Through the Brazilian Wilderness by Theodore Roosevelt (page 2)

we were assured, were descended in part from the big red 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, and 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 fertile inter se; 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 and 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 inter se, are in many cases obviously blood kin to the neighboring wild, wolf-like or jackal-like creatures which are specifically, and possibly even generically, distinct from one another. 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 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 hardy 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 “Matto Grosso,” 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 bade 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 swarthy 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 thick jungle, we had to cut out a path, and it was interesting to see one of them, although cumbered by his unwieldy spear, handling his half-broken little horse with complete ease while he hacked at limbs and branches. Of the two ordinarily with us one was 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 healthfulness of which the adventurers felt doubtful; and because of the obvious resemblance of function we christened 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 growth, 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-lipped 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 truculent little wild 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, accustomed to traversing the vast stretches of morass; and we were accompanied by a brown boy, with saddle-bags holding our lunch, who rode a long-horned trotting steer which he managed by a string through its nostril and lip. The two trailers carried each a long, clumsy spear. We had a rather poor pack. Besides our own two dogs, neither of which was used to jaguar-hunting, there 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-starved 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 jacare-tinga, some five feet long, floated unconcernedly among the splashing hoofs 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 broken clouds; his disk 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 tapirs, and it had gone straight through ponds and long, winding, narrow ditches or bayous, 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 tarumans; the taruman is almost as big as a live-oak, with glossy foliage and a 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 forked limbs of a taruman tree. It was a beautiful picture– the spotted coat of the big, lithe, formidable cat fairly shone as it snarled defiance 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 at once, from a distance of seventy yards. I was using my favorite rifle, the little Springfield with 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 bolder dogs riving at it.

The jaguar is the king of South American game, ranking on an equality 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 effect of strength that a tiger or lion does, and that the lithe leopards and pumas do not. Its flesh, by the way, proved good eating, 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, cowing the quarry by their clamor, they were not sufficiently stanch 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 ten in the morning we came to a long, deep, winding bayou. On the opposite bank stood a capybara, looking like a blunt-nosed 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 travelling 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 and 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 lying 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 nacury 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 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 combine 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, about 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 cougar I 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 and 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 travelled a good deal, perhaps only passing a day or two in a given locality, perhaps spending a week where 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 caymans; for these small pond caymans, the jacare-tinga, form part of their habitual food, and a big jaguar when hungry will attack and kill large caymans and crocodiles if he can get them a few yards from the water. On these marshes the jaguars also followed the peccary herds; it is said that they always strike the hindmost of a 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 tapir has no respect for timber, as Colonel Rondon phrased it, and rushes with such blind, headlong speed through and among branches and trunks that if not immediately killed it brushes the jaguar off, the claws leaving long raking 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 wild game is scarce, kill every other domestic animal. It is a thirsty brute, 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 seemed 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 the lions living almost exclusively on zebra and antelope, and not molesting the buffalo and domestic cattle, which in other parts of Africa furnish their habitual prey. In some other neighborhoods, not far distant, our hosts 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 the habit of scientific accuracy in observation and record is achieved and until specimens are preserved and carefully compared, entirely truthful men, at home in the wilderness, will whole-heartedly accept, and repeat as matters of gospel faith, theories which split the grizzly 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 fables, 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.

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 jacare-tinga or small cayman about five feet long. I paid no heed to it at the moment. But shortly afterward 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 near by. In another little pond a jacare-tinga showed no less anger when another of my companions approached. It bellowed, opened its jaws, and lashed its tail. Yet these pond jacares 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 da Cunha (of the Brazilian Navy), a capital sportsman and delightful companion. They found a deepish pond a hundred yards or so long and thirty or forty across. It was tenanted by the small caymans 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 caymans were subsisting largely on these piranhas. But the tables were readily turned if any caymans 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 cayman 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. Evidently they did not molest either cayman 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 appear 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 unwounded man is attacked only by accident. Such accidents are rare; but they happen with sufficient frequency to justify 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 tame. 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 travelled 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 dive, for capybaras swim with equal facility on or below the surface; and if they wish to hide they rise gently among the rushes or water-lily leaves with only their nostrils exposed. In these waters the capybaras and small caymans 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 rabbit is. The flesh is good to eat, and its amphibious habits and queer nature and surroundings 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 of interest, 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 the pack through a dry, sandy pasture country, dotted with clumps of palms, round 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 fore legs off the ground. Their 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 as surprised as if I had seen a turtle gallop when these two armadillos bounded 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 turned to pursue it; but its wedge-shaped snout and armored body, joined to the speed at which it was galloping, enabled it to drive 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 a hundred and fifty 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 its 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 of huge dimensions, scattered through the country. Sometimes they were built against the stems of trees. We did not here 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 nestling birds, and at 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 nest they came across and could get at.

Once we saw a small herd of peccaries, one a sow 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 sow. The herd galloped into a mass of 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.

On 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; toucans with varied plumage, black, white, red, yellow; green jacmars; flaming orioles and both blue and dark-red tanagers. It was an extraordinary collection. All were noisy. Perhaps there was a snake that had drawn them by its presence; but we could find no snake. The assembly dispersed as we rode up; the huge blue macaws departed in pairs, uttering their hoarse “ar-rah-h, ar-rah-h.” It has been said that parrots in the wilderness are only noisy on the wing. They are 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 as 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 Springfield, and then lost all the credit I had thus gained by a series of inexcusable misses, at long range, before I finally killed a jabiru. Kermit shot a jabiru with the Luger automatic. The great, splendid birds, standing about as tall as a man, show fight when wounded, and advance against their assailants, clattering their formidable bills. One day we found the nest of a jabiru 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 the 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 nests, in which half a dozen females lay their eggs indiscriminately. The common ibises in the ponds near by–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 stretch the neck straight in front of them. The jabiru–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-te-vi king-bird. 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 oven-birds, which had the carriage and somewhat the look of wood-thrushes, I am sure would prove delightful friends on a 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 in and 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 king-bird 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 and 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 have been literally as tough as horn; for when one of them roped a big bull he would brace himself, bending 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, and 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 until a couple of days before Christmas. Hitherto 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 steamboat awaited 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, were 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 Corumba. 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 plodded 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 wading 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-bottomed side-wheel steamboat was moored to the bank. The tired horses and oxen were turned loose to graze. 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 and legs of mutton, spitted on sticks and propped above the smouldering flame.

Next morning, with real regret, we waved good-by to our dusky attendants, as they stood on the bank, grouped around a little fire, beside the big, empty ox-carts. A dozen miles down-stream a rowboat fitted for a sprit-sail put off from the bank. The owner, a countryman from a small ranch, asked for a tow to Corumba, which we gave. He had with him in the boat his comely brown wife–who was smoking a very large cigar–their two children, a young man, and a couple of trunks and various other belongings. On Christmas eve we reached Corumba, and rejoined the other members of the expedition.

