198 The Naturalist in Nicaragua 
‘Jet us have mules at first, we should easily have got over the 
difficulty by leaving the value of the animals in the hands of 
some responsible person, but the owners had made all sorts 
of excuses for not lending them, and we had not suspected 
ithe true cause. We had been travelling continually for nine 
‘days, and looked more like brigands than honest travellers, 
and the good easy-going people of Ocotal had their suspicions 
about us. 
As I have said, when satisfied of our good faith, the mule 
owners soon offered us the use of their beasts, and next 
morning Velasquez and I started at seven o’clock on two 
fine fresh mules and rode merrily up the valley of the Depilto. 
‘The river rises in the high ranges that form the boundary 
‘between Honduras and Nicaragua, and running down past 
Depilto joins the Ocotal river a little below the capital. Our 
road lay up the valley close to the river, which we crossed 
and recrossed several times. The vegetation was scanty, 
ut the morning was a lovely one after the thunderstorm of 
the night before, and we greatly enjoyed our ride. We did 
mot see many birds, a pretty hawk that I shot being the 
most noticeable. Hawks of various kinds are very abundant 
in the tropics, and if the small birds had to personify death, 
they would certainly represent him as one, for this is the 
form in which he must generally appear to them. Towards 
evening the hawk glides noiselessly along and alights on a 
bough, near where he hears the small birds twittering amongst 
the bushes. Perhaps they see him and are quiet for a little, 
‘but he sits motionless as the sphinx, and they soon get over 
their fear and resume their play or feeding. Then suddenly 
a dark mass swoops down and rises again. It is the hawk, 
with a small bird grasped in his strong talons, gasping out 
its last breath. Its comrades are terror-struck for a moment 
_and dash madly into the thickets, but soon forget their fear. 
They chirp to each other, the scattered birds reunite; there 
is a fluttering and twittering, a rearranging of mates, then 
again songs, feeding, love, jealousy, and bickerings. 
The banks of the river were sandy and sterile, and the soil 
-contained much small quartz. The bed rock was a talcose 
schist near to Ocotal, but higher up the river it changed to 
gneissoid and quartz rocks, the latter in hard and massive 
-beds, As we-ascended the valley, the ranges bounding it 
