Chapter Thirty Five.
Eating a Negro’s Head.
According to their usual practice, they had hired one of the native hunters of the district to act as a guide, and assist them in finding the haunts of Bruin. In Napo they were fortunate in meeting with the very man in the person of a mestizo, or half-blood Indian, who followed hunting for his sole calling. He was what is termed a “tigrero,” or tiger-hunter—which title he derived from the fact that the jaguar was the principal object of his pursuit. Among all Spanish-Americans—Mexicans included—the beautiful spotted jaguar is erroneously termed tigre (tiger), as the puma or couguar is called leon (lion). A hunter of the jaguar is therefore denominated a “tiger-hunter,” or tigrero.
There are no puma or lion-hunters by profession—as there is nothing about this brute to make it worth while—but hunting the jaguar is, in many parts of Spanish America, a specific calling; and men make their living solely by following this occupation. One inducement is to obtain the skin, which, in common with those of the great spotted cats of the Old World, is an article of commerce, and from its superior beauty commands a good price. But the tigrero could scarce make out to live upon the sale of the skins alone; for although a London furrier will charge from two to three guineas for a jaguar’s robe, the poor hunter in his remote wilderness market can obtain little more than a tenth part of this price—notwithstanding that he has to risk his life, before he can strip the fair mantle from the shoulders of its original wearer.
It is evident, therefore, that jaguar-hunting would not pay, if there was only the pelt to depend upon; but the tigrero looks to another source of profit—the bounty.
In the hotter regions of Spanish America,—the Brazils as well—there are many settlements to which the jaguar is not only a pest, but a terror. Cattle in hundreds are destroyed by these great predatory animals; even full-grown horses are killed and dragged away by them! But is this all? Are the people themselves left unmolested? No. On the contrary, great numbers of human beings every year fall victims to the rapacity of the jaguars. Settlements attempted on the edge of the great Montaña—in the very country where our young hunters had now arrived—have, after a time, been abandoned from this cause alone. It is a well-known fact, that where a settlement has been formed, the jaguars soon become more plentiful in that neighbourhood: the increased facility of obtaining food—by preying on the cattle of the settlers, or upon the owners themselves—accounting for this augmentation in their numbers. It is precisely the same with the royal tiger of India, as is instanced in the history of the modern settlement of Singapore.
To prevent the increase of the jaguars then, a bounty is offered for their destruction. This bounty is sometimes the gift of the government of the country, and sometimes of the municipal authorities of the district. Not unfrequently private individuals, who own large herds of cattle, give a bounty out of their private purses for every jaguar killed within the limits of their estates. Indeed, it is not an uncommon thing for the wealthy proprietor of a cattle-estate (hacienda de ganados) to maintain one or more “tigreros” in his service—just as gamekeepers are kept by European grandees—whose sole business consists in hunting and destroying the jaguar. These men are sometimes pure Indians, but, as a general thing, they are of the mixed, or mestizo race. It need hardly be said that they are hunters of the greatest courage. They require to be so: since an encounter with a full-grown jaguar is but little less dangerous than with his striped congener of the Indian jungles. In these conflicts, the tigreros often receive severe wounds from the teeth and claws of their terrible adversary; and, not unfrequently, the hunter himself becomes the victim.
You may wonder that men are found to follow such a perilous calling, and with such slight inducement—for even the bounty is only a trifle of a dollar or two—differing in amount in different districts, and according to the liberality of the bestower. But it is in this matter as with all others of a like kind—where the very danger itself seems to be the lure.