prey. In some other neighborhoods, not far distant, our hosts informed
us that the jaguars lived almost exclusively on horses and cattle.
They also told us that the cougars had the same habits as the jaguars
except that they did not prey on such big animals. The cougars on this
ranch never molested the foals, a fact which astonished me, as in the
Rockies they are the worst enemies of foals. It was interesting to
find that my hosts, and the mixed-blood hunters and ranch workers,
combined special knowledge of many of the habits of these big cats
with a curious ignorance of other matters concerning them and a
readiness to believe fables about them. This was precisely what I had
found to be the case with the old-time North American hunters in
discussing the puma, bear, and wolf, and with the English and Boer
hunters of Africa when they spoke of the lion and rhinoceros. Until
the habit of scientific accuracy in observation and record is achieved
and until specimens are preserved and carefully compared, entirely
truthful men, at home in the wilderness, will whole-heartedly accept,
and repeat as matters of gospel faith, theories which split the
grizzly and black bears of each locality in the United States, and the
lions and black rhinos of South Africa, or the jaguars and pumas of
any portion of South America, into several different species, all with
widely different habits. They will, moreover, describe these imaginary
habits with such sincerity and minuteness that they deceive most
listeners; and the result sometimes is that an otherwise good
naturalist will perpetuate these fables, as Hudson did when he wrote
of the puma. Hudson was a capital observer and writer when he dealt
with the ordinary birds and mammals of the well-settled districts near
Buenos Aires and at the mouth of the Rio Negro; but he knew nothing of
the wilderness. This is no reflection on him; his books are great
favorites of mine, and are to a large degree models of what such books
should be; I only wish that there were hundreds of such writers and