IV. THE HEADWATERS OF THE PARAGUAY

At Corumba our entire party, and all their belongings, came aboard our good little river boat, the Nyoac. Christmas Day saw us making our way steadily up-stream 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 “Matto Grosso” 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, rank 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, Cherrie, and Miller squatted outside the railing on the deck over one paddle-wheel and put the final touches on the jaguar skins. Fiala 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 health 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.

Cherrie and Miller had secured a little owl a month before in the Chaco, and it was travelling 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 especial 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. Cherrie and Miller had trapped many mammals. Among them was a tayra 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 Cherrie 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 especial 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 whitetail deer. One of the vagaries of the ultraconcealing-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 wildebeeste, the lion, and the hunting hyena.

Next day we spent ascending the Sao Lourenco. 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 taquara 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 breast-bone, and the bird utters queer guttural screams. A dead cayman floated down-stream, with a black vulture 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 near by were patches of corn and mandioc. 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 Cuyaba 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 milch cows were gathered in one corral. Spurred plover, or lapwings, strolled familiarly among the hens. Parakeets and red-headed tanagers 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 year’s end to year’s end. They float down-stream, and up-stream are poled by their crew, or now and then get a tow from a steamer. This one had a house with a tin roof; others bear houses 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 passed such colonies, the long pendulous nests hanging from the boughs of trees directly over the water. Cherrie 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 bird’s- 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 his deep, two- syllabled note. Miller told how on the Orinoco these ibises plunder the nests of the big river-turtles. They are very skilful 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 Kootenay. Back in the forest near Corumba the naturalists had found them very bad indeed. Cherrie had spent two or three days on a mountain-top 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 Cuyaba, 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 Matto Grosso, 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 28th we reached the home buildings of the great Sao Joao fazenda, the ranch of Senhor Joao da Costa Marques. Our host himself, and his son, Dom Joao the younger, who was state secretary of agriculture, and the latter’s charming wife, and the president of Matto Grosso, and several other ladies and gentlemen, had come down the river to greet us, from the city of Cuyaba, several hundred miles farther up-stream. As usual, we were treated with whole-hearted and generous hospitality. Some miles below the ranch-house the party met us, on a stern-wheel 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 flagpoles, 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 97 degrees F. 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 tree tops; 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 in sight 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 sugar-cane, corn, and mandioc, stood very many miles apart. One of these little houses stood on an old Indian mound, exactly like the mounds which form 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 sugar-cane. 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 round-up, and we determined to have a hunt first, as there were still several kinds of beasts of the chase, notably tapirs and peccaries, of which the naturalists desired specimens. Dom Joao, our host, and his son accompanied us. Theirs is a noteworthy family. Born in Matto Grosso, 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 Matto Grosso 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. Altogether, 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 vaqueiros, 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 gentlefolk 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-practised 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 hosts’ 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 commonalty alike, rode equally well and with the same skill and fearlessness. To see our hosts 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 tatterdemalion 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, wading ahead of them; and even so two of them 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 caete rush. These caete flags towered above the other and 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. Humming-birds buzzed round these flowers; one species, the sickle-billed hummer, has its bill especially adapted for use in these queerly 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 a hundred yards off; one of them flew over our heads at a distance of thirty or forty yards. The screamers, crying curu-curu, 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 caymans 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 baying excitedly at the mouth of a huge hollow log, and very short examination showed us that there were two peccaries within, doubtless a boar and sow. However, just at this moment the peccaries bolted from an unsuspected 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 baying. 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 Joao 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.

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 caboclos; 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 wing-beats 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 bayed it–literally bayed it, 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 jabirus. 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 we saw the finfoot, 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 hoatzin and screamer, their like is not known elsewhere. Herons of many species swarmed in this neighborhood. The handsomest was the richly colored tiger bittern. Two other species were so unlike ordinary herons that I did not recognize them as herons at all until Cherrie told me what they were. One had a dark body, a white-speckled or ocellated 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 Matto Grosso, on a huge ranch where there are some sixty thousand head of horned cattle–the son of our host, Dom Joao the younger, the jaguar-hunter, presented me with two magnificent volumes on the palms of Brazil, the work of Doctor Barboso Rodriguez, one-time director of the Botanical Gardens at Rio Janeiro. The two folios were in a box of native cedar. No gift more appropriate, none that I would in the future value more as a reminder of my stay in Matto Grosso, could have been given me.

All that afternoon the rain continued. It was still pouring in torrents when we left the Cuyaba for the Sao Lourenco and steamed up the latter a few miles before anchoring; Dom Joao the younger had accompanied us in his launch. The little river steamer was of 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, Reinisch, a very good fellow from Vienna, sat on a stool, alternately drenched with rain and sweltering with heat, and muttered to himself: “Ach, Schweinerei!”

Two small caymans, 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 clods of mud and sticks; and even then one first crawled up on shore, to find out if thereby he could not rid himself of the annoyance we 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 Joao, Kermit, and I followed. The incessant downpour speedily wet 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–afterward 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 cebus; 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 coatis, which look 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 coatis were. Kermit solved the difficulty by going up along some huge twisted lianas for forty or fifty feet and exploring the upper branches; whereupon down came three other coatis through the branches, one being caught by the dogs and the other two escaping. Coatis 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 large ones; they kill iguanas; Cherrie saw a rattling chase through the trees, a coati 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 party shot a bush deer–a very pretty, graceful creature, smaller than our whitetail deer, but kin to it and doubtless the southernmost representative of the whitetail group.

The whitetail 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 furnished 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 arctogeal realm, 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 blacktail), 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 hoofs, which, thanks to its semi-aquatic mode of life, have grown long, like those of such African swamp antelopes as the lechwe and situtunga.

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 four hours our camaradas got lost; three several times they travelled 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 Rondon and I stayed in the boat, on the chance that a tapir might be roused and take to the river. However, no tapir was found; Kermit killed a collared peccary, and I shot a capybara representing a color-phase the naturalists wished.

Next morning, January 1, 1914, we were up at five and had a good New Year’s Day breakfast of hardtack, ham, sardines, and coffee before setting out on an all day’s 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 worth while 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 Rondon, Lieutenant Rogaciano–an excellent man, himself a native of Matto Grosso, of old Matto Grosso stock–two others of the party from the Sao Joao 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 would 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. We were bitten by 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 of our drenched clothes 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 it 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 wearily behind him. He had followed the jaguar trail 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 Borah 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, wild-cat, and deer in the cane-brakes of the lower Mississippi, would not only enjoy fine hunting in these vast 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 possess 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 with which the hunter is 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 travellers 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 Schilling, Selous, and Shiras 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 open 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 bend 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 predaceous insects the prowess is in some cases of such type as to render the possessor practically immune from danger. In other 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 wasp’s 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 Sao Lourenco to its junction with the Paraguay, and once more began the ascent of the latter. At one cattle-ranch where we stopped, the troupials, 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; I shot 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 an additional revealing mark, although not of such startlingly advertising quality as the flag of the whitetail. The whitetail, in one of its forms, and with the ordinary whitetail 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 a 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 overmastering 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.

