84 Through the Brazilian Wilderness 



tree. The furious baying of the pack, the shouts and 

 cheers of encouragement from the galloping horsemen, 

 the wilderness surroundings, the knowledge of what the 

 quarry is — all combine to make the moment one of fierce 

 and thrilling excitement. Besides, in this case there was 

 the possibility the jaguar might come to bay on the 

 ground, in which event there would be a slight element 

 of risk, as it might need straight shooting to stop a 

 charge. However, about as soon as the long-drawn 

 howling and eager yelping showed that the jaguar had 

 been overtaken, we saw him, a huge male, up in the 

 branches of a great fig-tree. A bullet behind the shoul- 

 der, from Kermit's 405 Winchester, brought him dead 

 to the ground. He was heavier than the very big male 

 horse-killing cougar I shot in Colorado, whose skull Hart 

 Merriam reported as the biggest he had ever seen; he 

 was very nearly double the weight of any of the male 

 African leopards we shot; he was nearly or quite the 

 weight of the smallest of the adult African lionesses 

 we shot while in Africa. He had the big bones, the 

 stout frame, and the heavy muscular build of a small 

 lion; he was not lithe and slender and long like a cougar 

 or leopard ; the tail, as with all jaguars, was short, while 

 the girth of the body was great ; his coat was beautiful, 

 with a satiny gloss, and the dark-brown spots on the gold 

 of his back, head, and sides were hardly as conspicuous 

 as the black of the equally well-marked spots against his 

 white belly. 



This was a well-known jaguar. He had occasionally 

 indulged in cattle-killing; on one occasion during the 

 floods he had taken up his abode near the ranch-house 



