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An interesting incident occurred on the day we killed our first jaguar. We took our lunch beside a small but deep and obviously permanent pond. I went to the edge to dip up some water, and something growled or bellowed at me only a few feet away. It was a jacare-tinga or small cayman about five feet long. I paid no heed to it at the moment.
The ibis and plover did not pay any heed to the fish; but the black carrion vultures feasted on them in the mud; and in the pools that were not dry small alligators, the jacare-tinga, were feasting also. In many places the stench from the dead fish was unpleasant. Then for miles we rode through a beautiful open forest of tall, slender caranda palms, with other trees scattered among them.
At the first shallow ford, as horses and dogs splashed across, an alligator, the jacare-tinga, some five feet long, floated unconcernedly among the splashing hoofs and paws; evidently at night it did not fear us. Hour after hour we slogged along. Then the night grew ghostly with the first dim gray of the dawn. The sky had become overcast.
In this country they rambled through the night across the marshes and prowled along the edges of the ponds and bayous, catching the capybaras and the caymans; for these small pond caymans, the jacare-tinga, form part of their habitual food, and a big jaguar when hungry will attack and kill large caymans and crocodiles if he can get them a few yards from the water.
There was a mist, and for a couple of miles the great river, broad and quiet, ran between the high walls of tropical forest, the tops of the giant trees showing dim through the haze. Different members of the party caught many fish, and shot a monkey and a couple of jacare-tinga birds kin to a turkey, but the size of a fowl so we again had a camp of plenty.
On the 10th we again embarked and made a kilometre and a half, spending most of the time in getting past two more rapids. Near the first of these we saw a small cayman, a jacare-tinga.
We could not drive it away. Why it should have shown such truculence and heedlessness I cannot imagine, unless perhaps it was a female, with eggs near by. In another little pond a jacare-tinga showed no less anger when another of my companions approached. It bellowed, opened its jaws, and lashed its tail.
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