THE LIVING ANIMALS OF THE WORLD 



writers believed the puma was 

 a terrible man-eater, they also 

 appear as " wonderful escapes." 

 One tells how a man put his 

 poncho, or cloak, over his back 

 when crawling up to get a shot 

 at some duck, and felt something 

 heavy on the end of it. He 

 crept from under it, and there 

 was a puma sitting on it, which 

 did not offer to hurt him. 



As space forbids further 

 quotation from Mr. Hudson's 

 experiences, which should be 

 read, the writer will only add one 

 anecdote which was told him by 

 Mr. Everard im Thurn, C. B., 

 formerly an official in British 

 Guiana. He was going up one 

 of the big rivers in his steam- 

 launch, and gave a passage to an 

 elderly and respectable Cornish 

 miner, who wanted to go up to 

 a gold-mine. The visitor had his 

 meals on the boat, but at night 

 went ashore with the men and 

 slung his hammock between two 

 trees, leaving the cabin to his 



host. One morning two of the Indian crew brought the miner's hammock on board with a 

 good deal of laughing and talking. Their master asked what the joke was, whereupon, pointing 

 to the trees whence they had unslung the hammock, one said, " Tiger sleep with old man last 

 night." They were quite in earnest, and pointed out a hollow and marks on the leaves, which 

 showed that a puma had been lying just under the mans hammock. When asked if he had 

 noticed anything in the night, he said, " Only the frogs croaking wakened me up." The croak- 

 ing of the frogs was probably the hoarse purring of the friendly puma enjoying his proximity 

 to a sleeping man. Mr. Hudson quotes a case in which four pumas played round and leapt over 

 a person camping out on the Pampas. He watched them for some time, and then went to sleep ! 

 Many of those brought to this country come with their tempers ruined by ill-treatment and 

 hardship ; but a large proportion are as tame as cats. Captain Marshall had one at Marlow 

 which used to follow him on a chain and watch the boats full of pleasure-seekers at the lock. 



The puma is always a beautiful creature, the fur cinnamon-coloured, tinged with gold ; the 

 belly and chest white ; the tail long, full, and round. Though friendly to man, it is a desperate 

 cattle-killer, and particularly fond of horse-flesh, so much so that it has been suggested that the 

 indigenous wild horses of America were destroyed by the puma. 



There are two other cats of the Pampas the GRASS-CAT, not unlike our wild cat in appear- 

 ance and habits, and the WOOD-CAT, or Geoffrey's Cat. It is a tabby, and a most elegant 

 creature, of which there is a specimen, at the time of writing, in the Zoo. 



THE OCELOT 

 In the forest region is also found the most beautiful of the medium-sized cats. This is the 



Photo by Ottomar Anschutx,'} 



OCELOT 



Note the elongated spots, and their arrangement in chains 



[Birlin 



