MAMMAUA— ORDER XI.—MARSUPIAUA. 



of her voice, and will not abandon her till the dogs, which have been 

 aroused by the uproar, have overtaken them and commenced cracking their 

 bones. They will eat bacon, dry beef, cariion, any kind of fowl, rabbits, any 

 sort of small game, almost all the insects, and fruits of every variety. They 

 voraciously devour the musk-melon, and several species of mushroows; 

 in short, they are nearly omnivorous. The only case in which the opossum 

 manifests any respectable degree of cautiousness is when it is hunted at 

 night in the forest ; on hearing the din and noise of the hunters it with 

 some difficulty makes shift to climb a small tree or sapling, where, wrapping 

 the naked, rasp-like tail round some convenient limb, it quietly awaits the 

 approaching dogs and hunters. By many people the flesh is considered 

 delicious. Its flavour resembles that of the fltsh of a young hog, but is 

 sweeter, less gross, and is, no doubt, a more healthy food for man. A dog 

 will starve sooner than eat the flesh of an opossum ; negroes and many other 

 persons are exceedingly fond of it. During their breeding season, the males 

 are very rampant and belligerent, Numbers will collect round a female and 

 fight like dogs. Twenty or thirty years ago I witnessed a fight myself in 

 the forests of Mississippi. The female was present; there were three males ; 

 two of them were fighting, while the third one was sitting a little distance 

 off', looking as though he felt he had seen enough. They were fighting 

 hard, and had been, from the signs in the wallowed-down grass, for three 

 or four days, kicking over the female, who immediately went into a spasm 

 when I examined the pouch. Opossums are exceedingly tenacious of life. I 

 have many times seen the dogs catch them and chew and crack, seemingly, 

 all the bones in their skin, leaving them to all appearance entirely lifeless; 

 and, going out the next morning for the purpose of removing the dead 

 thing, would find that it had left its death-bed, and putting the dogs on its 

 track, trail him a mile or more before overtaking him. He would, to be 

 sure, be found in a bad fix, but at the satne time he lacked two or three 

 more bone-crackings of being dead. They cannot, like the raccoon, he so far 

 domesticated as to form any attachment fcjr persons or their houses, though 

 I have two or three times found them under the floors of dwelling-houses, 

 where they had been for some time, and had evidently taken up winter- 

 quarters, but they did not remain there long." Of the South American 

 variety known as Azara's opossum, Mr. Aplin, in the " Proceedings of the 

 Zoological Society for 1894," observes that in Uruguay, "where it is known 

 by the name of Gomadreja^ this opossum lives in a nearly treeless country, 

 the river moiite in South Soriano being the only natural wood (composed of 

 low thorny trees and big willows), and the Coniadreja preferring to live on 

 the higher camp, where it lies up in clefts and holes among the granite 

 boulder-rocks ; among these a few low thorny bushes are found in soma 

 cases. I have never seen a Comadr^ja in the monte or up any native tree, 

 but have no doubt they often climbed the trees at the estancias, which they 

 are all well able to do. Yet this animal has a very prehensile tiil, naked 

 and scaly. Having hauled one out of a cleft by the tail, I found that it 

 twined the latter tightly round my fingers, the muscular power being 

 considerable. They run up the boulder-rocks with great agility. At bay, 

 whether in rocky holt or old ants'-nest, laid up in a soft bed of dead grass, 

 or drawn and facing a dog with arched back and grinning teeth, they make a 

 snarling, grunting growl and a hiss. It is necessary to kill those taking up 

 their quarters near houses, but they are often very diflloult to kill. I have 

 hammered one with a stick and thrown its heavy body against a rock time 



