Cherrie and Miller had secured a little owl a month before in the
Chaco, and it was travelling with them in a basket. It was a dear
little bird, very tame and affectionate. It liked to be handled and
petted; and when Miller, its especial protector, came into the cabin,
it would make queer little noises as a signal that it wished to be
taken up and perched on his hand. Cherrie and Miller had trapped many
mammals. Among them was a tayra weasel, whitish above and black below,
as big and blood-thirsty as a fisher-martin; and a tiny opossum no
bigger than a mouse. They had taken four species of opossum, but they
had not found the curious water-opossum which they had obtained on the
rivers flowing into the Caribbean Sea. This opossum, which is black
and white, swims in the streams like a muskrat or otter, catching fish
and living in burrows which open under water. Miller and Cherrie were
puzzled to know why the young throve, leading such an existence of
constant immersion; one of them once found a female swimming and
diving freely with four quite well-grown young in her pouch.

We saw on the banks screamers--big, crested waders of archaic type,
with spurred wings, rather short bills, and no especial affinities
with other modern birds. In one meadow by a pond we saw three marsh-
deer, a buck and two does. They stared at us, with their thickly
haired tails raised on end. These tails are black underneath, instead
of white as in our whitetail deer. One of the vagaries of the
ultraconcealing-colorationists has been to uphold the (incidentally
quite preposterous) theory that the tail of our deer is colored white
beneath so as to harmonize with the sky and thereby mislead the cougar
or wolf at the critical moment when it makes its spring; but this
marsh-deer shows a black instead of a white flag, and yet has just as
much need of protection from its enemies, the jaguar and the cougar.