about us, the venomous fire-ants stung us, the sharp spines of a small
palm tore our hands--afterward some of the wounds festered. Hour after
hour we thus walked on through the Brazilian forest. We saw monkeys,
the common yellowish kind, a species of cebus; a couple were shot for
the museum and the others raced off among the upper branches of the
trees. Then we came on a party of coatis, which look like reddish,
long-snouted, long-tailed, lanky raccoons. They were in the top of a
big tree. One, when shot at and missed, bounced down to the ground,
and ran off through the bushes; Kermit ran after it and secured it. He
came back, to find us peering hopelessly up into the tree top, trying
to place where the other coatis were. Kermit solved the difficulty by
going up along some huge twisted lianas for forty or fifty feet and
exploring the upper branches; whereupon down came three other coatis
through the branches, one being caught by the dogs and the other two
escaping. Coatis fight savagely with both teeth and claws. Miller told
us that he once saw one of them kill a dog. They feed on all small
mammals, birds, and reptiles, and even on some large ones; they kill
iguanas; Cherrie saw a rattling chase through the trees, a coati
following an iguana at full speed. We heard the rush of a couple of
tapirs, as they broke away in the jungle in front of the dogs and
headed, according to their custom, for the river; but we never saw
them. One of the party shot a bush deer--a very pretty, graceful
creature, smaller than our whitetail deer, but kin to it and doubtless
the southernmost representative of the whitetail group.

The whitetail deer--using the word to designate a group of deer which
can neither be called a subgenus with many species, nor a widely
spread species diverging into many varieties--is the only North
American species which has spread down into and has outlying
representatives in South America. It has been contended that the