46 WILD NEIGHBORS  ' CHAP. 
This introduces the subject of the puma’s food, 
which might be succinctly disposed of by the 
statement that he ate anything he could get his 
teeth upon in the way of flesh. As Spears pictu- 
resquely writes of it (in Patagonia): “It claws 
down the whirring partridge, as she springs from 
her nest, which it afterward robs of its eggs; it 
kills the ostrich as he sits on his nest, and then, 
after hiding his body, it returns to the nest and 
eats the eggs with gusto; it snatches the duck or 
the goose from its feeding-place at the edge of a 
lagoon; it crushes the shell of the waddling arma- 
dillo; it digs the mouse from its nest in the grass; 
it stalks the desert prairie-dog, and, dodging with 
easy motion the fangs of the serpent, it turns to 
claw and strip out its life before it can coil to strike 
again. The mainstay of his natural bill of fare in 
the North was the Virginia deer, especially fawns 
and yearlings, and in South America the guanaco.” 
Elks and moose could fight him off, as cattle 
are able to do, except when seized by surprise and 
from behind. In his admirable history of the 
quadrupeds of the Adirondacks, Dr. C. Hart Mer- 
riam gives the following lucid description of the 
cougar’s method of hunting : 
“Panthers hunt both day and night, but un- 
doubtedly kill the larger part of their game after 
nightfall. When one scents a deer he leaps to 
the leeward and creeps stealthily toward it, as a 
cat does after a mouse. With noiseless tread and 
