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A little silky hair upon the stumped tail, and a few thinly scattered hairs of a brown colour over the body, would make the likeness still more striking; and it would be necessary, too, that the donkey be one of the very biggest kind to be as big as a big tapir. The tapir is a harmless creature, and although it has a good set of teeth, it never uses them for the purpose of defending itself.
Among carnivorous creatures the very opposite is sometimes the truth; and some animals as the tapir, for instance that feed exclusively on sweet and succulent vegetables, produce a most bitter flesh for themselves. About this there is no standing law either way. Guapo did not call them armadillos he had several Indian names for different kinds of them.
This is the more valuable in a country where the thick-skinned and leather-yielding mammalia are almost unknown. "Slaying the tapir is no easy matter. The creature is shy; and, having the advantage of the watery clement, is often enabled to dive beyond the reach of pursuit, and thus escape by concealing itself.
Here and there several terrified monkeys, which had taken shelter from the storm in a hollow trunk, were now running about, looking out in vain for some means of reaching the shore. Ahead of us we distinguished some large animal on a floating mass, but whether jaguar, puma, or tapir, at that distance I could not make out. No trace of the Indians or their canoe could we discover.
We were not in time to head it, but fortunately some of the dogs had come down to the river's edge at the very point where the tapir was about to land, and turned it back. Two or three of the dogs were swimming. We were more than half the breadth of the river away from the tapir, and somewhat down-stream, when it dived.
We were seated on our perches, disconsolate enough, it may be supposed, when we heard a sound of cracking boughs, as if some creature was making its way through the underwood, and presently we caught sight of a large tapir with a jaguar on its back, dashing at headlong speed through the forest.
Putting the curassow on the ground, with its legs tied, Kallolo begged me to assist him in throwing a quantity of earth over the front of the pit. In a short time we had made an incline, up which the tapir of its own accord climbed; expecting, probably, when at the top to find itself free.
But the result is inevitable it will come to an end; and some future generation of naturalists those of them at least who are curious in Palæontology will regard the remains of our contemporary races of elephants with the same kind of astonishment with which we investigate the pre-historic evidences of the gigantic tapir or the mammoth.
The widespread blotting out of life at the end of Palaeozoic time, and again at the end of Mesozoic times, when myriads of forms were cut off, probably from some convulsion of nature or some cosmic catastrophe; and again during the ice age, when the camel, the llama, the horse, the tapir, the mastodon, the elephant, the giant sloth, became extinct in North America how fared it with our ancestor during these terrible ages?
"The underwood crackled and shook; reddish forms appeared among the leaves; and the next moment a dozen animals, resembling a flock of hogs, tumbled out from the thicket, and flung themselves with a splashing into the water. "`No tapir no capivara, cried the chief; but his voice was drowned by the reports of guns and the twanging of bowstrings.
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