The junction of the Sao Lourenco and the Paraguay is a day’s journey above Corumba. From Corumba there is a regular service by shallow steamers to Cuyaba, at the head of one fork, and to Sao Luis de Caceres, at the head of the other. The steamers are not powerful and the voyage to each little city takes a week. There are other forks that are navigable. Above Cuyaba and Caceres launches go up-stream for several days’ journey, except during the dryest parts of the season. North of this marshy plain lies the highland, the Plan Alto, where the nights are cool and the climate healthy. But I wish emphatically to record my view that these marshy plains, although hot, are also healthy; and, moreover, the mosquitoes, in most places, are not in sufficient numbers to be a serious pest, although of course there must be nets for protection against them at night. The country is excellently suited for settlement, and offers a remarkable field for cattle-growing. Moreover, it is a paradise for water-birds and for many other kinds of birds, and for many mammals. It is literally an ideal place in which a field naturalist could spend six months or a year. It is readily accessible, it offers an almost virgin field for work, and the life would be healthy as well as delightfully attractive. The man should have a steam-launch. In it he could with comfort cover all parts of the country from south of Corumbra to north of Cuyaba and Caceres. There would have to be a good deal of collecting (although nothing in the nature of butchery should be tolerated), for the region has only been superficially worked, especially as regards mammals. But if the man were only a collector he would leave undone the part of the work best worth doing. The region offers extraordinary opportunities for the study of the life-histories of birds which, because of their size, their beauty, or their habits, are of exceptional interest. All kinds of problems would be worked out. For example, on the morning of the 3rd, as we were ascending the Paraguay, we again and again saw in the trees on the bank big nests of sticks, into and out of which parakeets were flying by the dozen. Some of them had straws or twigs in their bills. In some of the big globular nests we could make out several holes of exit or entrance. Apparently these parakeets were building or remodelling communal nests; but whether they had themselves built these nests, or had taken old nests and added to or modified them, we could not tell. There was so much of interest all along the banks that we were continually longing to stop and spend days where we were. Mixed flocks of scores of cormorants and darters covered certain trees, both at sunset and after sunrise. Although there was no deep forest, merely belts or fringes of trees along the river, or in patches back of it, we frequently saw monkeys in this riverine tree-fringe–active common monkeys and black howlers of more leisurely gait. We saw caymans and capybaras sitting socially near one another on the sandbanks. At night we heard the calling of large flights of tree-ducks. These were now the most common of all the ducks, although there were many muscovy ducks also. The evenings were pleasant and not hot, as we sat on the forward deck; there was a waxing moon. The screamers were among the most noticeable birds. They were noisy; they perched on the very tops of the trees, not down among the branches; and they were not shy. They should be carefully protected by law, for they readily become tame, and then come familiarly round the houses. From the steamer we now and then saw beautiful orchids in the trees on the river bank.

One afternoon we stopped at the home buildings or headquarters of one of the great outlying ranches of the Brazil Land and Cattle Company, the Farquahar syndicate, under the management of Murdo Mackenzie–than whom we have in the United States no better citizen or more competent cattleman. On this ranch there are some seventy thousand head of stock. We were warmly greeted by McLean, the head of the ranch, and his assistant Ramsey, an old Texan friend. Among the other assistants, all equally cordial, were several Belgians and Frenchmen. The hands were Paraguayans and Brazilians, and a few Indians–a hard-bit set, each of whom always goes armed and knows how to use his arms, for there are constant collisions with cattle thieves from across the Bolivian border, and the ranch has to protect itself. These cowhands, vaqueiros, were of the type with which we were now familiar: dark- skinned, lean, hard-faced men, in slouch-hats, worn shirts and trousers, and fringed leather aprons, with heavy spurs on their bare feet. They are wonderful riders and ropers, and fear neither man nor beast. I noticed one Indian vaqueiro standing in exactly the attitude of a Shilluk of the White Nile, with the sole of one foot against the other leg, above the knee. This is a region with extraordinary possibilities of cattle-raising.

At this ranch there was a tannery; a slaughter-house; a cannery; a church; buildings of various kinds and all degrees of comfort for the thirty or forty families who made the place their headquarters; and the handsome, white, two-story big house, standing among lemon-trees and flamboyants on the river-brink. There were all kinds of pets around the house. The most fascinating was a wee, spotted fawn which loved being petted. Half a dozen curassows of different species strolled through the rooms; there were also parrots of several different species, and immediately outside the house four or five herons, with unclipped wings, which would let us come within a few feet and then fly gracefully off, shortly afterward returning to the same spot. They included big and little white egrets and also the mauve and pearl-colored heron, with a partially black head and many- colored bill, which flies with quick, repeated wing-flappings, instead of the usual slow heron wing-beats.

