408 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 



creatures, which had been tilled near San Antonio de Bexar, 

 in Texas, which is a very old Spanish town; yet, on the 

 most careful inquiry, we learned from the hunters, that they 

 were quite as cowardly, and averse to attacking man as the 

 cougars, which yet linger in the swamps of the Mississippi, 

 the pine woods of the Carolinas, or along the course of 

 our Western rivers, are known to be. 



The secret of this is, that the creatures we met on the 

 remote waters of the Red River, where the hunter's rifle 

 had probably been never heard, were in fact living in entire 

 unconsciousness of its formidable prognostics and accompani- 

 ments. • 



I had also an adventure once with the oceolet, which fully 

 illustrates the progress this sort of intimidation has made in 

 altering our relations to such creatures. 



The oceolet — which is, next to the common house cat, the 

 base of the felines, and has always been set down in old 

 books of natural history as, in proportion to its size, one 

 of the most incorrigibly fierce of its tribe, and which may 

 Btill with truth be called the most untameable, as it is the 

 most beautiful of all — yet showed itself to be even more 

 timid than I, in a sudden rencontre ! 



I was hunting with a friend near his ranche, on the San 

 Antonio river, one morning. The two untrained dogs which 

 accompanied us soon ran off far enough ahead down the 

 course of the heavily timbered river bottom. We were 

 walking through a field which had been opened into the 

 timber, and which being now uncultivated, was fringed by 

 a thick briar-path. As we approached this, some creature 

 sprang up from its outer edge, where it had probably been 

 sunning itself, and we heard it rattling away into the 

 adjacent forest, which at this place was below where we 

 stood. 



On looking down over the top of the thicket, we saw the 

 beautifully mottled form of an oceolet, clinging to the trunk 



