Chapter Eleven.
Musquitoes and their Antidote.
Our next day’s journey brought us again into heavy timber—another creek bottom. The soil was rich and loamy, and the road we travelled was moist, and in some places very heavy for our waggon. Several times the latter got stalled in the mud, and then the whole party were obliged to dismount, and put their shoulders to the wheel. Our progress was marked by some noise and confusion, and the constant din made by Jake talking to his team, his loud sonorous “woha!” as they were obliged to halt, and the lively “gee-up—gee-up” as they moved on again—frighted any game long before we could come up with it. Of course we were compelled to keep by the waggon until we had made the passage of the miry flat.
We were dreadfully annoyed by the mosquitoes, particularly the doctor, of whose blood they seemed to be especially fond! This is a curious fact in relation to the mosquitoes—of two persons sleeping in the same apartment, one will sometimes be bitten or rather punctured, and half bled to death, while the other remains untouched! Is it the quality of the blood or the thickness of the skin that guides to this preference?
This point was discussed amongst us—the doctor taking the view that it was always a sign of good blood when one was more than usually subject to the attack of mosquitoes. He was himself an apt illustration of the fact. This statement of course produced a general laugh, and some remarks at the doctor’s expense, on the part of the opponents of his theory. Strange to say, old Ike was fiercely assailed by the little blood-suckers. This seemed to be an argument against the doctor’s theory, for in the tough skinny carcass of the old trapper, the blood could neither have been very plenteous nor delicate.
Most of us smoked as we rode along, hoping by that means to drive off the ferocious swarm, but although tobacco smoke is disagreeable to the mosquitoes, they cannot be wholly got rid of by a pipe or cigar. Could one keep a constant nimbus of the smoke around his face it might be effective, but not otherwise. A sufficient quantity of tobacco smoke will kill mosquitoes outright, as I have more than once proved by a thorough fumigation of my sleeping apartment.
These insects are not peculiar, as sometimes supposed, to the inter-tropical regions of America. They are found in great numbers even to the shores of the Arctic Sea, and as fierce and bloodthirsty as anywhere else—of course only in the summer season, when, as before remarked, the thermometer in these Northern latitudes mounts to a high figure. Their haunts are the banks of rivers, and particularly those of a stagnant and muddy character.
There is another singular fact in regard to them. Upon the banks of some of the South-American rivers, life is almost unendurable on account of this pest—the “plaga de mosquitos,” as the Spaniards term it—while upon other streams in the very same latitude musquitoes are unknown. These streams are what are termed “rios negros,” or black-water rivers—a peculiar class of rivers, to which many tributaries of the Amazon and Orinoco belong.