CHAP. Ill] A WELL-KNOWN JAGUAR 79 



howling and eager yelping showed that the jaguar 

 had been overtaken, we saw him, a huge male, up 

 in the branches of a great fig-tree. A bullet behind 

 the shoulder, from Kermit's 405 Winchester, brought 

 him dead to the ground. He was heavier than the very 

 big male horse-kilUng cougar I shot in Colorado, whose 

 skull Hart Merriam reported as the biggest he had ever 

 seen ; he was very nearly double the weight of any of 

 the male African leopards we shot; he was nearly or 

 quite the weight of the smallest of the adult African 

 lionesses we shot while in Africa. He had the big 

 bones, the stout frame, and the heavy muscular build 

 of a small lion ; he was not lithe and slender and long 

 like a cougar or leopard ; the tail, as with all jaguars, 

 was short, while the girth of the body was great ; his 

 coat was beautiful, with a satiny gloss, and the dark 

 brown spots on the gold of his back, head, and sides 

 were hardly as conspicuous as the black of the equally 

 well-marked spots against his white belly. 



This was a well-known jaguar. He had occasionally 

 indulged in cattle-killing ; on one occasion during the 

 floods he had taken up his abode near the ranch-house, 

 and had killed a couple of cows and a young steer. The 

 hunters had followed him, but he had made his escape, 

 and for the time being had abandoned the neighbour- 

 hood. In these marshes each jaguar had a wide irreg- 

 ular range, and travelled a good deal, perhaps only 

 passing a day or two in a given locality, perhaps spend- 

 ing a week where game was plentiful. .Jaguars love the 

 water. They drink greedily and swim freely. In this 

 country they rambled through the night across the 

 marshes and prowled along the edges of the ponds and 

 bayous, catching the capybaras and the caymans ; for 

 these small pond caymans, the jacare-tinga, form part 



