"Not a word more on the subject, tocayo, I beg; let us breakfast, for I am literally dying of hunger; and were the tigers here," she added, with a laugh, "they might frighten me, but not deprive me of my appetite."
[CHAPTER XX.]
LOST!
They sat down to table; but the meal, in spite of Doña Marianna's efforts to enliven it, suffered from the anxiety which two of the party felt, and tried in vain to conceal. The tigrero was vexed with his foster sister for not letting him accompany her, for he had not liked to express his fears, lest the young lady on her return to the hacienda might meet the ferocious animals he had been pursuing for some days past, without being able to shoot them.
The jaguar, which, is very little known in Europe, is one of the scourges of Mexico, and would figure advantageously in zoological gardens. There is only one in the Parisian Jardin des Plantes, and that is a very small specimen. Let us describe this animal, which is more feared by the Indians and white men of North America, than is the lion by the Arabs. The jaguar (Felis onca, or onza) is, next to the tiger and lion, the largest of the animals of its genus; it is the great wild cat of Cuvier, and is called indiscriminately "the American tiger," and the "panther of the furriers." It is a quadruped of the feline race; its total length is about nine feet, and its height about twenty-seven inches. Its skin is handsome, and in great request; while of a bright tawny hue on the back, it is marked on the head, neck, and along the flanks with black spots: the lower part of the body is white, with irregular black spots.
But few animals escape the pursuit of the jaguar: it obstinately hunts horses, bulls, and buffaloes; it does not hesitate to leap into rivers to catch certain fish it is fond of, fights the alligator, devours otters and picas, and wages a cruel warfare with the monkeys, owing to its agility, which enables it to mount to the top of trees, even when they are devoid of branches, and upwards of eighty feet high. Although, like all the carnivora of the New World, it shuns the proximity of man, it does not hesitate to attack him when urged by hunger or tracked by hunters; in such cases it fights with the utmost bravery, and does not dream of flight.
Such were the animals the tigrero had been pursuing for the last few days, and had not been able to catch up. According to the sign he had found, the jaguars were four in number—the male, female, and two cubs. We can now understand what the young man's terror must be on thinking of the terrible dangers to which his foster sister ran a risk of being exposed on her return to the hacienda: but he knew Doña Marianna too well to hope he could make her recall her decision. Hence, he did not try to bring the conversation back to the subject, but resolved to follow her at a distance, in order to come to her aid if circumstances required it.
As always happens under such circumstances, Doña Marianna, seeing that no one referred again to the jaguars, was the first to talk about them, asking her foster brother the details of their appearance in the country, and the mischief they had done, in what way he meant to surprise them, and a multitude of other questions; to which the young man replied most politely, but limiting himself to brief answers, and without launching into details, which are generally so agreeable to a hunter. The tigrero displayed such laconism in the information he gave the young lady, that the latter, vexed in spite of herself at seeing him so cold upon a subject to which he had seemed to attach such importance a few moments before, began jeering him, and ended by saying, with a mocking look, that she was convinced he had only said what he did to frighten her, and that the jaguars had only existed in his imagination. Mariano gaily endured the raillery, confessed that he had perhaps displayed more anxiety than the affair deserved, and taking down a jarabe that hung on the wall, he began strumming a fandango with the back of his hand, in order to turn the conversation.