CHAPTER IX 



TRAPS. 



Man has been called a tool-making animal, and the 

 first tool was probably a trap. I do not believe that our 

 primogenitors were carnivorous. Long before they 

 began to covet the flesh they probably hankered after 

 the eggs and milk of their fellow-creatures, and had to 

 devise means for catching them alive. They had no 

 need of elaborate contrivances. Experience makes sav- 

 ages the best hunters, and it alone can explain their suc- 

 cess in capturing animals whose cunning defies the best 

 inventions of the amateur sportsman. With the simplest 

 of all imaginable traps — an elastic stick with a noose — 

 the Patagonian nomads catch hares, foxes, wolves, and the 

 shyest of all American quadrupeds, the mountain-vicuna. 

 Von Tschudi made the acquaintance of a Chilian farmer 

 who had passed several years in the Andes before he 

 succeeded in capturing a live vicuna. He had imitated 

 the traps of the Indians, their method of fixing them in 

 the sand of the river-banks, their precaution in obliter- 

 ating the traces of their footsteps, but all in vain, till an 

 Indian renegade revealed the secret, — namely, that the 

 vicunas invariably select their drinking-places where 



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