Many birds were around us; I saw some of them, and Cherrie and Miller many, many more.  They ranged from party-colored macaws, green parrots, and big gregarious cuckoos down to a brilliant green-and-chestnut kingfisher, five and a quarter inches long, and a tiny orange-and-green manakin, smaller than any bird I have ever seen except a hummer.  We also saw a bird that really was protectively colored; a kind of whippoorwill which even the sharp-eyed naturalists could only make out because it moved its head.  We saw orange-bellied squirrels with showy orange tails.  Lizards were common.  We killed our first poisonous snake (the second we had seen), an evil lance-headed jararaca that was swimming the river.  We also saw a black-and-orange harmless snake, nearly eight feet long, which we were told was akin to the mussurama; and various other snakes.  One day while paddling in a canoe on the river, hoping that the dogs might drive a tapir to us, they drove into the water a couple of small bush deer instead.  There was no point in shooting them; we caught them with ropes thrown over their heads; for the naturalists needed them as specimens, and all of us needed the meat.  One of the men was stung by a single big red maribundi wasp.  For twenty-four hours he was in great pain and incapacitated for work.  In a lagoon two of the dogs had the tips of their tails bitten off by piranhas as they swam, and the ranch hands told us that in this lagoon one of their hounds had been torn to pieces and completely devoured by the ravenous fish.  It was a further illustration of the uncertainty of temper and behavior of these ferocious little monsters.  In other lagoons they had again and again left us and our dogs unmolested.  They vary locally in aggressiveness just as sharks and crocodiles in different seas and rivers vary.

On the morning of January 9th we started out for a tapir-hunt.  Tapirs are hunted with canoes, as they dwell in thick jungle and take to the water when hounds follow them.  In this region there were extensive papyrus-swamps and big lagoons, back from the river, and often the tapirs fled to these for refuge, throwing off the hounds.  In these places it was exceedingly difficult to get them; our best chance was to keep to the river in canoes, and paddle toward the spot in the direction of which the hounds, by the noise, seemed to be heading.  We started in four canoes.  Three of them were Indian dugouts, very low in the water.  The fourth was our Canadian canoe, a beauty; light, safe, roomy, made of thin slats of wood and cement-covered canvas.  Colonel Rondon, Fiala with his camera, and I went in this canoe, together with two paddlers.  The paddlers were natives of the poorer class.  They were good men.  The bowsman was of nearly pure white blood; the steersman was of nearly pure negro blood, and was evidently the stronger character and better man of the two.  The other canoes carried a couple of fazendeiros, ranchmen, who had come up from Caceres with their