the sound of the dogs with their quarry at bay, or to see them handle their horses in a morass, was a pleasure.  It was equally a pleasure to see a camarada carrying his heavy spear, leading a hound in a leash, and using his machete to cut his way through the tangled vine-ropes of a jungle, all at the same time and all without the slightest reference to the plunges, and the odd and exceedingly jerky behavior, of his wild, half-broken horse—­for on such a ranch most of the horses are apt to come in the categories of half-broken or else of broken-down.  One dusky tatterdemalion wore a pair of boots from which he had removed the soles, his bare, spur-clad feet projecting from beneath the uppers.  He was on a little devil of a stallion, which he rode blindfold for a couple of miles, and there was a regular circus when he removed the bandage; but evidently it never occurred to him that the animal was hardly a comfortable riding-horse for a man going out hunting and encumbered with a spear, a machete, and other belongings.

The eight hours that we were out we spent chiefly in splashing across the marshes, with excursions now and then into vine-tangled belts and clumps of timber.  Some of the bayous we had to cross were uncomfortably boggy.  We had to lead the horses through one, wading ahead of them; and even so two of them mired down, and their saddles had to be taken off before they could be gotten out.  Among the marsh plants were fields and strips of the great caete rush.  These caete flags towered above the other and lesser marsh plants.  They were higher than the heads of the horsemen.  Their two or three huge banana-like leaves stood straight up on end.  The large brilliant flowers—­ orange, red, and yellow—­were joined into a singularly shaped and solid string or cluster.  Humming-birds buzzed round these flowers; one species, the sickle-billed hummer, has its bill especially adapted for use in these queerly shaped blossoms and gets its food only from them, never appearing around any other plant.

The birds were tame, even those striking and beautiful birds which under man’s persecution are so apt to become scarce and shy.  The huge jabiru storks, stalking through the water with stately dignity, sometimes refused to fly until we were only a hundred yards off; one of them flew over our heads at a distance of thirty or forty yards.  The screamers, crying curu-curu, and the ibises, wailing dolefully, came even closer.  The wonderful hyacinth macaws, in twos and threes, accompanied us at times for several hundred yards, hovering over our heads and uttering their rasping screams.  In one wood we came on the black howler monkey.  The place smelt almost like a menagerie.  Not watching with sufficient care I brushed against a sapling on which the venomous fire-ants swarmed.  They burnt the skin like red-hot cinders, and left little sores.  More than once in the drier parts of the marsh we met small caymans making their way from one pool to another.  My horse stepped over one before I saw it.  The dead carcasses of others showed that on their wanderings they had encountered jaguars or human foes.