The Gold Diggings of Cape Horn Part 15

Judging by the good qualities of the skins I have seen, the hide of the full-grown guanaco would make an excellent leather, well adapted for valises and such uses, while that of the younger ones would serve admirably for fine footwear and gloves. Skins bring from 25 to 50 cents gold each in the market at Punta Arenas.

A curious kind of ball acc.u.mulates in the stomach of the guanaco. It looks something like a stone, but can be readily broken. It is said to possess medicinal qualities, and there is a ready market for the stuff at the settlement.

Next to the guanaco in interest if not in utility is the panther of Patagonia, the _felis concolor_ of the naturalist. Nowhere in the world does the great tree-climbing cat reach greater size or acc.u.mulate more fat than on the treeless deserts of the far south. Specimens from eight to nine feet long over all are frequently seen. Though, perhaps, rather lighter in color, they are in all other respects exactly like the panthers of the United States. How it happened one cannot even guess, but the panther is known very much better in the desert than in the United States. Rarely can one read a story of the panther in the States without seeing something about its terrible ferocity toward human beings, while the stories of the panther that comes out of the woods to play with the lonely wayfarer as a cat plays with a mouse, that it may at last crush and eat him, are enough to make the flesh of the unlearned reader creep on his bones. On the desert of Patagonia there are more panthers in proportion to the area and the numbers of other kinds of animals than in any other region of the world. The lonely wayfarer is not often found there afoot, but men have been on the desert unmounted, and the panthers have come to play around them, too. But it is not as a predatory cat that they come. It is as a playful kitten. Individual panthers play by themselves--old ones as well as young--by the hour.

They will chase and paw and roll an upturned bush, or a round rock, or any moving thing, and lacking that will pretend to sneak up on unwary game, crouching the while behind a bush, or rock for concealment, to spring out at last and land on a hump of sand or a shadow. Then they turn around and do the same thing over again.

When it is in this frame of mind if a lone human being comes along the panther is as glad to see him as a petted cat to see its mistress. It purrs and rolls over before him, and gallops from side to side, and makes no end of kitten-like motions, and all because of the exuberance of its youthful spirits. I know that the average reader, accustomed to the Fenimore Cooper sort of novels, will think this an exaggeration, but the plainsmen of all Argentina call the panther by a name that means "the friend of man," and that too in spite of the havoc it makes among their sheep.

This name, "the friend of man," applied to a beast elsewhere counted ferocious, arose from an incident well authenticated in the history of Buenos Ayres, though I have no doubt that other instances of the kindly disposition of the panther toward the human race have served to perpetuate the t.i.tle. In 1536 the people of Buenos Ayres, then a town of 2000 inhabitants, were reduced to the point of starvation because of a war with the Indians. One writer, Del Barco Centenera, a.s.serts that 1800 of the 2000 died of hunger. The dead were buried only just beyond the palisades, because of the danger from Indians, and in consequence many beasts of prey came to feed on the thinly-covered bodies, a circ.u.mstance that added greatly to the terror and distress of the people.

Nevertheless, hunger increased so much that many ventured out into woods along the river seeking edible roots, and with some success. Among these was a young woman named Maldonada, who, getting lost, was found and carried away by the Indians. Some months later, peace having been restored, Don Rui Diaz, the Captain of the soldiers, learned that Senorita Maldonada was alive, and thereupon he persuaded the Indians to restore her. He did this, not to relieve her from her slavery, but that he might punish her for what he believed to be her treachery. He thought she had deserted to the Indians, and so he condemned her to be tied to a tree three miles from town and left there to be eaten by wild beasts.

This was done. After two nights and a day soldiers were sent to bring in her bones for burial, but to their great astonishment she was found unhurt. She said a panther had remained with her, and had driven off the jaguars and other beasts of prey that came to destroy her. The following sentence is from an old history of the town, and is given in the original for the benefit of those who read Spanish because of a pun in it.

De esta manera quedo libre la que ofrecieron a las fieras; la cual mujer yo la conoci, y la llamaban la Maldonada, que mas bien se le podia llama la Biendonada; pues por esta suceso se ha de ver no haber merecido el castigo a que la ofrecieron.

Freely translated this means:

In this manner she that was offered to the wild beasts remained free; the which, woman I knew and they called her Maldonada (ill-bestowed), whom they could better have called Biendonada (well-bestowed), since from this happening it was seen that she had not merited the punishment she had received.

