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Before going much further he feels his horse floundering between his legs; while a glance to the ground shows him he is riding through a biscachera! Absorbed in thought perhaps perfecting some wicked scheme he had not noticed the burrow till now. Now he sees it holes and heaps all around him at the same time hearing the screeches of the owls, as the frightened birds fly up out of his path.
We must crawl for it, muchachos, or ride all the way round. And there's no knowing how far round the thing might force us; leagues likely. It looks the biggest biscachera I ever set eyes on. Carra-i-i!" The final ejaculation is drawled out with a prolonged and bitter emphasis, as he again glances right and left, but sees no end either way.
On the pampa such incidents are far from rare; for the burrows of the biscachas are carried like galleries underground, and therefore dangerous to any heavy quadruped so unfortunate as to sink through the surface turf. In short, to ride across a biscachera would be on a par with passing on horseback through a rabbit warren.
On this same day, and, as already said, almost the same hour, when the trackers are brought up by the biscachera, a single horseman is seen with head turned towards the Paraguay, and making as if to reach this river; from which he is distant some eighteen or twenty miles.
But for his mischance in the biscachera, the rescuers would have found it empty on their return, and instead of a lost daughter, it would have been the mother missing. The second band of horsemen, coming from the opposite quarter and down the river, is no other than the pursuing party of Tovas, with Aguara at their head.
Heeding neither the quadrupeds, nor the birds, their fellow-tenants of the burrow the latter perched upon the summits of the mounds, and one after another flying off with a defiant screech as the horsemen drew near these, after an hour spent in a slow but diligent advance, at length, and without accident, ride clear of the biscachera, and out upon the smooth open plain beyond it.
When Gaspar, on first sighting the biscachera, poured forth vials of wrath upon it, he little dreamt that another burrow of similar kind, and almost at the very same hour, was doing him a service by causing not only obstruction, but serious damage to the man he regards as his greatest enemy.
Nothing of all this occupies the thoughts of the three trackers, as they approach the particular biscachera which has presented itself to their view, athwart their path. Of such things they neither think, speak, nor care. Instead, they are but dissatisfied to see it there; knowing it will give them some trouble to get to the other side of it, besides greatly retarding their progress.
He reaches Assuncion though not till the third day after and there gets his broken bones set. But for Gaspar Mendez, there may have been luck in that shoulder-blade being put out of joint. After passing the biscachera, the trackers have not proceeded far, when Caspar again reins up with eyes lowered to the ground.
The thing thus obstructing causes them neither surprise nor alarm, only annoyance; for it is one with which they all are familiar a biscachera, or warren of biscachas. It is scarce possible to travel twenty miles across the plains bordering the La Plata or Parana, without coming upon the burrows of this singular rodent; a prominent and ever-recurring feature in the scenery.
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