able to go for several hours more if I did not try to go too fast; and
we three walked on to the river, reaching it about half past four,
after eleven hours' stiff walking with nothing to eat. We were soon on
the boat. A relief party went back for the two men under the tree, and
soon after it reached them Kermit also turned up with his hounds and
his camaradas trailing wearily behind him. He had followed the jaguar
trail until the dogs were so tired that even after he had bathed them,
and then held their noses in the fresh footprints, they would pay no
heed to the scent. A hunter of scientific tastes, a hunter-naturalist,
or even an outdoors naturalist, or faunal naturalist interested in big
mammals, with a pack of hounds such as those with which Paul Rainey
hunted lion and leopard in Africa, or such a pack as the packs of
Johnny Goff and Jake Borah with which I hunted cougar, lynx, and bear
in the Rockies, or such packs as those of the Mississippi and
Louisiana planters with whom I have hunted bear, wild-cat, and deer in
the cane-brakes of the lower Mississippi, would not only enjoy fine
hunting in these vast marshes of the upper Paraguay, but would also do
work of real scientific value as regards all the big cats.

Only a limited number of the naturalists who have worked in the
tropics have had any experience with the big beasts whose life-
histories possess such peculiar interest. Of all the biologists who
have seriously studied the South American fauna on the ground, Bates
probably rendered most service; but he hardly seems even to have seen
the animals with which the hunter is fairly familiar. His interests,
and those of the other biologists of his kind, lay in other
directions. In consequence, in treating of the life-histories of the
very interesting big game, we have been largely forced to rely either
on native report, in which acutely accurate observation is invariably
mixed with wild fable, or else on the chance remarks of travellers or