176 



JAGUAR AND MONKEYS. 



animal, such as a horse or a deer, it performs its deadly task in a very curious manner. 

 Leaping from some elevated spot upon the shoulders of the doomed animal, it places one 

 paw on the back of the head and another on the muzzle, and then, with a single tre- 

 mendous wrench, dislocates the neck. With smaller creatures, the Jaguar uses no such 

 ceremony, but with a blow of the paw lays its prey dead at its feet. 



With the exception of such animals as the long-tailed lizards, the food of the Jaguar 

 is of a nature that human hunters would not disdain, and in many instances would meet 

 the approbation of a professed epicure. Of turtles and their eggs the Jaguar is particularly 

 fond, and displays great ingenuity and strength in the securing, killing, and eating such 

 impracticable animals as turtles. Any one who has handled a common land tortoise 

 would be wofully puzzled if he were ordered to kill that strong mailed creature without 



JAGUAR AND MONKEYS. 



the aid of tools, and still more bewildered, were his only meal that day to consist of the 

 flesh that was locked in so hard and impenetrable a covering. As to a huge turtle in the 

 vigor of active health, scuttling -over the sandy shores, throwing up showers of blinding 

 dust with its flippers, and ready to snap at an intruder with its sharp-edged jaws ; he 

 must be a powerful man who would arrest the unwieldy creature in its onward progress 

 and a very clever one who would make a dinner upon the flesh of the reptile, 



Yet the Jaguar contrives to catch, kill, and eat the turtle, displaying in this feat equal 

 strength and ingenuity. 



Watching a turtle as she for it is generally the female turtles that are made the 

 Jaguar's prey walks riverwards, or seawards, as the case may be, after depositing her 

 eggs under a slight covering of earth, there to be warmed into being by the genial rays of 



