A traveller in Mexico tells of going out with his ranchero host to hunt hares with a brace of very fine hounds. Going over a long stretch of sandy plain, relieved only by pillars and clusters of cactus, the Mexican called the attention of his guest to an alert, comical-looking bird, some distance from them.
With the remark that the gentleman should see some rare coursing, the Mexican slipped the leashes of the straining hounds, which sprang off as if used to the sport, and darted after the bird. For a moment it seemed to the stranger a very poor use to put the dogs to, but he was not long in changing his mind.
Instead of taking wing, the bird tilted its long tail straight up into the air in a saucily defiant way, and started off on a run in a direct line ahead. It seemed an incredible thing that the slender dogs, with their space devouring bounds, should not at once overtake the little bird; but so it was. The legs of the paisano moved with marvellous rapidity, and enabled it to keep the hounds at their distance for a very long time, being finally overtaken only after one of the gamest races ever witnessed by the visiting sportsman.
The roadrunner, however, serves a better purpose in life than being run down by hounds. Cassin mentions a most singular circumstance among the peculiarities of the bird. It seems to have a mortal hatred of rattlesnakes, and no sooner sees one of those reptiles than it sets about in what, to the snake, might well seem a most diabolical way of compassing its death. Finding the snake asleep, it at once seeks out the spiniest of the small cacti, the prickly pear, and, with infinite pains and quietness, carries the leaves, which it breaks off, and puts them in a circle around the slumbering snake. When it has made a sufficient wall about the object of all this care, it rouses its victim with a sudden peck of its sharp beak, and then quickly retires to let the snake work out its own destruction, a thing it eventually does in a way that ought to gratify the roadrunner, if it has any sense of humor. Any one watching it would say it was expressing the liveliest emotion with its constantly and grotesquely moving tail.
The first impulse and act of the assaulted snake is to coil for a dart; its next to move away. It quickly realizes that it is hemmed in, in a circle, and finally makes a rash attempt to glide over the obstruction. The myriad of tiny needles prick it and drive it back. The angry snake, with small wisdom, attempts to retaliate by fastening its fangs into the offending cactus. The spines fill its mouth.
Angrier still, it again and again assaults the prickly wall, until, quite beside itself with rage, it seems to lose its wits completely, and writhing and twisting horribly, buries its envenomed fangs into its own body, dying finally from its self-inflicted wounds. After the catastrophe, the roadrunner indulges in a few gratified flirts of its long tail and goes off, perchance to find its reward in being run down by hounds set on by men.
John R. Coryell, in Scientific American.
Man is hard to satisfy. Poverty is the only thing he can get enough of.