In the warehouse were scores of skins of jaguar, puma, ocelot, and jaguarundi, and one skin of the big, small-toothed red wolf. These were all brought in by the cowhands and by friendly Indians, a price being put on each, as they destroyed the stock. The jaguars occasionally killed horses and full-grown cows, but not bulls. The pumas killed the calves. The others killed an occasional very young calf, but ordinarily only sheep, little pigs, and chickens. There was one black jaguar-skin; melanism is much more common among jaguars than pumas, although once Miller saw a black puma that had been killed by Indians. The patterns of the jaguar-skins, and even more of the ocelot-skins, showed wide variation, no two being alike. The pumas were for the most part bright red, but some were reddish gray, there being much the same dichromatism that I found among their Colorado kinsfolk. The jaguarundis were dark brownish gray. All these animals, the spotted jaguars and ocelots, the monochrome black jaguars, red pumas, and dark-gray jaguarundis, were killed in the same locality, with the same environment. A glance at the skins and a moment’s serious thought would have been enough to show any sincere thinker that in these cats the coloration pattern, whether concealing or revealing, is of no consequence one way or the other as a survival factor. The spotted patterns conferred no benefit as compared with the nearly or quite monochrome blacks, reds, and dark grays. The bodily condition of the various beasts was equally good, showing that their success in life, that is, their ability to catch their prey, was unaffected by their several color schemes. Except white, there is no color so conspicuously advertising as black; yet the black jaguar had been a fine, well-fed, powerful beast. The spotted patterns in the forests, and perhaps even in the marshes which the jaguars so frequently traversed, are probably a shade less conspicuous than the monochrome red and gray, but the puma and jaguarundi are just as hard to see, and evidently find it just as easy to catch prey, as the jaguar and ocelot. The little fawn which we saw was spotted; the grown deer had lost the spots; if the spots do really help to conceal the wearer, it is evident that the deer has found the original concealing coloration of so little value that it has actually been lost in the course of the development of the species. When these big cats and the deer are considered, together with the dogs, tapirs, peccaries, capybaras, and big ant-eaters which live in the same environment, and when we also consider the difference between the young and the adult deer and tapirs (both of which when adult have substituted a complete or partial monochrome for the ancestral spots and streaks), it is evident that in the present life and in the ancestral development of the big mammals of South America coloration is not and has not been a survival factor; any pattern and any color may accompany the persistence and development of the qualities and attributes which are survival factors. Indeed, it seems hard to believe that in their ordinary environments such color schemes as the bright red of the marsh-deer, the black of the black jaguar, and the black with white stripes of the great tamandua, are not positive detriments to the wearers. Yet such is evidently not the case. Evidently the other factors in species- survival are of such overwhelming importance that the coloration becomes negligible from this standpoint, whether it be concealing or revealing. The cats mould themselves to the ground as they crouch or crawl. They take advantage of the tiniest scrap of cover. They move with extraordinary stealth and patience. The other animals which try to sneak off in such manner as to escape observation approach more or less closely to the ideal which the cats most nearly realize. Wariness, sharp senses, the habit of being rigidly motionless when there is the least suspicion of danger, and ability to take advantage of cover, all count. On the bare, open, treeless plain, whether marsh, meadow, or upland, anything above the level of the grass is seen at once. A marsh-deer out in the open makes no effort to avoid observation; its concern is purely to see its foes in time to leave a dangerous neighborhood. The deer of the neighboring forest skulk and hide and lie still in dense cover to avoid being seen. The white- lipped peccaries make no effort to escape observation by being either noiseless or motionless; they trust for defence to their gregariousness and truculence. The collared peccary also trusts to its truculence, but seeks refuge in a hole where it can face any opponent with its formidable biting apparatus. As for the giant tamandua, in spite of its fighting prowess I am wholly unable to understand how such a slow and clumsy beast has been able through the ages to exist and thrive surrounded by jaguars and pumas. Speaking generally, the animals that seek to escape observation trust primarily to smell to discover their foes or their prey, and see whatever moves and do not see whatever is motionless.

By the morning of January 5 we had left the marsh region. There were low hills here and there, and the land was covered with dense forest. From time to time we passed little clearings with palm-thatched houses. We were approaching Caceres, where the easiest part of our trip would end. We had lived in much comfort on the little steamer. The food was plentiful and the cooking good. At night we slept on deck in cots or hammocks. The mosquitoes were rarely troublesome, although in the daytime we were sometimes bothered by numbers of biting horse- flies. The bird life was wonderful. One of the characteristic sights we were always seeing was that of a number of heads and necks of cormorants and snake-birds, without any bodies, projecting above water, and disappearing as the steamer approached. Skimmers and thick- billed tern were plentiful here right in the heart of the continent. In addition to the spurred lapwing, characteristic and most interesting resident of most of South America, we found tiny red- legged plover which also breed and are at home in the tropics. The contrasts in habits between closely allied species are wonderful. Among the plovers and bay snipe there are species that live all the year round in almost the same places, in tropical and subtropical lands; and other related forms which wander over the whole earth, and spend nearly all their time, now in the arctic and cold temperate regions of the far north, now in the cold temperate regions of the south. These latter wide-wandering birds of the seashore and the river bank pass most of their lives in regions of almost perpetual sunlight. They spend the breeding season, the northern summer, in the land of the midnight sun, during the long arctic day. They then fly for endless distances down across the north temperate zone, across the equator, through the lands where the days and nights are always of equal length, into another hemisphere, and spend another summer of long days and long twilights in the far south, where the Antarctic winds cool them, while their nesting home, at the other end of the world, is shrouded beneath the iron desolation of the polar night.

In the late afternoon of the 5th we reached the quaint old-fashioned little town of Sao Luis de Caceres, on the outermost fringe of the settled region of the state of Matto Grosso, the last town we should see before reaching the villages of the Amazon. As we approached we passed half-clad black washerwomen on the river’s edge. The men, with the local band, were gathered at the steeply sloping foot of the main street, where the steamer came to her moorings. Groups of women and girls, white and brown, watched us from the low bluff; their skirts and bodices were red, blue, green, of all colors. Sigg had gone ahead with much of the baggage; he met us in an improvised motor-boat, consisting of a dugout to the side of which he had clamped our Evinrude motor; he was giving several of the local citizens of prominence a ride, to their huge enjoyment. The streets of the little town were unpaved, with narrow brick sidewalks. The one-story houses were white or blue, with roofs of red tiles and window-shutters of latticed woodwork, come down from colonial days and tracing back through Christian and Moorish Portugal to a remote Arab ancestry. Pretty faces, some dark, some light, looked out from these windows; their mothers’ mothers, for generations past, must thus have looked out of similar windows in the vanished colonial days. But now even here in Caceres the spirit of the new Brazil is moving; a fine new government school has been started, and we met its principal, an earnest man doing excellent work, one of the many teachers who, during the last few years, have been brought to Matto Grosso from Sao Paulo, a centre of the new educational movement which will do so much for Brazil.

Father Zahm went to spend the night with some French Franciscan friars, capital fellows. I spent the night at the comfortable house of Lieutenant Lyra; a hot-weather house with thick walls, big doors, and an open patio bordered by a gallery. Lieutenant Lyra was to accompany us; he was an old companion of Colonel Rondon’s explorations. We visited one or two of the stores to make some final purchases, and in the evening strolled through the dusky streets and under the trees of the plaza; the women and girls sat in groups in the doorways or at the windows, and here and there a stringed instrument tinkled in the darkness.

