CHAPTER VI 



THROUGH THE HIGHLAND WILDERNESS OF WESTERN 



BRAZIL 



We were now in the land of the bloodsucking bats, 

 the vampire bats that suck the blood of living creatures, 

 clinging to or hovering against the shoulder of a horse or 

 cow, or the hand or foot of a sleeping man, and making 

 a wound from which the blood continues to flow long after 

 the bat's thirst has been satiated. At Tapirapoan there 

 were milch cattle; and one of the calves turned up one 

 morning weak from loss of blood, which was still trickling 

 from a wound, forward of the shoulder, made by a bat. 

 But the bats do little damage in this neighborhood com- 

 pared to what they do in some other places, where not 

 only the mules and cattle but the chickens have to be 

 housed behind bat-proof protection at night or their lives 

 may pay the penalty. The chief and habitual offenders are 

 various species of rather small bats; but it is said that 

 other kinds of Brazilian bats seem to have become, at least 

 sporadically and locally, affected by the evil example and 

 occasionally vary their customary diet by draughts of 

 living blood. One of the Brazilian members of our party, 

 Hoehne, the botanist, was a zoologist also. He informed 

 me that he had known even the big fruit-eating bats to 

 take to bloodsucking. They did not, according to his 

 observations, themselves make the original wound; but 



167 