The kindness of the panther does not protect him from the a.s.sault of man, however. A war of extermination is everywhere waged against the race. Mr. W. H. Greenwood, a sheep-owner whom I met at Santa Cruz, had killed over 1000 panthers single handed, but in talking of the matter he said panther killing could not be called sport. When started by horse or dogs it runs with tremendous leaps a short distance. It gets tired out quickly, and then leaps into the middle of the largest clump of thorn brush at hand. There it sits up and snarls and looks like a fierce cat.

It will claw the life out of any dog it can get hold of very quickly, but the moment a la.s.so drops over its neck it gives up, and lying down, shed tears as if it knew and dreaded its fate. Panthers are knocked in the head with the bolas, and even stabbed to death with knives by the shepherds, though this last act is really dangerous. The panther will not leap from its crouching place at a man, but if the man ventures in reach the beast may claw his life out, and he may not, too.

As the sheep ranches spread over Patagonia, the panthers are killed off as vermin. The flesh is freely eaten by everybody in Patagonia. Some like it roasted best, but most people prefer it boiled. Roasted it tastes like young pig. It is particularly esteemed because usually fat.

The Patagonia plainsmen, as well as the Indians, consume fat as an Eskimo does. This is not because the weather is cold, as the arctic explorer imagined, but because they live on a meat diet exclusively.

Vegetables supply the const.i.tuents to civilized folks which lean meat lacks. The fat meat is sufficient of itself.

Of the hunting habits of the panther many stories are told, and from these one learns that it is about the laziest hunter in the world as well as the most playful. It creeps up slowly on the guanaco herds, picks out a fat one, and then with quivering fur and flaming eyes it leaps at its victim. Two mighty bounds, no more, no less, and it lands on the back of the guanaco, and with a sweep of its right paw it dislocates its victim's neck. Down the two go in a heap, and then the panther tears open the neck of the guanaco and drinks the hot sweet blood that gushes out. This done, the carca.s.s is usually covered up with brush, as if for future use, but as a matter of fact the condors or other carrion birds usually pick the bones.

That, at least, is the story of a panther's attack when it is lucky.

Half the time the guanaco hears or smells its enemy in time to leap away in safety. The panther never chases its game, even when it gets so close as to tear b.l.o.o.d.y stripes in its flank.

At times the panther finds the herd feeding in the open, where no shelter behind which it can reach its prey is to be had. Thereat the wily panther lies down on its back behind a bush that may be afar off, and claws the air, first with one paw, then with another, and then with both. Up will come its hind legs next, or its tail will stand erect, with the tip waving from side to side. These motions are something guanaco curiosity cannot resist. The guanaco comes to the decoy by starts and hesitating runs, but it comes, and so meets its death.

It is a fine savage, the panther. Shepherds told me of losing from forty to one hundred and twenty sheep in a night, the mother with young cubs being the most destructive--not that she may feed her young, but because she is then most playful. She kills for fun. The guanaco is the panther's staple food, but horses, sheep, and young cattle are all liked by it. Indeed, no living being of the desert except man escapes its appet.i.te for murder, one may say, for it claws down the whirring partridge as she springs from her nest, which it afterwards robs of its eggs; it kills the ostrich as he sits on his nest, and then, after hiding his body, it returns to the nest and eats the eggs with gusto; it s.n.a.t.c.hes the duck or the goose from its feeding place at the edge of a lagoon; it crushes the sh.e.l.l of the waddling armadillo; it digs the mouse from its nest in the gra.s.s; it stalks the desert prairie dog (_Viscacha Lagostomus Trichodactylus_), and, dodging with easy motion the fangs of the serpent, it turns to claw and strip out its life before it can coil to strike again.

And yet, with all this, it makes a charming household pet. I never heard of one being kept longer than three years, but none of those described as pets was ever killed for personal harm done to or even ill-temper shown toward a human being. The shepherds and gauchos agree that the panther is always a kitten at heart, so far as man is concerned, but it has an instinctive dislike for dogs and love for colts and lambs. These failings, in spite of good training, will sooner or later get a panther into trouble on the ranch, and then even the wife and children plead in vain for its life.

