leg of a chair; and I have heard of young fruit-trees in an orchard in
England having been thus much injured. Some such habit must also be
common to the puma, for on the bare hard soil of Patagonia I have
frequently seen scores so deep that no other animal could have made
them. The object of this practice is, I believe, to tear off the
ragged points of their claws, and not, as the Gauchos think, to sharpen
them. The jaguar is killed, without much difficulty, by the aid of
dogs baying and driving him up a tree, where he is despatched with
bullets.
Owing to bad weather we remained two days at our moorings. Our only
amusement was catching fish for our dinner: there were several kinds,
and all good eating. A fish called the "armado" (a Silurus) is
remarkable from a harsh grating noise which it makes when caught by
hook and line, and which can be distinctly heard when the fish is
beneath the water. This same fish has the power of firmly catching
hold of any object, such as the blade of an oar or the fishing-line,
with the strong spine both of its pectoral and dorsal fin. In the
evening the weather was quite tropical, the thermometer standing at 79
degs. Numbers of fireflies were hovering about, and the musquitoes
were very troublesome. I exposed my hand for five minutes, and it was
soon black with them; I do not suppose there could have been less than
fifty, all busy sucking.
October 15th.--We got under way and passed Punta Gorda, where there is
a colony of tame Indians from the province of Missiones. We sailed
rapidly down the current, but before sunset, from a silly fear of bad
weather, we brought-to in a narrow arm of the river. I took the boat
and rowed some distance up this creek. It was very narrow, winding,
and deep; on each side a wall thirty or forty feet high, formed by
trees intwined with creepers, gave to the canal a singularly gloomy
appearance. I here saw a very extraordinary bird, called the
Scissor-beak (Rhynchops nigra). It has short legs, web feet, extremely
long-pointed wings, and is of about the size of a tern. The beak is
flattened laterally, that is, in a plane at right angles to that of a
spoonbill or duck. It is as flat and elastic as an ivory paper-cutter,
and the lower mandible, differing from every other bird, is an inch and
a half longer than the upper. In a lake near Maldonado, from which the
water had been nearly drained, and which, in consequence, swarmed with
small fry, I saw several of these birds, generally in small flocks,
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