MAMMALS OF THE MEXICAN B'OrNDART. 479 



land, and store their dried pumpkins, peaches, Indian corn, and other 

 produce in caches in the walls of the canyon, and seal them up tight 

 with a kind of mud cement and stone walls to protect them from 

 wood-rats and spermophiles. 



The wood-rat has many enemies. Indians kill and eat them. The 

 Hopi call this species Kee-hua' Cahl'-a, and pronounce its flesh a deli- 

 cacy. Captain Martinez, of the army engineer corps of Mexico, 

 informed me that physicians of northern Mexico commonly order broth 

 made from the wood-rat for the Indians and peasants whom they are 

 called upon to treat — just as our physicians prescribe chicken broth 

 and beef tea. Bones of Neotoma albigula were numerous in the 

 cave-like human habitations so abundant in the Verde Valley. The 

 bones were often found in a charred condition, showing that the rat 

 was probably used as food by this' ancient people. On August 15, 

 1886, at Fort Verde, the first sergeant of Company K, Ninth Infan- 

 try, brought me a diamond rattlesnake, weighing 4^^ pounds, which 

 contained a wood-rat. Hawks and owls also devour this rat. A 

 western red-tailed hawk, taken January 16, 1887, at Fort Verde, 

 had eaten one, swallowing it bones, hair, and all. Barn owl pellets 

 from a nest in the bluflF clay bank of the Verde River, on July 30, 

 1885, contained bones of this wood-rat, and of smaller mammals, 

 together with a quantity of hair and remains of small birds. 



White-throated wood-rats are born at all seasons of the year, 

 but perhaps not in winter in the higher portions of its habitat. Two 

 females would have given birth to three young each and four to two 

 each. 



In Arizona the distribution of the white-throated wood-rat is quite 

 general except in the highest portions. It was abundant in the Verde 

 Valley. . In January, 1885, its cow-dung houses were seen under 

 bushes and cacti all along the route from Fort Verde to Indian Gar- 

 den, on Oak Creek. One wood-rat was seen on a nest built in the 

 center of a bunch of cacti growing in a scrub-oak bush. On the mesa 

 east of Fort Verde the nests were usually composed of sticks and dry 

 cow manure in varying proportions. Between Fort Verde and Fossil 

 Creek large pilfes of sticks and cow-dung heaps were built up around 

 the trunks of juniper trees by the wood-rat. I found it in the Agua 

 Fria Valley, at Hance's cienega, on Ash Creek, at Antelope and Bum- 

 ble Bee, and in the Black Canyon between Phoenix and Prescott. It 

 was common at Tucson, Camp Lowell, Mountain Spring, and on the 

 San Pedro River at Tres Alamos. 



Along the Mexican Line this species was first met with in the Dog 

 Mountains of New Mexico, where, as usual, it was abundant, as it also 

 was at the east base of the San Luis Mountains, in the vicinity of 

 Monument No. 64; but it was not found on these mountains above 

 2,100 meters altitude, beyond which it was replaced by Neotoma 



