408 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 
creatures, which had been killed near San Antonio de Bexar, 
in Texas, which is a very old Spanish town; yet, on the 
most careful inquiry, we learned from the hunters, that they 
were quite as cowardly, and averse to attacking man as the 
cougars, which yet linger in the swamps of the Mississippi, 
the pine woods of the Carolinas, or along the course of 
our Western rivers, are known to be. 
The secret of this is, that the creatures we met on the 
remote waters of the Red River, where the hunter’s rifle 
had probably been never heard, were in fact living in entire 
unconsciousness of its formidable prognostics and accompani- 
menis. 
I had also an adventure once with the oceolet, which fully 
illustrates the progress this sort of intimidation has made in 
altering our relations to such creatures. - 
The oceolet—which is, next to the common house cat, the 
base of the felines, and has always been set down in old 
books of natural history as, in proportion to its size, one 
of the most incorrigibly fierce of its tribe, and which may 
still with truth be called the most untameable, as it is the 
most beautiful of all—yet showed itself to be even more 
timid than I, in a sudden rencontre ! 
I was hunting with a friend near his ranche, on the San 
Antonio river, one morning. The two untrained dogs which 
accompanied us soon ran off far enough ahead down the 
course of the heavily timbered river bottom. We were 
walking through a field which had been opened into the 
timber, and which being now uncultivated, was fringed by 
a thick briar-path. As we approached this, some creature 
sprang up from its outer edge, where it had probably been 
sunning itself, and we heard it rattling away into the 
adjacent forest, which at this place was below where we 
‘stood. ' 
On looking down over the top of the thicket, we saw the 
beautifully mottled form of an oceolet, clinging to the trunk 
