ivered for a moment, and then lay motionless along
the grass. The victor uttered another sharp cry, that seemed intended
as a call to her young ones, who, emerging from the weeds where they
had concealed themselves, ran nimbly forward to the spot.'

While the father and son are watching the peccary peeling the serpent
as adroitly as a fishmonger would skin an eel, another actor enters
upon the scene. This was the dreaded cougar, an animal of the size of
a calf, and with the head and general appearance of a cat. Creeping
stealthily round his victim, who is busy feasting on the quarry, he
at length attains the proper vantage-ground, and gathering himself up
like a cat, springs with a terrific scream upon the back of the
peccary, burying his claws in her neck, and clasping her all over in
his fatal embrace. 'The frightened animal uttered a shrill cry, and
struggled to free itself. Both rolled over the ground--the peccary all
the while gnashing its jaws, and continuing to send forth its strange
sharp cries, until the woods echoed again. Even the young ones ran
around, mixing in the combat--now flung sprawling upon the earth, now
springing up again, snapping their little jaws, and imitating the cry
of their mother. The cougar alone fought in silence. Since the first
wild scream not a sound had escaped him; but from that moment his
claws never relaxed their hold, and we could see that with his teeth
he was silently tearing the throat of his victim.'

The Robinsons of the desert were now in an awkward predicament; for
although they had been safe from the peccary, the cougar could climb a
tree like a squirrel. A noise, however, disturbs him from his meal,
and swinging the dead animal on his back, he begins to skulk away. But
he is interrupted before he can reach cover; and as the new-comers
prove to be twenty or thirty peccaries, summoned to the field by the
dying screams of their comrade, he has more to do than to think of his
dinner. To fling down his burden, to leap upon the foremost of his
enemies, is but the work of an instant; but the avengers crowd round
him with their gnashing jaws and piercing cries, and the brute darts
up the tree like a flash of red fire, and crouches not twenty feet
above the heads of the horrified spectators! The father, however,
after some agonising moments of deliberation, brings him down with his
rifle; and the cougar, falling among the eager crowd below, is torn to
pieces in a moment. But this