1892 
Itzatlan 
(Jalisco) 
June 
Bat hunting 
in old mines 
Old 
Miners 
ing worked in a small way, I went back into several of them after 
bats. In one mine that had been deserted a long time there were 
quite a number of the flesh and blood eating bats that attack the 
cattle horses, etc,, an the neck and back* 
We crawled back over great masses of fallen rock from the roof 
and finally penetrated to the extremity of the galleries, hearing 
the wings of the bats all the time as they flew on ahead and se¬ 
creted themselves in inaccessible crevices, I only secured one here, 
then we went into another old mine being worked and after climbing 
down notched logs and inclined passages for several hundred foet to 
the lower levels we found quite a number of these vampires (# 2787 
and $ 2788) which were living in the extreme lower levels. 
As we drew near, the whirring of their wings could be heard very 
distinctly as they flew ahead and secreted themselves in the timber¬ 
ing, 
My guides were two of the miners who were well adapted to hunt 
bats in the intense gloom of these depths. One was an old grizzled 
fellow with an enormous goitre under his chin, and the other had a 
powerful, rounded back and shoulders, with head set forward by long 
bearing burdens of ore up through these tortuous ways. His face was 
of repulsive paleness and his dead, fishy eyes looked out from a 
countenance like that of a corps©* 
He burrowed among the timbers and secured a number of the -vamp¬ 
ires in his hands, each time the vicious brutes bit a piece of skin 
off so that his hands were streaming with blood. The female bats 
had each a single young one clinging to her attached to the teat on 
one aide with their bodies stretched across the body of the mother 
and holding on firmly to the fur on the other side under her winr 
by means of their hind claws* ilhen pulled off they searched for 
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