rent beasts, raccoons, wild-cats, and the tree-civet, with its
ringed tail. The Mexican's brown wife and children were in the hut, but
the man himself and the goats were off in the forest, and it took us
three or four hours' search before we found him. Then it was nearly
noon, and we lunched in his hut, a square building of split logs, with
bare earth floor, and roof of clap-boards and bark. Our lunch consisted
of goat's meat and _pan de mais_. The Mexican, a broad-chested man with
a stolid Indian face, was evidently quite a sportsman, and had two or
three half-starved hounds, besides the funny, hairless little house
dogs, of which Mexicans seem so fond.

Having borrowed the javalina hound of which we were in search, we rode
off in quest of our game, the two dogs trotting gayly ahead. The one
which had been living at the ranch had evidently fared well, and was
very fat; the other was little else but skin and bone, but as alert and
knowing as any New York street-boy, with the same air of disreputable
capacity. It was this hound which always did most in finding the
javalinas and bringing them to bay, his companion's chief use being to
make a noise and lend the moral support of his presence.

We rode away from the river on the dry uplands, where the timber, though
thick, was small, consisting almost exclusively of the thorny mesquites.
Mixed among them were prickly pears, standing as high as our heads on
horseback, and Spanish bayonets, looking in the distance like small
palms; and there were many other kinds of cactus, all with poisonous
thorns. Two or three times the dogs got on an old trail and rushed off
giving tongue, whereat we galloped madly after them, ducking and dodging
through and among the clusters of spine-bearing tress and cactus, not
without getting a considerable number of thorns in our hands and legs.
It was very dry and hot. Where the javalinas live in droves in the river
bottoms they often drink at the pools; but when some distance from water
they seem to live quite comfortably on the prickly pear, slaking their
thirst by eating its hard, juicy fibre.

At last, after several false alarms, and gallops which led to nothing,
when it lacked but an hour of sundown we struck a band of five of the
little wild hogs. They were running off through the mesquites with a
peculiar hopping or bounding motion, and we all, dogs and men, tore
after them instantly.

Peccaries are very fast for a few hundred yards, but s