Darwin states that the jaguar prowling at night is much annoyed by foxes, that attend his movements and keep up a constant barking. It is well known that jackals follow or accompany lions under like circumstances, and Darwin speaks of this parallel association as a “curious coincidence.” But the fox is in this case an interloper like the other, an unwelcome hanger-on in expectation of offal, that betrays the jaguar’s presence when he, usually a noisy animal, has cause to be quiet.
It is singular that a creature so noteworthy, and one so frequently mentioned, should remain so imperfectly known in many important particulars relating to its natural history, habits, and character. Dr. Carpenter (“Zoölogy”) remarks that it “may be regarded as the panther of America,” and many traits which favor this likeness have been given. It remains to say, however, that while zoölogists express themselves in guarded terms with respect to species of Felis onca, and the natives discriminate half a dozen among the spotted kind alone; while Liais describes “le jaguar noir” as “a third species,” and Azara (“Descripcion y Historia del Paraguay”) writes of a yellowish-white variety as a fourth specific form, the black jaguar, in all probability, only adds another to the many resemblances that liken this beast to the panther. Black or dark-brown cubs have not, as in the case of Felis pardus, been found, so far as the writer knows, in one litter with those marked with spots; but there is reason to believe that they occur in this manner.
Two cubs are born together as a rule, although, as happens with other species of this family, the average number is sometimes exceeded. Of the young jaguar’s first essays in life very little is known. Whether its father takes part in the whelp’s education, as a lion does, or is on the contrary a destroyer of his male offspring, like the tiger; how long parental care continues, and in fact all details relating to its period of infancy, remain obscure. If one inquires about these matters from natives, they entertain him with romances, legends, and folk-lore tales. It was a subject for comment among the early Spanish writers that so few of these animals were killed by Indians. In his “Brief Narrative of the Most Remarkable Things that Samuel Champlain observed in the Western Indies,” we find a mention of some jaguar skins that had been bartered by natives, referred to as rarities. Now, as many or more come annually from Buenos Ayres alone as were once procured in the same time throughout the Amazon valleys. Notices of jaguars being taken in traps are occasionally found in books, but detailed descriptions of the process of catching them the author has not met with. Some of the tribes possess efficient weapons of their kind—bows, strong enough, as Cieza de Leon asserts, “to send an arrow through a horse, or the knight who rides it.” These Indians are in the habit likewise of poisoning their arrow-heads. Cieza gives an account of how, after much trouble and persuasion, he induced the aborigines at Carthagena and Santa Martha to show him their mode of preparing poison. His relation, however, is not very instructive. Humboldt and Bonpland (“Voyage, etc., Relation Historique”) give “curare” as the active principle of those mixtures made by Amazonian tribes. These poisons contain, both in South America and all over the world where they are used, matters which are more or less inert, and have been introduced upon purely magical principles. E. F. im Thurn found the effective constituent used in Guiana to be “Strychnos-Urari, Yakki, or Arimaru—i.e., S. toxifera, S. Schomburgkii, S. cogens.” Both he and Sir R. Schomburgh speak of other ingredients—bark, roots, peppers, snake venom—compounded with the more active principle. Waterton gives much the same account of the toxic agent used by means of the bow or blow-gun, and of course there is no doubt that a jaguar inoculated with enough curare would die.
As for foreigners, their reliance has always been upon firearms, ever since the first arquebuses were introduced into Spanish America by the conquistadores; and nothing less efficient is likely to avail against an animal that Audubon and Bachman say “compares in size with the Asiatic tiger,” and is his “equal in fierceness.”
THE TIGER
A tiger to the majority of men is probably the most impressive and suggestive of all animals. Apart from those traits so obvious in his appearance that they affect every one, most beholders have in their minds some material with which imagination works under the quickening influence of his deadly eye. No creature matches him in general powers of destruction; none enacts such tragedies as he, amid scenes so replete with a various interest; none sheds so much human blood.
The hunter’s spirit natural to our remoter ancestors survives in their descendants, and few persons are placed under circumstances favorable for its revival without experiencing something of its force. When tigers are the objects of pursuit, this often becomes a passion.
THE TIGER.
[From a photograph by Gambier Bolton. Copyright.]