From Caceres onward we were entering the scene of Colonel Rondon’s explorations. For some eighteen years he was occupied in exploring and in opening telegraph lines through the eastern or north middle part of the great forest state, the wilderness state of the “Matto Grosso”– the “great wilderness,” or, as Australians would call it, “the bush.” Then, in 1907, he began to penetrate the unknown region lying to the north and west. He was the head of the exploring expeditions sent out by the Brazilian Government to traverse for the first time this unknown land; to map for the first time the courses of the rivers which from the same divide run into the upper portions of the Tapajos and the Madeira, two of the mighty affluents of the Amazon, and to build telegraph-lines across to the Madeira, where a line of Brazilian settlements, connected by steamboat lines and a railroad, again occurs. Three times he penetrated into this absolutely unknown, Indian-haunted wilderness, being absent for a year or two at a time and suffering every imaginable hardship, before he made his way through to the Madeira and completed the telegraph-line across. The officers and men of the Brazilian Army and the civilian scientists who followed him shared the toil and the credit of the task. Some of his men died of beriberi; some were killed or wounded by the Indians; he himself almost died of fever; again and again his whole party was reduced almost to the last extremity by starvation, disease, hardship, and the over-exhaustion due to wearing fatigues. In dealing with the wild, naked savages he showed a combination of fearlessness, wariness, good judgment, and resolute patience and kindliness. The result was that they ultimately became his firm friends, guarded the telegraph- lines, and helped the few soldiers left at the isolated, widely separated little posts. He and his assistants explored, and mapped for the first time, the Juruena and the Gy-Parana, two important affluents of the Tapajos and the Madeira respectively. The Tapajos and the Madeira, like the Orinoco and Rio Negro, have been highways of travel for a couple of centuries. The Madeira (as later the Tapajos) was the chief means of ingress, a century and a half ago, to the little Portuguese settlements of this far interior region of Brazil; one of these little towns, named Matto Grosso, being the original capital of the province. It has long been abandoned by the government, and practically so by its inhabitants, the ruins of palace, fortress, and church now rising amid the rank tropical luxuriance of the wild forest. The mouths of the main affluents of these highway rivers were as a rule well known. But in many cases nothing but the mouth was known. The river itself was not known, and it was placed on the map by guesswork. Colonel Rondon found, for example, that the course of the Gy-Parana was put down on the map two degrees out of its proper place. He, with his party, was the first to find out its sources, the first to traverse its upper course, the first to map its length. He and his assistants performed a similar service for the Juruena, discovering the sources, discovering and descending some of the branches, and for the first time making a trustworthy map of the main river itself, until its junction with the Tapajos. Near the watershed between the Juruena and the Gy-Parana he established his farthest station to the westward, named Jose Bonofacio, after one of the chief republican patriots of Brazil. A couple of days’ march northwestward from this station, he in 1909 came across a part of the stream of a river running northward between the Gy-Parana and the Juruena; he could only guess where it debouched, believing it to be into the Madeira, although it was possible that it entered the Gy-Parana or Tapajos. The region through which it flows was unknown, no civilized man having ever penetrated it; and as all conjecture as to what the river was, as to its length, and as to its place of entering into some highway river, was mere guess-work, he had entered it on his sketch maps as the Rio da Duvida, the River of Doubt. Among the officers of the Brazilian Army and the scientific civilians who have accompanied him there have been not only expert cartographers, photographers, and telegraphists, but astronomers, geologists, botanists, and zoologists. Their reports, published in excellent shape by the Brazilian Government, make an invaluable series of volumes, reflecting the highest credit on the explorers, and on the government itself. Colonel Rondon’s own accounts of his explorations, of the Indian tribes he has visited, and of the beautiful and wonderful things he has seen, possess a peculiar interest.

V. UP THE RIVER OF TAPIRS

After leaving Caceres we went up the Sepotuba, which in the local Indian dialect means River of Tapirs. This river is only navigable for boats of size when the water is high. It is a swift, fairly clear stream, rushing down from the Plan Alto, the high uplands, through the tropical lowland forest. On the right hand, or western bank, and here and there on the left bank, the forest is broken by natural pastures and meadows, and at one of these places, known as Porto Campo, sixty or seventy miles above the mouth, there is a good-sized cattle-ranch. Here we halted, because the launch, and the two pranchas–native trading-boats with houses on their decks–which it towed, could not carry our entire party and outfit. Accordingly most of the baggage and some of the party were sent ahead to where we were to meet our pack- train, at Tapirapoan. Meanwhile the rest of us made our first camp under tents at Porto Campo, to wait the return of the boats. The tents were placed in a line, with the tent of Colonel Rondon and the tent in which Kermit and I slept, in the middle, beside one another. In front of these two, on tall poles, stood the Brazilian and American flags; and at sunrise and sunset the flags were hoisted and hauled down while the trumpet sounded and all of us stood at attention. Camp was pitched beside the ranch buildings. In the trees near the tents grew wonderful violet orchids.

Many birds were around us; I saw some of them, and Cherrie and Miller many, many more. They ranged from party-colored macaws, green parrots, and big gregarious cuckoos down to a brilliant green-and-chestnut kingfisher, five and a quarter inches long, and a tiny orange-and- green manakin, smaller than any bird I have ever seen except a hummer. We also saw a bird that really was protectively colored; a kind of whippoorwill which even the sharp-eyed naturalists could only make out because it moved its head. We saw orange-bellied squirrels with showy orange tails. Lizards were common. We killed our first poisonous snake (the second we had seen), an evil lance-headed jararaca that was swimming the river. We also saw a black-and-orange harmless snake, nearly eight feet long, which we were told was akin to the mussurama; and various other snakes. One day while paddling in a canoe on the river, hoping that the dogs might drive a tapir to us, they drove into the water a couple of small bush deer instead. There was no point in shooting them; we caught them with ropes thrown over their heads; for the naturalists needed them as specimens, and all of us needed the meat. One of the men was stung by a single big red maribundi wasp. For twenty-four hours he was in great pain and incapacitated for work. In a lagoon two of the dogs had the tips of their tails bitten off by piranhas as they swam, and the ranch hands told us that in this lagoon one of their hounds had been torn to pieces and completely devoured by the ravenous fish. It was a further illustration of the uncertainty of temper and behavior of these ferocious little monsters. In other lagoons they had again and again left us and our dogs unmolested. They vary locally in aggressiveness just as sharks and crocodiles in different seas and rivers vary.

On the morning of January 9th we started out for a tapir-hunt. Tapirs are hunted with canoes, as they dwell in thick jungle and take to the water when hounds follow them. In this region there were extensive papyrus-swamps and big lagoons, back from the river, and often the tapirs fled to these for refuge, throwing off the hounds. In these places it was exceedingly difficult to get them; our best chance was to keep to the river in canoes, and paddle toward the spot in the direction of which the hounds, by the noise, seemed to be heading. We started in four canoes. Three of them were Indian dugouts, very low in the water. The fourth was our Canadian canoe, a beauty; light, safe, roomy, made of thin slats of wood and cement-covered canvas. Colonel Rondon, Fiala with his camera, and I went in this canoe, together with two paddlers. The paddlers were natives of the poorer class. They were good men. The bowsman was of nearly pure white blood; the steersman was of nearly pure negro blood, and was evidently the stronger character and better man of the two. The other canoes carried a couple of fazendeiros, ranchmen, who had come up from Caceres with their dogs. These dugouts were manned by Indian and half-caste paddlers, and the fazendeiros, who were of nearly pure white blood, also at times paddled vigorously. All were dressed in substantially similar clothes, the difference being that those of the camaradas, the poorer men or laborers, were in tatters. In the canoes no man wore anything save a shirt, trousers, and hat, the feet being bare. On horseback they wore long leather leggings which were really simply high, rather flexible boots with the soles off; their spurs were on their tough bare feet. There was every gradation between and among the nearly pure whites, negroes, and Indians. On the whole, there was the most white blood in the upper ranks, and most Indian and negro blood among the camaradas; but there were exceptions in both classes, and there was no discrimination on account of color. All alike were courteous and friendly.

