of the expedition, consisting of the
American members, and of Colonel Rondon, Lieutenant Lyra, and Doctor
Cajazeira, with their baggage and provisions, formed another
detachment.

VI. THROUGH THE HIGHLAND WILDERNESS OF WESTERN BRAZIL

We were now in the land of the bloodsucking bats, the vampire bats
that suck the blood of living creatures, clinging to or hovering
against the shoulder of a horse or cow, or the hand or foot of a
sleeping man, and making a wound from which the blood continues to
flow long after the bat's thirst has been satiated. At Tapirapoan
there were milch cattle; and one of the calves turned up one morning
weak from loss of blood, which was still trickling from a wound,
forward of the shoulder, made by a bat. But the bats do little damage
in this neighborhood compared to what they do in some other places,
where not only the mules and cattle but the chickens have to be housed
behind bat-proof protection at night or their lives may pay the
penalty. The chief and habitual offenders are various species of
rather small bats; but it is said that other kinds of Brazilian bats
seem to have become, at least sporadically and locally, affected by
the evil example and occasionally vary their customary diet by
draughts of living blood. One of the Brazilian members of our party,
Hoehne, the botanist, was a zoologist also. He informed me that he had
known even the big fruit-eating bats to take to bloodsucking. They did
not, according to his observations, themselves make the original
wound; but after it had been made by one of the true vampires they
would lap the flowing blood and enlarge the wound. South America makes
up for its lack, relatively to Africa and India, of large man-eating
carnivores by the extraordinary ferocity or bloodthirstiness of
certain small creatures of which the kinsfolk elsewhere are harmless.
It is only here that fish no bigger than trout kill swimmers, and bats
the size of the ordinary "flittermice" of the northern hemisphere
drain the life-blood of big beasts and of man himself.

There was not much large mammalian life in the neighborhood. Kermit
hunted industriously and brought in an occasional armadillo, coati, or
agouti for the naturalists. Miller trapped rats and a queer opossum
new to the collection. Cherrie got many birds. Cherrie and Miller
skinned their specimens in a little open hut or shed. Moses, the small
pet owl, sat on a cross-bar overhead, an interested spec