Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/424



394 TO THE TEBICUARY HIVER.

rious, unblushing,, unmitigated " economists of truth " Kit Carson himself would have " kow-towed " to them !

And, curious to say, great mountains have the same moral eflPect upon those living in their recesses. The moun- tain is nearer and dearer to man than the plain. JHe dwells in the bosom of his hills — his hand can almost touch the horizon of his world. Thus with him also, the visible has little of variety; his imagination is excited by the aspect of the greater heights which he does not inhabit, and which often he cannot visit. I found the Andine liar by no means inferior to him of Pampasia.

Return we to our hogs, which looked like a blending of the guinea-pig and the hare. With bluff muzzles and brown skins they stared at us anxiously, and not without a comic air of defiance. Lieutenant-Commander Bushe, having ex- hausted his bullets, tried at close quarters a charge of buck- shot, which only made the pachyderms wriggle in their leaps like vicious mules. The crew sighted, in our absence, a ciervo (stag), which, at a distance, they mistook for a horse. This is the cua9U guazu, or cua9u pucu, the big, or long deer (C. paludosus), that haunts river banks; a fine animal with reddish-yellow coat, good for rugs. Though uneatable, it is the noblest game in this region. Mr. Darwin was fortunate, when failing to shoot, he drove off the ciervo by throwing stones : the male deer is apt, at seasons, to charge home with its large horns, and an onslaught might have left the glorious Darwinian theory in its earliest stage of development.

There are three other kinds of deer, which all give good meat. The cua9u mini (small stag) prefers plains, whilst the cuagu pita (Cervus rufus) and the cuafiibira, or cabra de los bosques, is generally found in the woods. Mborevi (the tapir) la grande bete, the largest of South American ruminants, has been killed out ; and guara or Aguara, the