268 Wild Beasts 



without some weapon of defence, and I knew that one of 

 them had a gun ; but nothing could be seen. As long as 

 I did not move the puma remained motionless also ; and 

 thus we stood, some fifteen yards apart, eyeing each other 

 curiously. I had heard that the human voice was potent 

 in scaring most wild beasts, and feeling that the time had 

 arrived for doing something desperate, I waved my arms 

 in the air and shouted loudly. The effect on the animal 

 was electrical ; it turned quickly to one side, and in two 

 bounds was lost in the forest." 



Now why did this brute thus behave ? The narrative 

 gives not the least explanation of its conduct. Brown 

 thought it was frightened by his gestures, because a few 

 days before he had come upon a jaguar basking on a rock 

 by the river, whose serenity was not at all disturbed by 

 the voices of a boat full of men. But that was merely a 

 guess. Very probably this animal had never seen a man 

 previously, and almost certainly not a white man in civil- 

 ized costume. There was then the profound impressive- 

 ness of absolute strangeness in the sight, and this alone 

 would have been more likely to alarm a human being or 

 intelligent brute than any other cause we know of. Per- 

 haps the puma had just devoured a peccary and was 

 gorged ; or possibly its keen senses revealed the approach 

 of Brown's party, who in fact appeared almost imme- 

 diately. One may see in a narrative like this, which is a 

 fair specimen of those relations from which most dogmatic 

 conclusions upon the character of wild beasts have been 

 drawn, how arbitrary and unjustifiable they generally are. 



Roosevelt states that a slave on his father's plantation in 



