BRAZILIAN DOGS 145 



If we had not used crippling rifles the peccaries might 

 have gotten away, for in the dark jungle, with the 

 masses of intervening leaves and branches, it was im- 

 possible to be sure of placing each bullet properly in the 

 half-seen moving beast. We found where the herd had 

 wallowed in the mud. The stomachs of the peccaries 

 we killed contained wild figs, palm nuts, and bundles of 

 root fibres. The dead beasts were covered with ticks. 

 They were at least twice the weight of the smaller 

 peccaries. 



On the ride home we saw a buck of the small species 

 of bush-deer, not half the size of the kind I had already 

 shot. It was only a patch of red in the bush, a good 

 distance off, but I was lucky enough to hit it. In spite 

 of its small size it was a full-gi"own male, of a species we 

 had not yet obtained. The antlers had recently been 

 shed, and the new antler growth had just begun. A 

 great jabiru stork let us ride by him a hundred and 

 fifty yards off without thinking it worth while to take 

 flight. This day we saw many of the beautiful violet 

 orchids ; and in the swamps were multitudes of flowers, 

 red, yellow, lilac, of which I did not know the names. 



I aUuded above to the queer custom these people in 

 the interior of Brazil have of gelding their hunting-dogs. 

 This absurd habit is doubtless the chief reason why 

 there are so few hounds worth their salt in the more 

 serious kinds of hunting, where the quarry is the jaguar 

 or big peccary. Thus far we had seen but one dog as 

 good as the ordinary cougar hound or bear hound, in 

 such packs as those with which I had hunted in the 

 Rockies and in the cane-brakes of the lower Mississippi. 

 It can hardly be otherwise when every dog that shows 

 himself worth anything is promptly put out of the cate- 

 gory of breeders — the theory apparently being that the 



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