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ponies close to the water that I might get my usual 

 riding nag. After breakfast I strolled out and saw 

 a bunch of ponies close by, all of them being black 

 or pied, and was going to pass on, thinking they 

 belonged to the farm, when Jon, surrounded by a 

 halo of insects, arose from behind a rock and asked 

 me which pony I wanted to ride. My white pony 

 had been transformed into a black one, being 

 literally covered with black flies. 



There is more than one instance of flies having 

 killed ponies, and some weeks later, when we stood 

 at the other end of the lake, one of our ponies had 

 a hole eaten in his neck as big as a half-crown, and 

 if this had not been discovered, and the animal 

 had been allowed through an oversight to remain 

 tethered a little longer, he would doubtless have 

 been killed by the insects. This is the usual prac- 

 tice of these terrible little creatures. They settle 

 on a pony and simply wear him out till he is so 

 tired that he can no longer kick, bite or swish his 

 tail. A mass of flies, owing to the pony's difficulty 

 in reaching them, get in their most deadly work, 

 especially if the little horse is hobbled. They then 

 fix on one spot, generally high up on the side of 

 the neck between the windpipe and the vertebrae, 

 and suck and suck till they have made a hole you 

 can put your finger into. In the particular case 

 of our own pony which they had attacked, there 

 was a solid cake of flies all eating their way into 

 the flesh to the depth of an inch and a half. 



The bird life of Myvatn is a great delight to the 

 ornithologist. In our own Scottish lakes and seas 

 we can see and hunt many of the northern ducks, 

 but there they only come to us for the most part 