The hounds were at first carried in two of the dugouts, and then let loose on the banks. We went up-stream for a couple of hours against the swift current, the paddlers making good headway with their pointed paddles–the broad blade of each paddle was tipped with a long point, so that it could be thrust into the mud to keep the low dugout against the bank. The tropical forest came down almost like a wall, the tall trees laced together with vines, and the spaces between their trunks filled with a low, dense jungle. In most places it could only be penetrated by a man with a machete. With few exceptions the trees were unknown to me, and their native names told me nothing. On most of them the foliage was thick; among the exceptions were the cecropias, growing by preference on new-formed alluvial soil bare of other trees, whose rather scanty leaf bunches were, as I was informed, the favorite food of sloths. We saw one or two squirrels among the trees, and a family of monkeys. There were few sand-banks in the river, and no water-fowl save an occasional cormorant. But as we pushed along near the shore, where the branches overhung and dipped in the swirling water, we continually roused little flocks of bats. They were hanging from the boughs right over the river, and when our approach roused them they zigzagged rapidly in front of us for a few rods, and then again dove in among the branches.

At last we landed at a point of ground where there was little jungle, and where the forest was composed of palms and was fairly open. It was a lovely bit of forest. The colonel strolled off in one direction, returning an hour later with a squirrel for the naturalists. Meanwhile Fiala and I went through the palm wood to a papyrus-swamp. Many trails led through the woods, and especially along the borders of the swamp; and, although their principal makers had evidently been cattle, yet there were in them footprints of both tapir and deer. The tapir makes a footprint much like that of a small rhinoceros, being one of the odd-toed ungulates. We could hear the dogs now and then, evidently scattered and running on various trails. They were a worthless lot of cur-hounds. They would chase tapir or deer or anything else that ran away from them as long as the trail was easy to follow; but they were not stanch, even after animals that fled, and they would have nothing whatever to do with animals that were formidable.

While standing by the marsh we heard something coming along one of the game paths. In a moment a buck of the bigger species of bush deer appeared, a very pretty and graceful creature. It stopped and darted back as soon as it saw us, giving us no chance for a shot; but in another moment we caught glimpses of it running by at full speed, back among the palms. I covered an opening between two tree-trunks. By good luck the buck appeared in the right place, giving me just time to hold well ahead of him and fire. At the report he went down in a heap, the “umbrella-pointed” bullet going in at one shoulder, and ranging forward, breaking the neck. The leaden portion of the bullet, in the proper mushroom or umbrella shape, stopped under the neck skin on the farther side. It is a very effective bullet.

Miller particularly wished specimens of these various species of bush deer, because their mutual relationships have not yet been satisfactorily worked out. This was an old buck. The antlers were single spikes, five or six inches long; they were old and white and would soon have been shed. In the stomach were the remains of both leaves and grasses, but especially the former; the buck was both a browser and grazer. There were also seeds, but no berries or nuts such as I have sometimes found in deer’s stomachs. This species, which is abundant in this neighborhood, is solitary in its habits, not going in herds. At this time the rut was past, the bucks no longer sought the does, the fawns had not been born, and the yearlings had left their mothers; so that each animal usually went by itself. When chased they were very apt to take to the water. This instinct of taking to the water, by the way, is quite explicable as regards both deer and tapir, for it affords them refuge against their present day natural foes, but it is a little puzzling to see the jaguar readily climbing trees to escape dogs; for ages have passed since there were in its habitat any natural foes from which it needed to seek safety in trees. But it is possible that the habit has been kept alive by its seeking refuge in them on occasion from the big peccaries, which are among the beasts on which it ordinarily preys.

We hung the buck in a tree. The colonel returned, and not long afterward one of the paddlers who had been watching the river called out to us that there was a tapir in the water, a good distance up- stream, and that two of the other boats were after it. We jumped into the canoe and the two paddlers dug their blades in the water as they drove her against the strong current, edging over for the opposite bank. The tapir was coming down-stream at a great rate, only its queer head above water, while the dugouts were closing rapidly on it, the paddlers uttering loud cries. As the tapir turned slightly to one side or the other the long, slightly upturned snout and the strongly pronounced arch of the crest along the head and upper neck gave it a marked and unusual aspect. I could not shoot, for it was directly in line with one of the pursuing dugouts. Suddenly it dived, the snout being slightly curved downward as it did so. There was no trace of it; we gazed eagerly in all directions; the dugout in front came alongside our canoe and the paddlers rested, their paddles ready. Then we made out the tapir clambering up the bank. It had dived at right angles to the course it was following and swum under water to the very edge of the shore, rising under the overhanging tree-branches at a point where a drinking-trail for game led down a break in the bank. The branches partially hid it, and it was in deep shadow, so that it did not offer a very good shot. My bullet went into its body too far back, and the tapir disappeared in the forest at a gallop as if unhurt, although the bullet really secured it, by making it unwilling to trust to its speed and leave the neighborhood of the water. Three or four of the hounds were by this time swimming the river, leaving the others yelling on the opposite side; and as soon as the swimmers reached the shore they were put on the tapir’s trail and galloped after it, giving tongue. In a couple of minutes we saw the tapir take to the water far up-stream, and after it we went as fast as the paddles could urge us through the water. We were not in time to head it, but fortunately some of the dogs had come down to the river’s edge at the very point where the tapir was about to land, and turned it back. Two or three of the dogs were swimming. We were more than half the breadth of the river away from the tapir, and somewhat down-stream, when it dived. It made an astonishingly long swim beneath the water this time, almost as if it had been a hippopotamus, for it passed completely under our canoe and rose between us and the hither bank. I shot it, the bullet going into its brain, while it was thirty or forty yards from shore. It sank at once.

