406 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 
in eluding pursuit, which would do credit ‘a hood himself, 
One of them is, that he makes for some half dried swamp 
or pond, and runs into the most sticky clay, seeming to be 
aware that the stockings with which his legs would be 
defended when he came out, would prevent the scent being 
deposited from his feet, and dull the ‘trail! A shrewd 
conjecture that! but not, as I think, particularly plausible, 
for in a few bounds the mire would be rubbed off the soles of 
his feet, from which alone the scent is emitted, and leave him 
badly off as ever. I have described the cunning strategy of 
this creature, in the Night Hunt of an earlier chapter. 
But I know hundreds of well authenticated instances in 
which the cougar or panther attacked the early hunters— 
springing upon them as readily from ambush, as they would 
have done upon a deer. 
I should not feel authorized to mention at second-hand 
any incident of the many I could command, as entitle? to 
stand among the facts of natural history, but that in my 
own personal experience I have so frequently witnessed such, 
that I am compelled to allow some of these a weight propor- 
tioned to their authority. 
In an excursion towards the Rocky Mountains, I have 
met all our most formidable animals under the -most varied 
circumstances of sudden collision. On this expedition we 
saw several skins and two specimens in the flesh of the puma, 
which is yet unrecognized by any American Naturalist. It 
is evidently a transitional genus, partaking: of the charac- 
ters of both the lion and the cougar. It has clearly the 
rudimental mane and tufted tail, which characterizes the 
former, while its habits approximate those of the latter. 
I once, while hunting around a camp on one of the head 
streams of the Red River, encountered a puma, in a manner © 
much resembling the instance of the wild cat given above. 
I had gone out in the early morning to hunt, with a comrade, 
and we were carelessly walking through the thick woods in 
