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To the insatiable bloody appetite of this creature nothing comes amiss; he takes the male ostrich by surprise, and slays that wariest of wild things on his nest; He captures little birds with the dexterity of a cat, and hunts for diurnal armadillos; he comes unawares upon the deer and huanaco, and, springing like lightning on them, dislocates their necks before their bodies touch the earth.
A few days previously I had fallen in with an old half-caste priest, from whom I had heard of the Mission of San Andrea de Huanaco, and how to get there, and who drew for my guidance a rough sketch of the route. The priest in charge, a certain Fray Ignacio, a born Catalan, would, he felt sure, be glad to find me quarters and give me every information in his power. And so it proved.
The huanaco, happily for it, exists in a barren, desolate region, in its greatest part waterless and uninhabitable to human beings; and the chapter-heading refers to a singular instinct of the dying animals, in very many cases allowed, by the exceptional conditions in which they are placed, to die naturally. And first, a few words about its place in nature and general habits.
Natural selection, like an angry man, can make a weapon of anything; and, using the word in this wide sense, the mucous secretions the huanaco discharges into the face of an adversary, and the pestilential drops "distilled" by the skunk, are weapons, and may be as effectual in defensive warfare as spines, fangs and tushes.
The huanaco has never been a hybernating animal; but we must assume that, like the crotalus of the north, he had formed a habit of congregating with his fellows at certain seasons at the same spot; further, that these were seasons of suffering to the animal the suffering, or discomfort and danger, having in the first place given rise to the habit.
To return to the huanaco. After tracing the dying instinct back to its hypothetical origin namely, a habit acquired by the animal in some past period of seeking refuge from some kind of pain and danger at a certain spot, it is only natural to speculate a little further as to the nature of that danger and of the conditions the animal existed in.
It was on my conscience to keep faith with the girls; I wanted neither to kill the cacique nor see his men kill the tame Indians, and whatever might befall me "up yonder" I should at any rate get away from San Andrea de Huanaco. "The die is cast; I will go with you," I said, turning to Gondocori. "Now, I know, beyond a doubt, that my brother is the bravest of the brave. He fears not the unknown."
Darwin writes: "On the mountains of Tierra del Fuego I have more than once seen a huanaco, on being approached, not only neigh and squeal, but prance and leap about in a most ridiculous manner, apparently in defiance as a challenge."
And such an instinct, slowly matured and made perfect to enable this animal to escape extinction during periods of great danger to mammalian life, lasting hundreds or even thousands of years, and destructive of numberless other species less hardy and adaptive than the generalized huanaco, might well continue to exist, to be occasionally called into life by a false stimulus, for many centuries after it had ceased to be of any advantage.
It would, no doubt, be rash to affirm of any instinct that it is absolutely unique; but, putting aside some doubtful reports about a custom of the Asiatic elephant, which may have originated in the account of Sindbad the Sailor's discovery of an elephant's burial place, we have no knowledge of an instinct similar to that of the huanaco in any other animal.
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