PAMPAS AND GAUCHO 



dog, finds plenty of sustenance in the abundant grasses. 

 Upon them subsist pumas, foxes, and other carnivores. 



We have said that the Pampas gradually changes from 

 being very fertile on the east to being almost a desert on the 

 west. Here is the place to mention a very interesting, if not 

 romantic, fact. The guanaco does not travel hundreds of 

 miles in order to die in one particular spot as soon as it feels 

 ill, but it does resort especially to certain spots. There the 

 grass is often a bright, fresh green, for it is plentifully 

 manured, and consequently the guanaco helps to encourage 

 the good grasses to occupy a half-desert. On the eastern 

 side of the Pampas great changes are beginning to appear. 

 The owners of the great camps, haciendas or cattle- 

 ranches let off small parts of their land to Italian " colonists." 

 These people grow crops of Indian corn, and when that has 

 been reaped, the valuable Alfalfa or Lucerne is sown down. 

 This forms the most exquisite and valuable pasture, and 

 consequently far more Shorthorn and Durham cattle can be 

 maintained. 



There are in South Africa enormous grassy plains, where 

 once springbok and other game used to exist in enormous 

 herds (Wangeman records having seen a herd of antelope 

 four miles long), in spite of lions and other beasts of 

 prey, and in spite also of the Boer, who was as much a 

 horseman as the gaucho or Red Indian. The great buck 

 wagons of South Africa were almost as much the real 

 homes of the Boers as the two-roomed huts which make up 

 his " farms." 



The great Steppes of Russia and Siberia are also grass- 

 lands. " As seen from a distance hills covered by the Stipa 

 grass resemble sand-hills, but, when nearer at hand, the sand- 

 grey colour changes into a silvery white, and these ever-moving 



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