WILD HUNTING COMPANIONS 153 



of mixed blood or else wild natives of the wild 

 lands over which the great game roamed. To 

 some of these men I became really attached. 

 Not a few of them showed a courage and loyalty 

 and devotion to duty which would have put to 

 shame very many civiHzed men. Almost all of 

 them at times did or said things that were very 

 interesting because of the glimpses they gave 

 into souls that really belong to a totally different 

 age from that in which I and my friends of 

 civilized lands are Hving. 



December, 1913, and January, 1914, I spent 

 in the remote interior of Brazil, on and near 

 various rivers which form the headwaters of 

 the mighty Paraguay. It is still a frontier 

 country; the province is known as the Matto 

 Grosso, the province of the great wooded wil- 

 derness. Yet it has a civihzed and Christian 

 history which runs back for over a century. It 

 is on the eve of striking material development, 

 and, nevertheless, it is still primitive with a 

 primitiveness half that of a belated Europe, 

 half that of a savagery struggling over the 

 border-line into an exceedingly simple civihza- 

 tion. Out of these diverse and conflicting ele- 

 ments, and with a century of comparative isola- 

 tion behind it, the land has produced a far more 

 distinctive and peculiar life than our own frontier 



