234 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES. 



that often attends a bold enterprise, and easily obtained 

 possession of ten select meladas, — a monopoly, in fact, 

 for in the next moment his pre-emption was rati- 

 fied by the fall of the tail-board. The sachem turned 

 round with a coughing grunt, — " I told you so," — then 

 took to his heels, and, seized with a sudden panic, the 

 whole troop fled, shrieking, in the direction of the high 

 timber. 



Monkeys caught in steel-traps are wildly obstreperous 

 and can hardly ever be tamed : their first experience of 

 man's inhumanity to man seems to have left an indelible 

 impression. Steel-traps make their captives ferocious. 

 There is something in the arrangement and modus oper- 

 andi of the treacherous implement that appears to aggra- 

 vate the horrors of the result and excite the wrath of a 

 naturally savage animal to the raging pitch : the strug- 

 gles of a captured wild-cat sometimes liberate her at the 

 cost of a limb, and, if the iron has not collared her at the 

 very middle of the neck, she will tear herself out at the 

 risk of leaving her scalp behind. 



Pitfalls have the opposite effect : they cow their prison- 

 ers ; the darkness and mystery of the predicament and the 

 uncertainty of the result seem to paralyze their energies. 

 In Abyssinia, where all our principal menagerie-men have 

 an agent or two, sand-foxes, jackals, and even hyenas are 

 often caught in pits and taken alive by a very simple pro- 

 cess : the hunter goes down, lariats his quailing captives, 

 and, while his partner draws the rope tight, he ties their 



