e 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 w