A Peccary Hunt on the Nueces. 349 



were filled with fish. One lay quite near the ranch house, 

 under a bold rocky bluff; at its edge grew giant cypress 

 trees. In the hollows and by the watercourses were 

 occasional groves of pecans, live-oaks, and elms. Strange 

 birds hopped among the bushes ; the chaparral cock a 

 big, handsome ground-cuckoo of remarkable habits, much 

 given to preying on small snakes and lizards ran over 

 the ground with extraordinary rapidity. Beautiful swal- 

 low-tailed kingbirds with rosy plumage perched on the 

 tops of the small trees, and soared and flitted in graceful 

 curves above them. Blackbirds of many kinds scuttled in 

 flocks about the corrals and outbuildings around the 

 ranches. Mocking-birds abounded, and were very noisy, 

 singing almost all the daytime, but with their usual 

 irritating inequality of performance, wonderfully musical 

 and powerful snatches of song being interspersed with 

 imitations of other bird notes and disagreeable squalling. 

 Throughout the trip I did not hear one of them utter the 

 beautiful love song in which they sometimes indulge 

 at night. 



The country was all under wire fence, unlike the 

 northern regions, the pastures however being sometimes 

 many miles across. When we reached the Frio ranch a 

 herd of a thousand cattle had just been gathered, and 

 two or three hundred beeves and young stock were being 

 cut out to be driven northward over the trail. The cat- 

 tle were worked in pens much more than in the North, 

 and on all the ranches there were chutes with steering 

 gates, by means of which the individuals of a herd could 

 be dexterously shifted into various corrals. The brand- 



