88 Through the Brazilian Wilderness 



small cayman about five feet long. I paid no heed to it 

 at the moment. But shortly afterward when our horses 

 went down to drink it threatened them and frightened 

 them; and then Colonel Rondon and Kermit called me 

 to watch it. It lay on the surface of the water only a 

 few feet distant from us and threatened us; we threw 

 cakes of mud at it, whereupon it clashed its jaws and 

 made short rushes at us, and when we threw sticks it 

 seized them and crunched them. We could not drive it 

 away. Why it should have shown such truculence and 

 heedlessness I cannot imagine, unless perhaps it was a 

 female, with eggs near by. In another little pond a 

 jacare-tinga showed no less anger when another of my 

 companions approached. It bellowed, opened its jaws, 

 and lashed its tail. Yet these pond jacares never actu- 

 ally molested even our dogs in the ponds, far less us on 

 our horses. 



This same day others of our party had an interest- 

 ing experience with the creatures in another pond. One 

 of them was Commander da Cunha (of the Brazilian 

 Navy), a capital sportsman and delightful companion. 

 They found a deepish pond a hundred yards or so long 

 and thirty or forty across. It was tenanted by the small 

 ca)nTians and by capybaras — the largest known rodent, 

 a huge aquatic guinea-pig, the size of a small sheep. It 

 also swarmed with piranhas, the ravenous fish of which 

 I have so often spoken. Undoubtedly the caymans were 

 subsisting largely on these piranhas. But the tables were 

 readily turned if any caymans were injured. When a 

 capybara was shot and sank in the water, the piranhas 

 at once attacked it, and had eaten half the carcass ten 



