470 A YEAR OF COSTA RICAN NATURAL HISTORY 



Senor Bonilla furnished us with three horses and a boy to 

 bring them back and the three of us left Santa Cruz about 

 nine o'clock going in a generally northeast direction to Bol- 

 son, the road passing northwest of the Cerro Tamarindo and 

 to the east of a ridge of hills separating this road from that 

 taken the day before to the Rio de las Canas. These ridges 

 and also the isolated conical hills, both of which are nu- 

 merous in this part of the country, were now pale brown and 

 very dry and stood out in such sharp contrast against the 

 blue sky that their extreme edges often looked as if they had 

 been colored white. The road was almost level for the 

 whole distance; much of the way ran through forests but 

 passed very few houses. We saw a few cara blanca monkeys, 

 but the chief object of interest was a pisote which walked 

 rather leisurely across the road in front of us, unaware of our 

 presence until looking around it spied us and quickened its 

 pace. This pisote (probably Nasua narica bullata) was 

 black and looked about two feet long exclusive of its black 

 tail which was held fairly high and was apparently a little 

 longer than the body. Its snout was prolonged into a taper- 

 ing point to which fact the animal owes its technical name of 

 Nasua. Its movements were so catlike than when I first 

 caught sight of the body only I thought the creature was a 

 black jaguar. Biolley, in his Elementos de Historia Natural, 

 says the pisote is omnivorous, and Belt {Naturalist in Nicar- 

 agua) describes the methods of this animal in hunting iguanas 

 and other lizards on trees. The pisotes are members of the 

 raccoon family. 



We reached Bolson at 1.40 P. M. and went to the house 

 of Seiiora Fonseca where we stayed all night. In the dining- 

 room was a watermark five feet above the floor, showing 

 the height to which the nearby rivers had risen in the pre- 

 ceding rainy season. 



Bolson was a poor town of scattered houses built in many 



