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An' theah's javalinas, the wild boars of the Rio country. Then theah's men what have had to ride fast on a day as hot as this, swallerin' dust an' thinkin' what they're gonna do when they catch up to them as they're chasin'; an' those men're 'bout as mean as the boars " Drew lifted his hand to Jim Dandy and followed the other two through the pasture gate. Now he grinned.
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.
There had been many peccaries, or, as the Mexicans and cowpunchers of the border usually call them, javalinas, round this ranch a few years before the date of my visit. Until 1886, or thereabouts, these little wild hogs were not much molested, and abounded in the dense chaparral around the lower Rio Grande.
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.
Having satisfied myself that there were no javalinas left on the Frio ranch, and being nearly at the end of my holiday, I was about to abandon the effort to get any, when a passing cowman happened to mention the fact that some were still to be found on the Nueces River thirty miles or thereabouts to the southward.
Ain't far to sundown, an' we oughta git some countryside between us an' them rip-snortin' javalinas " "Javalinas?" Drew heard Boyd repeat inquiringly. "Kid " the Texan reined his bay "there is some mean things in this heah world. Theah is Comanches an' Apaches, an' a longhorn cow with a calf hid out in a thicket, an' a rattler, what's feelin' lowdown in his mind.
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