those that prey and those that are preyed on, concealing coloration has not been a survival factor. Throughout the ages during which they have survived they have gradually lost whatever of concealing coloration they may once have had, if any, and have developed a coloration which under present conditions has no concealing and perhaps even has a revealing quality and which in all probability never would have had a concealing value in any environmental complex in which the species as a whole lived during its ancestral development. Indeed, it seems astonishing when one observes these big beasts and big waders and other water birds in their native surroundings to find how utterly non-harmful their often strikingly revealing coloration is. Evidently the various other survival factors such as habit and in many cases cover, etc. are of such over-mastering importance that the coloration is generally of no consequence whatever one way or the other and is only very rarely a factor of any serious weight. End of chapter 4 part 2 of Through the Brazilian Wood