If it be thought interesting that a tree-climbing cat like the panther should flourish on the treeless plains of Patagonia, then it is remarkable that two kinds of the colored man's choicest game, the 'possum, should thrive in the same locality. In regions where there never was a tree, and never will be one naturally, the 'possum, with its prehensile tail dragging uselessly behind it, lives as comfortably, and makes just as good a roast, as ever it did where the pawpaws grow. That it has lived thus for ages on the treeless mesa no one need doubt; but when by chance one is transported from the plain to a region of trees, to the valley of the Rio Negro, for instance, the old tree-climbing instinct is found as strong as ever. A mother 'possum that had ten young ones as large as rats, was once taken from her nest to a plantation with trees, and straightway, without any hesitation, she climbed nimbly up, carrying her family with her in the usual fashion--clinging all over her back and sides. Nor had the use of her tail been forgotten.

So much for the ordinary 'possum. There is another sort found that is no doubt indigenous, and it is of a kind to make the eyes of a colored brother bulge with astonishment, for it is at maturity the size of a small meadow mole. There are bushes on the desert large enough to serve these little fellows as trees, and they are, therefore, able to follow their instinctive desire to climb and hang head down by the tail, but the spectacle of one of the little 'possum mothers climbing about a desert bush with her tiny young clinging to her is one of the most interesting sights in nature.

Another animal that is at least in one respect allied to the 'possum is the coypu. It might, perhaps, be called an aquatic 'possum because of its hairless tail and its habit of carrying its young on its back. The naturalists, however, say it is more like the beaver than any other North American beast, and it certainly has a remarkably beautiful pelage. Its flesh is very good to eat, but it is chiefly hunted for the fur. The feature of this animal, however, that at once attracts the attention of a stranger is the location of the nipples of the mother on her back instead of on her breast and belly, as in ordinary mammals.

When seen swimming about with her young on her back, as is her custom, the nipples are found above the water line extending in a row from shoulder to hip, where the young can nurse as they are carried along.

Of the weasels, one kind is described as much larger than those in the United States. They travel in packs like wolves when hunting, and are said to have the most malignant and devilish faces of any beast of the desert. All birds and rodents that get within their grasp are torn to pieces in savage fashion.

Along the Andes many Virginia deer are found, but it is only near the forests. They emit a rank odor from the leg glands that is said to be fatal to the desert snakes. The gray fox flourishes everywhere and grows to a rather larger size than in the United States, but he is remarkable for being very short-winded. At least, he is easily tired out. A race of a few hundred yards with a desert horse uses him up, and he falls a victim to the well-nigh unerring bolas of the plainsmen. He is not often killed by the Indians, for he is not fit to eat, but the shepherds slay him at sight because of the number of lambs he kills in the season.

Then there is the skunk, a counterpart in all respects of the skunk of the States. Skunks are very numerous in all parts, and often serve the Indians as food when larger game fails. It is an interesting fact, too, that the Indians capture them when young and make pets of them. There is rarely a collection of wigwams on the desert without a couple of tame skunks playing about.

The skunks, when tame, seem in all respects inoffensive. The gauchos I met when told that a skunk's bite is supposed in parts of the United States to cause a malady akin to hydrophobia were incredulous. They had never heard of such a thing.

Any reference to the animals of Patagonia that omitted the armadillo would be noticeably defective. It is an animal with habits that must interest an amateur naturalist greatly. There are two forms of the armadillo. Roughly speaking, one is like a hairy guinea pig with a pointed turtle sh.e.l.l over its back and head, while the other is like a thick turtle without any breastplate. The former is very rare even in its haunts on the Andes. The latter is everywhere abundant. As described by all who have seen it, the latter will eat and get fat--very fat--on anything from gra.s.s roots to decayed fish or cattle, from an ant to a poisonous serpent, from strawberries to rats and mice. In the wilderness it roams about by day because the cats of the desert persecute it most at night. Near the settlements, where, by the way, it thrives best, it is abroad at night, because man persecutes it in the day. Slow moving, as it seems to be when the traveller sees it at sunset, it overtakes the serpents of the region in a fair race, and kills them by squatting on them and sawing its body to and fro so that the edges of its protective sh.e.l.l cut the snake to pieces. It captures mice by sneaking on them cat-fashion and throwing its body over them like a trap. It grubs for worms; it robs nests of eggs and fledglings. Now, although it eats a great many things that are repulsive to civilized tastes, the armadillo is itself a most delicious article of food for any human taste, civilized or uncivilized. In my journeys as a reporter of _The Sun_ I have eaten nearly every kind of fish, flesh, and fowl served between Ivigtut, Greenland, and Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, but found nothing quite so much to my taste as an armadillo baked in the embers of an out-door fire on the desert of Patagonia. Nor was my judgment in the matter influenced by hunger, for my first armadillo was served unexpectedly after a plentiful repast of good beef roasted on a spit. It is said that armadillos are not found south of the Santa Cruz River.

