568 Wild Beasts 



without some weapon of defence, and I knew that one of 

 them had a gun ; but nothing could be seen. As long as 

 I did not move the puma remained motionless also ; and 

 thus we stood, some fifteen yards apart, eyeing each other 

 curiously. I had heard that the human voice was potent 

 in scaring most wild beasts, and feeling that the time had 

 arrived for doing something desperate, I waved my arms 

 in the air and shouted loudly. The effect on the animal 

 was electrical ; it turned quickly to one side, and in two 

 hounds was lost in the forest." 



Now why did this brute thus behave .' The narrative 

 gives not the least explanation of its conduct. Brown 

 thought it was frightened by his gestures, because a few 

 days before he had come upon a jaguar basking on a rock 

 by the river, whose serenity was not at all disturbed by 

 the voices of a boat full of men. But that was merely a 

 guess. Very probably this animal had never seen a man 

 previously, and almost certainly not a white man in civil- 

 ized costume. There was then the profound impressive- 

 ness of absolute strangeness in the sight, and this alone 

 would have been more likely to alarm a hunian being or 

 intelligent brute than any other cause we know of. Per- 

 haps the puma had just devoured a peccary and was 

 gorged ; or possibly its keen senses revealed the approach 

 of Brown's party, who in fact appeared almost imme- 

 diately. One may see in a narrative like this, which is a 

 iair specimen of those relations from which most dogmatic 

 conclusions upon the character of wild beasts have been 

 drawn, how arbitrary and unjustifiable they generally are. 



Roosevelt states that a slave on his father's plantation in 



