Not that the keeper—“arbiter of this terraqueous swamp”—would have believed me if he had caught me, and no monkey in Brazilian forests hated the jaguar more
than I hated the keeper. Sometimes just as I was really happy, and doing nothing more criminal than watching a water-rat that was trying to balance itself on an arrowhead stem while it reached up to the seeds, I would hear his detestable splashing—stealthy, he thought it, no doubt, the clumsy wretch, but noisy enough to warn my Red Indian ears a long way off—and I had to go. His own squelching feet and big body forcing a way through the osiers, which whipped his face as he went, hid the noise of my retreat as I slipped along like some fox, hardly scaring the birds that I passed, and cunningly stepping from point to point so as scarcely to make a splash. And so out at the other end and up into the high road and home as hard as I could run.
On one occasion, all but taken by surprise, I suddenly heard the keeper’s step close by, and had to slip into the water and sit there, like a coot, with only my head above the surface, and that half-hidden by reeds—and he passed, oh! so close to me, stopped for an instant to wonder to himself, perhaps, why the water was rippling so, and then went on, so cautiously, so cunningly, knowing that a boy was somewhere about, and expecting to pounce on him; while I just as cautiously rose from my sloppy, weedy lair, and crept off in the other direction, and got into the dusty road, my boots squelching dreadfully, and making as I jogged along (as Ben Jonson says) “great S’s like a watering-pot.”
And what was there in the osiers to amuse a boy? First of all, there were the water-rats, always funny, but never so comical as when cutting reeds. You would see one go down under the water, and the reed would begin “twiddling” and quivering in response to the sharp brown teeth at work below, but instead of falling, the reed would lean up against the next one, and when the vole came up to look for it, it would not see it, but it used to say “Bless me, how odd!” and go under again, and begin cutting another one down, bothering the dragon-fly who was sitting on it very much by the vibration. Then it would come up again, catch hold of it, and swim away to the stump where its hole was, and drag it up and cut it into lengths like an imitation beaver making a dam, and stop every now and again and look round, though there was only myself and the dragon-fly to appeal to, as much as to say, “There! that’s the way it’s done.” And if there were two of them, to see the way they stroked each other’s cheeks with their tiny paws, just as the wallabies do, putting one hand on each side of the other’s face, was as pretty as could be. Then there were the dabchicks, who came swimming along under water right over one’s feet, looking like bags of bubbles, or as if they were all covered with globules of quicksilver, and stopping to eat something at the bottom, as if they were fish, not birds. Then they would come to the top for air, catch sight of me, and with a horrified little “Goodness gracious!” bob under water again and go off straight down the little canal, a streak of bubbles.
“The Coot bald, else clean black that whiteness it doth bear
Upon her forehead starred, the Water-hen doth wear
Upon her little tail, in one small feather set.”
Drayton.