lOO Through the Brazilian Wilderness 



sion; one of them once found a female swimming and 

 diving freely with four quite well-grown young in her 

 pouch. 



We saw on the banks screamers — ^big, crested waders 

 of archaic type, with spurred wings, rather short bills, 

 and no especial affinities with other modern birds. In 

 one meadow by a pond we saw three marsh-deer, a buck 

 and two does. They stared at us, with their thickly 

 haired tails raised on end. These tails are black under- 

 neath, instead of white as in our whitetail deer. One of 

 the vagaries of the ultraconcealing-colorationists has been 

 to uphold the (incidentally quite preposterous) theory 

 that the tail of our deer is colored white beneath so as 

 to harmonize with the sky and thereby mislead the cougar 

 or wolf at the critical moment when it makes its spring; 

 but this marsh-deer shows a black instead of a white 

 flag, and yet has just as much need of protection from 

 its enemies, the jaguar and the cougar. In South Amer- 

 ica concealing coloration plays no more part in the lives 

 of the adult deer, the tamandua, the tapir, the peccary, 

 the jaguar, and the puma than it plays in Africa in the 

 lives of such animals as the zebra, the sable antelope, 

 the wildebeeste, the lion, and the hunting hyena. 



Next day we spent ascending the Sao Lourengo. It 

 was narrower than the Paraguay, naturally, and the swirl- 

 ing brown current was, if anything, more rapid. The 

 strange tropical trees, standing densely on the banks, 

 were matted together by long bush ropes — lianas, or 

 vines, some very slender and very long. Sometimes we 

 saw brilliant red or blue flowers, or masses of scarlet 

 berries on a queer palmlike tree, or an array of great 



