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Updated: June 2, 2025
"We have numbers of wild horses, and hogs, and goats; and in the woods are tiger-cats, jaguars, tapirs, hyenas, sloths, porcupines, and but you have seen many things already. If you live you will see more. I need not tell you of these things; very soon I will show you some. "The population of my country consists of the descendants of Portuguese settlers, native Indians, and Negroes.
I believe this agitation is most frequently the effect of some conflict that has arisen in the depths of the forest. The jaguars, for instance, pursue the peccaries and the tapirs, which, having no defence but in their numbers, flee in close troops, and break down the bushes they find in their way.
In their woods live elephants, rhinoceroses, and tapirs; in the brushwood lurk tigers and panthers; and in the depths of their primeval forests dwell monkeys of various species. The largest is the orang-utang, which grows to a height of five feet, is very strong, savage and dangerous, and is almost always seen on trees.
Palm-trees are rare; we saw only a few scattered trunks of the thorny piritu and corozo. The large quadrupeds of those regions, the jaguars, tapirs, and peccaries, have made openings in the hedge of sauso which we have just described. Through these the wild animals pass when they come to drink at the river.
Near the lower end of the valley I passed a number of tapirs, and across the river saw a great sadok, the enormous double-horned progenitor of the modern rhinoceros. At the valley's end the cliffs upon the left ran out into the sea, so that to pass around them as I desired to do it was necessary to scale them in search of a ledge along which I might continue my journey.
The hunt led right through the marsh. Evidently the jaguar had not the least distaste for water. Probably it had been hunting for capybaras or tapirs, and it had gone straight through ponds and long, winding, narrow ditches or bayous, where it must now and then have had to swim for a stroke or two.
Days when the marsh would be full of tapirs wallowing and wild pig rootling and fighting, there might be hundreds feeding within sound of you and not a hint of it except the occasional toot-toot of some silly cow calling for Scrag, or a young bull blowing water.
"It's only some tapirs, I think," the guide said. "They are harmless." "Then we'll film them," decided Blake, though the mere fact of harm or danger being absent did not influence him. Both he and Joe had taken pictures of dangerous wild animals in Africa, and had stood at the camera, calmly turning the handle, when it seemed as though death was on its way toward them in horrible form.
"There was a part of the river, some two or three miles above the malocca, where the channel was wider than elsewhere several miles in breadth at this place. Here it was studded with islands, known to be a favourite resort of the tapirs. This was to be the scene of our hunt.
At present, tapirs are found only in South America and southern Asia, a remarkable distribution which we could not explain were it not that the geological record shows that during Tertiary times tapirs ranged throughout the northern hemisphere, making their way to South America late in that period.
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