There was now nothing to do but wait until the body floated. I feared that the strong current would roll it down-stream over the river bed, but my companions assured me that this was not so, and that the body would remain where it was until it rose, which would be in an hour or two. They were right, except as to the time. For over a couple of hours we paddled, or anchored ourselves by clutching branches close to the spot, or else drifted down a mile and paddled up again near the shore, to see if the body had caught anywhere. Then we crossed the river and had lunch at the lovely natural picnic-ground where the buck was hung up. We had very nearly given up the tapir when it suddenly floated only a few rods from where it had sunk. With no little difficulty the big, round black body was hoisted into the canoe, and we all turned our prows down-stream. The skies had been lowering for some time, and now–too late to interfere with the hunt or cause us any annoyance–a heavy downpour of rain came on and beat upon us. Little we cared, as the canoe raced forward, with the tapir and the buck lying in the bottom, and a dry, comfortable camp ahead of us.

When we reached camp, and Father Zahm saw the tapir, he reminded me of something I had completely forgotten. When, some six years previously, he had spoken to me in the White House about taking this South American trip, I had answered that I could not, as I intended to go to Africa, but added that I hoped some day to go to South America and that if I did so I should try to shoot both a jaguar and a tapir, as they were the characteristic big-game animals of the country. “Well,” said Father Zahm, “now you’ve shot them both!” The storm continued heavy until after sunset. Then the rain stopped and the full moon broke through the cloud-rack. Father Zahm and I walked up and down in the moonlight, talking of many things, from Dante, and our own plans for the future, to the deeds and the wanderings of the old-time Spanish conquistadores in their search for the Gilded King, and of the Portuguese adventurers who then divided with them the mastery of the oceans and of the unknown continents beyond.

This was an attractive and interesting camp in more ways than one. The vaqueiros with their wives and families were housed on the two sides of the field in which our tents were pitched. On one side was a big, whitewashed, tile-roofed house in which the foreman dwelt–an olive- skinned, slightly built, wiry man, with an olive-skinned wife and eight as pretty, fair-haired children as one could wish to see. He usually went barefoot, and his manners were not merely good but distinguished. Corrals and outbuildings were near this big house. On the opposite side of the field stood the row of steep-roofed, palm- thatched huts in which the ordinary cowhands lived with their dusky helpmeets and children. Each night from these palm-thatched quarters we heard the faint sounds of a music that went far back of civilization to a savage ancestry near by in point of time and otherwise immeasurably remote; for through the still, hot air, under the brilliant moonlight, we heard the monotonous throbbing of a tomtom drum, and the twanging of some old stringed instrument. The small black turkey-buzzards, here always called crows, were as tame as chickens near the big house, walking on the ground or perched in the trees beside the corral, waiting for the offal of the slaughtered cattle. Two palm-trees near our tent were crowded with the long, hanging nests of one of the cacique orioles. We lived well, with plenty of tapir beef, which was good, and venison of the bush deer, which was excellent; and as much ordinary beef as we wished, and fresh milk, too–a rarity in this country. There were very few mosquitoes, and everything was as comfortable as possible.

The tapir I killed was a big one. I did not wish to kill another, unless, of course, it became advisable to do so for food; whereas I did wish to get some specimens of the big, white-lipped peccary, the “queixa” (pronounced “cashada”) of the Brazilians, which would make our collection of the big mammals of the Brazilian forests almost complete. The remaining members of the party killed two or three more tapirs. One was a bull, full grown but very much smaller than the animal I had killed. The hunters said that this was a distinct kind. The skull and skin were sent back with the other specimens to the American Museum, where after due examination and comparison its specific identify will be established. Tapirs are solitary beasts. Two are rarely found together, except in the case of a cow and its spotted and streaked calf. They live in dense cover, usually lying down in the daytime and at night coming out to feed, and going to the river or to some lagoon to bathe and swim. From this camp Sigg took Lieutenant Lyra back to Caceres to get something that had been overlooked. They went in a rowboat to which the motor had been attached, and at night on the way back almost ran over a tapir that was swimming. But in unfrequented places tapirs both feed and bathe during the day. The stomach of the one I shot contained big palm-nuts; they had been swallowed without enough mastication to break the kernel, the outer pulp being what the tapir prized. Tapirs gallop well, and their tough hide and wedge shape enable them to go at speed through very dense cover. They try to stamp on, and even to bite, a foe, but are only clumsy fighters.

The tapir is a very archaic type of ungulate, not unlike the non- specialized beasts of the Oligocene. From some such ancestral type the highly specialized one-toed modern horse has evolved, while during the uncounted ages that saw the horse thus develop the tapir has continued substantially unchanged. Originally the tapirs dwelt in the northern hemisphere, but there they gradually died out, the more specialized horse, and even for long ages the rhinoceros, persisting after they had vanished; and nowadays the surviving tapirs are found in Malaysia and South America, far from their original home. The relations of the horse and tapir in the paleontological history of South America are very curious. Both were, geologically speaking, comparatively recent immigrants, and if they came at different dates it is almost certain that the horse came later. The horse for an age or two, certainly for many hundreds of thousands of years, throve greatly and developed not only several different species but even different genera. It was much the most highly specialized of the two, and in the other continental regions where both were found the horse outlasted the tapir. But in South America the tapir outlasted the horse. From unknown causes the various genera and species of horses died out, while the tapir has persisted. The highly specialized, highly developed beasts, which represented such a full evolutionary development, died out, while their less specialized remote kinsfolk, which had not developed, clung to life and throve; and this although the direct reverse was occurring in North America and in the Old World. It is one of the innumerable and at present insoluble problems in the history of life on our planet.

I spent a couple of days of hard work in getting the big white-lipped peccaries–white-lipped being rather a misnomer, as the entire under jaw and lower cheek are white. They were said to be found on the other side of, and some distance back from, the river. Colonel Rondon had sent out one of our attendants, an old follower of his, a full-blood Parecis Indian, to look for tracks. This was an excellent man, who dressed and behaved just like the other good men we had, and was called Antonio Parecis. He found the tracks of a herd of thirty or forty cashadas, and the following morning we started after them.

On the first day we killed nothing. We were rather too large a party, for one or two of the visiting fazendeiros came along with their dogs. I doubt whether these men very much wished to overtake our game, for the big peccary is a murderous foe of dogs (and is sometimes dangerous to men). One of their number frankly refused to come or to let his dogs come, explaining that the fierce wild swine were “very badly brought up” (a literal translation of his words) and that respectable dogs and men ought not to go near them. The other fazendeiros merely feared for their dogs; a groundless fear, I believe, as I do not think that the dogs could by any exertion have been dragged into dangerous proximity with such foes. The ranch foreman, Benedetto, came with us, and two or three other camaradas, including Antonio, the Parecis Indian. The horses were swum across the river, each being led beside a dugout. Then we crossed with the dogs; our horses were saddled, and we started.

