“Yes,” said Matava, who had now come up, “and they are ‘Warracaba tigers.’”[7]
“What on earth are they?” asked Leonard.
“Warracaba tiger,” Monella said, “is the name given to a species of small ‘tiger’ (in America all such animals are called ‘tigers’) that hunts in packs, and is reputed to be unusually ferocious. They have a peculiar trumpeting cry, not unlike the sound made by the Warracaba bird—the ‘trumpet-bird’—hence their name.”
“They look to me more like light-coloured pumas,” Jack remarked.
“No; pumas are not marked like that, and do not make the sounds we heard. Besides, you need never fear a puma, and should never shoot at one, unless it is attacking your domestic animals.”
Both Templemore and Elwood looked up in surprise.
“I always thought,” the latter said, “that pumas were such bloodthirsty animals.”
“So they are, to other animals—even the jaguar they attack and kill. But men they never touch, if let alone. I do not believe there is a single authenticated instance of a puma’s hurting any human being, man, woman or child. In the Andes and Brazil—where I have lived long enough to know—the Gauchos call the puma ‘Amigo del cristiano’—‘the friend of man’—and they think it an evil thing to kill one.”[8]
A few days after, they were attacked again by these furious creatures, and this time did not come off so well, for two of the Indians were badly mauled. But for Monella’s cool bravery, indeed, matters would have been much worse; and Templemore had a narrow escape. Then, a day or two later, one of the Indians was stung by a scorpion; and Jack came near being bitten by a rattlesnake—would have been but for Monella, who, just in time, boldly seized the reptile by the tail, and, swinging it two or three times round his head, dashed its brains out against a piece of rock.
Indeed, upon all occasions where there was any kind of danger, Monella’s ready, quiet courage was always displayed in a manner that won both the admiration of his white colleagues and the devotion of his Indian followers. Moreover, as Dr. Lorien had stated, and as Leonard had found by actual experience, he was skilled in medicine and surgery. To wounds he applied the leaves of some plant, of which he had a store with him in a dried state, the curative effects of which were reputed among the Indians to be almost marvellous.