Page:Through the Brazilian Wilderness by Theodore Roosevelt (1925).djvu/53

 from the windward side. When the cougar broke from the bushes, the Indian rode after her, and threw his bolas, which twisted around her hind legs; and while she was struggling to free herself, he brained her with his second bolas. The doctor’s injuries were rather painful, but not serious.

Twenty-one years later, in April, 1898, he was camped on the same lake, but on the north shore, at the foot of a basaltic cliff. He was in company with four soldiers, with whom he had travelled from the Strait of Magellan. In the night he was aroused by the shriek of a man and the barking of his dogs. As the men sprang up from where they were lying asleep they saw a large puma run off out of the firelight into the darkness. It had sprung on a soldier named Marcelino Huquen while he was asleep, and had tried to carry him off. Fortunately, the man was so wrapped up in his blanket, as the night was cold, that he was not injured. The puma was never found or killed.

About the same time a surveyor of Doctor Moreno’s party, a Swede named Arneberg, was attacked in similar fashion. The doctor was not with him at the time. Mr. Arneberg was asleep in the forest near Lake San Martin The cougar both bit and clawed him, and tore his mouth, breaking out three teeth. The man was rescued; but this puma also escaped.

The doctor stated that in this particular locality the Indians, who elsewhere paid no heed whatever to the puma, never let their women go out after wood for fuel unless two or three were together. This was because on several occasions women who had gone out alone