e the animal is much hunted for
the sake of his grease, with which the planters generally oil the
machinery of their mills, little negroes are generally sent into the
woods, during the fall, "grease-making" as at that season the men are
better employed in cotton-picking or storing the maize. No danger ever
happens to the urchins during these expeditions, as, keeping within the
sweep of the tail, they contrive to chop it off with an axe.

M. Audubon says:--

When autumn has heightened the colouring of the foliage of our woods,
and the air feels more rarefied during the nights and the early part of
the day, the alligators leave the lakes to seek for winter-quarters, by
burrowing under the roots of trees, or covering themselves simply with
earth along their edges. They become then very languid and inactive,
and, at this period, to sit or ride on one would not be more difficult
than for a child to mount his wooden rocking-horse. The negroes, who
now kill them, put all danger aside by separating at one blow with an
axe, the tail from the body. They are afterwards cut up in large
pieces, and boiled whole in a good quantity of water, from the surface
of which the fat is collected with large ladles. One single man kills
oftentimes a dozen or more of large alligators in the evening, prepares
his fire in the woods, where he has erected a camp for the purpose, and
by morning has the oil extracted.

As soon as the rider feels his horse sinking, the first movement, if an
inexperienced traveller, is to throw himself from the saddle, and
endeavour to wade or to swim to the cane-brakes, the roots of which give
to the ground a certain degree of stability. In that case, his fate is
probably sealed, as he is in immediate danger of the "cawana." This is
a terrible and hideous monster, with which, strange to say, the
naturalists of Europe are not yet acquainted, though it is too well
known to all the inhabitants of the streams and lagoons tributary to the
Red River. It is an enormous turtle or tortoise, with the head and tail
of the alligator, not retractile, as is usual among the different
species of this reptile; the shell is one inch and a half thick, and as
impenetrable as steel. It lies in holes in the bottom of muddy rivers
or in the swampy cane-brakes, and measures often ten feet in length and
six in breadth over the shell, independent of the head and tail, which
must give often to this dreadful monster the length of twent