They are indigenous north of it, but the river's current is an impa.s.sable barrier to keep it from spreading south.

All travellers familiar with the desert regions of the United States are at once struck on reaching Patagonia with the remarkable similarity between the two countries. No one could object to the transplanting of armadillos to the prairies and deserts of the United States. They prefer animal food; they are good scavengers. They do no harm to crops, but on the contrary aid materially in destroying insects and other crop enemies. Indeed, they are so valuable in this respect that the Agricultural Department, which imported bugs of one kind to destroy others that were ruining California orange-growers, might well take into consideration a proposition to import armadillos.

s.p.a.ce is lacking even for brief reference to other animals. There is one thing, however, about the majority of all the desert animals that must strike the traveller as the most remarkable thing in nature. The big guanacos, the tiny rodent, half a dozen different kinds of mammals, besides birds, all live without water. I do not know this to be true, but every plainsman with whom I have talked said it was so. The panther, of course, finds a subst.i.tute in the blood he drinks, but there are others that do not have even a liquid food. They live on flesh or on the herbs that are never noticeable for having juices in them. Still, the matter is not without a parallel in the United States, for the prairie dogs, the rabbits, and the reptiles of such regions as the Panhandle of Texas and the Colorado Desert live in like fashion.

On the whole, Patagonia is one of the parts of the world for the hardy lover of nature to see when he goes a-travelling. The zoology is, indeed, about as scant, numerically, as the flora; but here, as in all other things, there is a universal law of compensation. Whatever may be lacking in the count of kinds is more than made up in the interesting characteristics of those to be found there.

CHAPTER X.

BIRDS OF PATAGONIA.

All things save song considered, the ostrich is the most interesting bird of Patagonia. There are really two kinds of ostriches in the territory, one at the north and one at the south, but in the eyes of an ordinary spectator they are all of one species.

The traveller will see them from the deck of the steamer as he approaches sh.o.r.e. From a distance they look like a flock of overgrown gray turkeys running around the desert. The angular gait of a turkey in pursuit of a gra.s.shopper is theirs. That the ostrich existed in the days when sunny tropical skies hung over Patagonia is a fact well known to paleontologists. There are ostrich bones in the old clay beds of the region with those of the glyptodon and the monkey, but the monkey was wholly extinguished in the cataclysms of the early ages, while the ostrich, being better able to adapt himself to new conditions, survived, and is even now almost holding his own in the fight for existence on the desert, in spite of the onslaughts of the puma, the wild-cat, the fox, and the still more ruthless hunters who have human blood in their veins.

Just how it is that ostriches have survived can be understood by what the Patagonians tell of them. Thus the birds feed on flies, gra.s.shoppers--about all the insects that appear in their region--and they do this from the moment they break their way through their egg-sh.e.l.ls. They are able to make their own living from the first. Then, too, they are brought into being in peculiar fashion. The old c.o.c.k bird has a harem of several hens, and he is in some respects a marvellously good head of a family. He builds a nest for the harem, and the hens take turns in depositing their eggs in it until it is full. Nests having forty eggs in them are not uncommon. When the nest is full enough the old c.o.c.k takes possession, and sits on and cares for them until they are hatched. Meantime the females go wandering about the plains having a good time, and, incidentally, laying eggs where there is no nest--eggs that are called "strays" by the gauchos, and remain fit to eat for many weeks after they are dropped.

When the eggs are hatched the male looks after the brood--leads them about where food is most abundant, and keeps his eyes open for the ever-near dangers. Although the young birds do not at first recognize an enemy in the predacious beasts and birds that surround them, the old c.o.c.k remains with them sounding "a loud snorting or rasping warning call" whenever he sees a danger, until the youngsters know the dangers for themselves--a very short time sufficing.

The habit which ostriches have of sticking their heads into the sand, leaving the body exposed to danger, has often been mentioned in books and used as an ill.u.s.tration of what a fool will do. But when one comes to study the ostrich in its home on the desert the habit does not seem at all foolish. Indeed, it is a wise provision of nature for the safety of the bird in a region where hiding places are scarce. When a brood of young ostriches is warned by their guardian they instantly fade out of sight. Gauchos told me that they had surprised broods of more than a score, of which they were able to find no more than three or four, and yet those birds had no more shelter for hiding than was afforded by a dozen or so of small bushes. Squatting motionless, with his head in the sand, the ostrich is so near in color like the sand and the scant herbage that grows there that even experienced hunters fail to see him.

