Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/627

Rh have to crawl a long way before they could find a frog. In the sterile border-land of north Mexico and southern Texas swamps and frogs are hardly known to the untraveled natives, while the frequency of poisonous reptiles is almost unparalleled; and on a recent visit to the lower Rio Grande I found that the trade in living serpents, scorpions, and tarantulas has become a regular branch of industry, which in Cameron County, Texas, and Matamoras alone, employs a dozen professional and twenty or thirty juvenile amateurs. In a state of captivity these animals fast with the stoicism of an othodoxorthodox [sic] fakir, so that the question of their proper diet becomes comparatively unimportant; but out in the prairie the embonpoint of the copperheads and yellow rattlesnakes suggests eupeptic habits and a liberal food-supply, though the arid soil yields neither frogs nor moles. Birds there are, in abundance; but how can the most subtle serpent secure them without incurring the suspicion of witchcraft? The opinions of the natives differ as widely as those of the above scientists. Among the less transcendental ones, some hold that the vivoras hunt in night-time, others that they poison the berries of the taxus-tree and surprise the birds while they are prostrated by a fit of gastritis. A rather intelligent ranchero, who had hauled a load of ice water and comestibles for a picnic party of American merchants and Mexican army officers, was present when the autopsy of an overgrown rattlesnake elicited a series of half-digested singing birds, and explained that the Rio Grande vivoras could only indulge in such luxuries since the establishment of the International Telegraph line, which caused the death of so many swift-flying birds that came in contact with the wires. This theory might satisfy the Spanish-American officers, but not an Anglo-American druggist, who had visited the upland prairies on his botanical excursions and had reasons to believe that the prosperity of the wily ophidians was not materially affected by the absence of telegraphic facilities. So he applied to one of the leading vivora-catchers and a week before my arrival in Matamoras obtained a pair of good-sized yellow rattlesnakes, which he added to a more or less happy family of lizards and blacksnakes in an empty room of his suburban cottage.

Reptilians, said he, are generally inexpensive boarders; his four lizards content themselves with a daily fly apiece, and one old horned toad has pursued the road of total abstinence to a length where even Dio Lewis would hesitate to follow; but some snakes make an exception: the Coluber palusiris, or water-blacksnake, is almost insatiable, and the common blacksnake insists on his three daily meals with a firmness that would disgust the business-managers of a fasting girl. The rattlesnakes, too, began to crawl about and ply their tongues in a way that suggested a growing interest in the table-d'hôte arrangements of their new hotel, and cast furtive glances at a little mouse which had been introduced in anticipation of their wishes.

But, either through fastidiousness or a mistaken notion of duty