It was a picturesque cavalcade. The native hunters, of every shade from white to dark copper, all wore leather leggings that left the soles of their feet bare, and on their bare heels wore spurs with wheels four inches across. They went in single file, for no other mode of travel was possible; and the two or three leading men kept their machetes out, and had to cut every yard of our way while we were in the forest. The hunters rode little stallions, and their hounds were gelded.

Most of the time we were in forest or swampy jungle. Part of the time we crossed or skirted marshy plains. In one of them a herd of half- wild cattle was feeding. Herons, storks, ducks, and ibises were in these marshes, and we saw one flock of lovely roseate spoonbills.

In one grove the fig-trees were killing the palms, just as in Africa they kill the sandalwood-trees. In the gloom of this grove there were no flowers, no bushes; the air was heavy; the ground was brown with mouldering leaves. Almost every palm was serving as a prop for a fig- tree. The fig-trees were in every stage of growth. The youngest ones merely ran up the palms as vines. In the next stage the vine had thickened and was sending out shoots, wrapping the palm stem in a deadly hold. Some of the shoots were thrown round the stem like the tentacles of an immense cuttlefish. Others looked like claws, that were hooked into every crevice, and round every projection. In the stage beyond this the palm had been killed, and its dead carcass appeared between the big, winding vine-trunks; and later the palm had disappeared and the vines had united into a great fig-tree. Water stood in black pools at the foot of the murdered trees, and of the trees that had murdered them. There was something sinister and evil in the dark stillness of the grove; it seemed as if sentient beings had writhed themselves round and were strangling other sentient beings.

We passed through wonderfully beautiful woods of tall palms, the ouaouaca palm–wawasa palm, as it should be spelled in English. The trunks rose tall and strong and slender, and the fronds were branches twenty or thirty feet long, with the many long, narrow green blades starting from the midrib at right angles in pairs. Round the ponds stood stately burity palms, rising like huge columns, with great branches that looked like fans, as the long, stiff blades radiated from the end of the midrib. One tree was gorgeous with the brilliant hues of a flock of party-colored macaws. Green parrots flew shrieking overhead.

Now and then we were bitten and stung by the venomous fire-ants, and ticks crawled upon us. Once we were assailed by more serious foes, in the shape of a nest of maribundi wasps, not the biggest kind, but about the size of our hornets. We were at the time passing through dense jungle, under tall trees, in a spot where the down timber, holes, tangled creepers, and thorns made the going difficult. The leading men were not assailed, although they were now and then cutting the trail. Colonel Rondon and I were in the middle of the column, and the swarm attacked us; both of us were badly stung on the face, neck, and hands, the colonel even more severely than I was. He wheeled and rode to the rear and I to the front; our horses were stung too; and we went at a rate that a moment previously I would have deemed impossible over such ground.

At the close of the day, when we were almost back at the river, the dogs killed a jaguar kitten. There was no trace of the mother. Some accident must have befallen her, and the kitten was trying to shift for herself. She was very emaciated. In her stomach were the remains of a pigeon and some tendons from the skeleton or dried carcass of some big animal. The loathsome berni flies, which deposit eggs in living beings–cattle, dogs, monkeys, rodents, men–had been at it. There were seven huge, white grubs making big abscess-like swellings over its eyes. These flies deposit their grubs in men. In 1909, on Colonel Rondon’s hardest trip, every man of the party had from one to five grubs deposited in him, the fly acting with great speed, and driving its ovipositor through clothing. The grubs cause torture; but a couple of cross cuts with a lancet permit the loathsome creatures to be squeezed out.

In these forests the multitude of insects that bite, sting, devour, and prey upon other creatures, often with accompaniments of atrocious suffering, passes belief. The very pathetic myth of “beneficent nature” could not deceive even the least wise being if he once saw for himself the iron cruelty of life in the tropics. Of course “nature”– in common parlance a wholly inaccurate term, by the way, especially when used as if to express a single entity–is entirely ruthless, no less so as regards types than as regards individuals, and entirely indifferent to good or evil, and works out her ends or no ends with utter disregard of pain and woe.

The following morning at sunrise we started again. This time only Colonel Rondon and I went with Benedetto and Antonio the Indian. We brought along four dogs which it was fondly hoped might chase the cashadas. Two of them disappeared on the track of a tapir and we saw them no more; one of the others promptly fled when we came across the tracks of our game, and would not even venture after them in our company; the remaining one did not actually run away and occasionally gave tongue, but could not be persuaded to advance unless there was a man ahead of him. However, Colonel Rondon, Benedetto, and Antonio formed a trio of hunters who could do fairly well without dogs.

After four hours of riding, Benedetto, who was in the lead, suddenly stopped and pointed downward. We were riding along a grassy intervale between masses of forest, and he had found the fresh track of a herd of big peccaries crossing from left to right. There were apparently thirty or forty in the herd. The small peccaries go singly or in small parties, and when chased take refuge in holes or hollow logs, where they show valiant fight; but the big peccaries go in herds of considerable size, and are so truculent that they are reluctant to run, and prefer either to move slowly off chattering their tusks and grunting, or else actually to charge. Where much persecuted the survivors gradually grow more willing to run, but their instinct is not to run but to trust to their truculence and their mass-action for safety. They inflict a fearful bite and frequently kill dogs. They often charge the hunters and I have heard of men being badly wounded by them, while almost every man who hunts them often is occasionally forced to scramble up a tree to avoid a charge. But I have never heard of a man being killed by them. They sometimes surround the tree in which the man has taken refuge and keep him up it. Cherrie, on one occasion in Costa Rica, was thus kept up a tree for several hours by a great herd of three or four hundred of these peccaries; and this although he killed several of them. Ordinarily, however, after making their charge they do not turn, but pass on out of sight. Their great foe is the jaguar, but unless he exercises much caution they will turn the tables on him. Cherrie, also in Costa Rica, came on the body of a jaguar which had evidently been killed by a herd of peccaries some twenty-four hours previously. The ground was trampled up by their hoofs, and the carcass was rent and slit into pieces.

Benedetto, as soon as we discovered the tracks, slipped off his horse, changed his leggings for sandals, threw his rifle over his arm, and took the trail of the herd, followed by the only dog which would accompany him. The peccaries had gone into a broad belt of forest, with a marsh on the farther side. At first Antonio led the colonel and me, all of us on horseback, at a canter round this belt to the marsh side, thinking the peccaries had gone almost through it. But we could hear nothing. The dog only occasionally barked, and then not loudly. Finally we heard a shot. Benedetto had found the herd, which showed no fear of him; he had backed out and fired a signal shot. We all three went into the forest on foot toward where the shot had been fired. It was dense jungle and stiflingly hot. We could not see clearly for more than a few feet, or move easily without free use of the machetes. Soon we heard the ominous groaning of the herd, in front of us, and almost