Nature The Peccary.

Waikato Times, Volume XXIV, Issue 1961, 31 January 1885, Page 2 (Supplement)

Nature The Peccary.

Some o' tho Hahiti and Characteristics of. a Strange Beast. Tfxar hM within her borders a beant into •those narrow skull fear never enters). It is the peooary — the Havihnah of the Mexicans, the Dicotyles torquatus of zoologists. Jjravery is a notable attribute of man, and it is discovered in birde, beast? and fishes. I don't claim the quality for the bruto I am about to describe. I behovo bravery canno* be spid to exist in senses devoid of fear. I conceive that an npprociation of danger iH a necessary menstruum to the nobler courage. It is not tho man of dogged indifference I admire ; it is th« man who refuses to fly when duty bids him stand, and though he fears deatb, fears dishonor more. Now the peccary has no partiole of fear on account of any show of odds, and appears to live only for the purpose of madly dying when opportunity offers. The game cook fights with heroio Valor, bat one •cos in his swimming even, when gaffed and bleeding in the pit, glances of rogrot and nameless fear. He ahaddera out hm hfo beneath his crowing conqueror, and his tiny heart, perhaps, swells with woe at its last throb*. At least he looks that way to me. The dying paohyderin of the Texas forest dies in a " matter of course" manner, as if he was meant to end that way and was glad of it. He looks np in the tree where the man sits who shot him (few men of experience ever shoot them from any other standpoint) and anon he holds up his cloven hoof and glances at it. If the peccary regrots anything in the hour of dissolution it is that he was not made like a squirrel— to climb. Roaming the glade, searching for mast, a drove of peccaries resembles a drove of tame bogß. They never begin a war, but when one is assailed the entire drove rush to the attack as men rush when martial valor urges them. Each bead-like eye is a fire-spark ; tusks are protruded, the echinated spine straightened, and woe to the wretch who falls in thoir path. Gored, bitten, torn, trampled upon, and eaten up, to the last shred of his clothing — such is the fate of the man caught by a drove of angry peccaries. With the same fury they assail a wolf or attack a bull ; and neither tbe wolf nor the bull can stand up against a ohargo of halfa dozen peccaries. Both know this and tly in terror from the field. Lately, on the Wichita River, I attaoked a drove of peccaries. I was safely perched in a tree, armed with a Winchester rifle and accompanied by Sergeant Platt, of tho Frontier Battalion, who occupied a bough beneath me. Wo waited until the drove approachod within thirty yards of our tree, and then we fired simultaneously, killing one and wounding another. The roar of our carbines brought them upon us with that strange alacrity that suggested their having awaited from sucklings for jast that occasion, and kept perfectly ready for it. When they arrived at the tree they bit it, each in turn, and then glancing up, equatted and fixed upon us a dozen pair of eye-!, small as peas, and blazing with fierce purpose, and fury intense. One by one we shot them, and they fell, one by one, and died*, eaoh willing and roady to go, and accepting his fate as pleasantly as school-boys accept apples. Not a groan or a squeal betrayed pain or dismay. .Squatting on their hams they gazed at us and took tho bullets as if we were tosHing them acorns. Presently only one was left alive amid a dozen corpses, and there he sat brown, bristling, furious, foaming with raging life, courting death ; unmindful of the blood that damped the grass about him ; indiflerent of the fate of comrades—a very epitome of hate. " Don't Hhoot yet 1" I said to Sergeant I'latt, "I want to study him." (irim, voiceless, horriblo — the hog sat and gave me back glanoe for glance. The spot he equatted upon was within the radius of a red ant bod. The insects crawled over him and stung his thick hide ; they wasted their formic acid, blunted their lancets in vain. As well might they have stung tho cactus plant growing beside their bed. After a time the old boar grow woary of tho task of gazing, and he got up and went around, smelling tho bodies of his late companions. Then he ate a few acorns that had fallen from the live oak treo we were perched in, and after that he deliberately stretched himself at thd root of tho tree, intending to remain a sentry, and prevent our slipping away without his permission, or without doing by him as we had done by the otherß. We did not keop him waiting muoh longer. Platt aimed at his heart, and pierced it with a forty-four calibre bullet. With a singlo glance upward from a sinister eyo, the hog died gently ; and with his life ended his one emotion— hate. Texas and Paciflo and Fort Worth and Doover City locomotive engineen often en-

ountorcd drovou of pccoarirs, as 1 suppose do all engineers who operate on tho Wi-Htern Tpxai railroads. No wliislle is tounded to frighten them. The engineers know that peccaries oannot bo frightened. The engine rushes into the ir.idnt of thi drovo, and tho'-e not killed ontright die madly, charging mid biting at the wheels that crush them. A peccary is in all respects a hng. He looks, smells, ta?tps like » ho^— r»nd i-t a ho. 1 ; bat for a thing of indomitable courage of tho lower typ°, for a hater, of quenchless fury, and for a fighter to the last throb of his heart, commend ma to the fierce D«ootylea torqnatus, the indigenons Toxai hog, a bruto that wonld, if he could, whila riding in tho mid«*t of a cyclone, bi^o at the zig-zag flfi«hes of the death-dealing lightning.— Detroit Free Press.