Page:The naturalist on the River Amazons 1863 v2.djvu/283

 ditch in England is in summer with tadpoles. During a journey of five days which I once made in the Upper Amazons steamer, in November, alligators were seen along the coast almost every step of the way, and the passengers amused themselves, from morning till night, by firing at them with rifle and ball. They were very numerous in the still bays, where the huddled crowds jostled together, to the great rattling of their coats of mail, as the steamer passed.

The natives at once despise and fear the great cayman. I once spent a month at Caiçara, a small village of semi-civilised Indians, about twenty miles to the west of Ega. My entertainer, the only white in the place, and one of my best and most constant friends, Senhor Innocencio Alves Faria, one day proposed a half-day's fishing with net in the lake,—the expanded bed of the small river on which the village is situated. We set out in an open boat with six Indians and two of Innocencio's children. The water had sunk so low that the net had to be taken out into the middle by the Indians, whence at the first draught, two medium-sized alligators were brought to land. They were disengaged from the net and allowed, with the coolest unconcern, to return to the water, although the two children were playing in it, not many yards off. We continued fishing, Innocencio and I lending a helping hand, and each time drew a number of the reptiles of different ages and sizes, some of them Jacaré-tingas; the lake in fact, swarmed with alligators. After taking a very large quantity of fish (I took pains to count the different species, and found there were no less than