His body looks like a gray desert bush--so much like it that a man may look at without recognizing it. When looking for young ostriches the gauchos examine every bush within many rods of the spot where a brood disappears, and so find very often that what seemed to be a bush was wholly or in part a young ostrich. With its head up, of course, the ostrich would be at once detected. With its head in the sand it often escapes even the keen-eyed fox, the gauchos say.

Ostriches readily learn the habits of their persecutors. When Patagonia was first discovered by white men the aborigines were afoot, and the ostriches, being hunted by men afoot, were accustomed to flee at the sight of a man afoot. The Spaniards introduced horses on the pampas and at first the ostriches were not greatly frightened by a man riding. Very soon, however, they found the mounted man dangerous. For some hundreds of years only mounted men pursued the ostriches, and they at last got to a point where they did not fear a man on foot. Then came a great flood of emigrants to Buenos Ayres--chiefly Englishmen and Italians, both cla.s.ses everywhere the avowed and open enemies of innocent bird life.

These took guns to slay the ostrich, and straightway a man afoot once more became an object of terror, while the smell of powder smoke, it is said, will set the pampa birds running away when the gun is at a distance of two miles.

Further than that, a ranch owner is found here and there who will not permit ostrich hunting on his grounds. The birds quickly learn where they are safe and gather from surrounding districts in great bands, leaving the hunted grounds bare. And what is more remarkable still, the very birds that will flee for their lives when started by a man on the hunted grounds will show not the least concern at the approach of a man when they are on safe ground.

That they are readily domesticated may be inferred from this, and so their plumes may be obtained without killing them. But not many are kept so, because the old c.o.c.ks are often ugly and will attack even men accustomed to feed them.

Because the ostrich, though having wings, is unable to fly, it furnished such sport on the desert as may rarely be found elsewhere. Consider the healthful dash of the athletic young men and women when hunting on Long Island. Remember the old time southern planter, when with thorough-breds and yelping hounds he ran to death the long-winded red fox. And then there are the races across the Colorado plains in chase of a coyote or an antelope or a deer. The game is worth the struggle then, and the struggle is worth--how can one estimate the value of such a mad chase?

It is simply glorious, but there is a race better still--the race for the life of an old c.o.c.k ostrich. With both wings drooping if he be at the south, but with one up and spread like a great sail if he be at the north, he stretches out his neck and flees away. The sportsman has no need to urge a well-broken desert horse--it will turn into the hot trail and stretch out in pursuit till the speed sends a gale whistling past the ears of the rider and the dust from his heels lingers above the mesa like the smoke from a flying express.

Nor is the thrill in the race alone, for there are pitfalls in the shape of burrows where a misstep will send the rider flying sure enough, while gullies and gulches with perpendicular walls lie here and there across the trail. The bird with widespread wings will land in safety after a jump over a precipice, but rider and horse must stop short on the brink or plunge to certain death.

And when the bird is overtaken he is never shot to death. The sportsman must loose the bolas from his waist, and, swinging them with whizzing speed around his head, launch them forth at the right moment to tangle the feet of the bird before it can dodge the blow. Men pay good prices in the States to see a Capt. Brewer knock down a pigeon at thirty yards with a scatter gun, and they probably get the worth of their money, but what is the skill of a pigeon shooter compared with that of the man who can strike a running ostrich with the bolas at a range of sixty yards?

Among the gauchos the chase of the ostrich is known as "the wild mirth of the desert."

The ostrich can swim after a fashion, but the water in cold weather numbs its legs until it is barely able to crawl out on the bank after crossing a stream. The Indians take advantage of this and drive the ostriches to water in cold weather.

Once upon a time a milk-white ostrich appeared among the gray birds that roamed about to the south of Carmen de Patagones. Its conspicuous color at once drew the Indians and gauchos after it, but for some reason their attempts to kill it failed, and within a few days the belief that it was the G.o.d of the ostriches was spread among the hunters, and thereafter their superst.i.tious fear of disaster made them avoid it altogether. It was seen for some years, but the unsuperst.i.tious panther probably got it at last.