PREHISTORIC IMAGES OF THE JAGUAR, CARVED FROM STONE AND FOUND INTHE RUINS OF GUERRERO

O those who know him, the jaguar is almost as much an ob-ject of dread as his distant Asiatic cousin. Fearless, strong,

wily, he is a match for most hunters, and the natives regard himwith awesome fear. These qualities, combined with the densityof his jungle haunts, have prevented him from being well knownor frequently hunted by white men, and the stories which Mr.Dunn tells will be a voyage into an unknown country to most of us.

jaguar, which, in 1906, had stolen a pigfrom Felipe Alvarejo, mahogany cruiserand hunter, until, when I reachedNicapa in the fall of 1909, he was of thesize of a dinosaur, in the minds of thetwo hundred Chiapanecos who dwelt inthe hamlet.

I had hunted with Felipe, years before,around the Laguna de Carmen, when weshot alligators to make it safe for bronzedcoastal Indians to handle mahogany raftsin the lagoon. Therefore, he turned tome when the tiger proved too crafty for

THE TRAIL OF THE AMERICANTIGER

By HARRY H. DUNN

PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR

T

E had come to be known asthe Tiger of Nicapa, inthe three years that he haddwelt in the hill of theCalavera, some two milesback of the little village

at the headwaters of the Rio de Gon-zales, in Chiapas, Mexico. In thosethree years he had carried off five chil-dren, killed one woman to get her child,and mauled a man who attempted tofight him, with an ox-goad for a weapon.In size he had grown from the ordinary

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THE TIGER CAT CAPTURED NEAR TLACOTEPEC, NOW THREE YEARS OLD ANDBECOME SO SAVAGE THAT HE HAS TO BE CHAINED AT ALL TIMES

him. The jefe politico of Nicapa wrotefor him, for Felipe lacks even the rudi-ments of learning, save in junglecraft,and eventually I got the letter, away upin Mexico City, seven thousand feetabove the sea, where the Indians huntjags rather than jaguars. The day afterthe letter came, having spent most of thenight in deciphering it, I started southand east.

Felipe greeted me when I left thecanoa six miles from his village, and fouro'clock of the next morning, which hap-pened to be Christmas Day, found us inthe bush. Felipe carried the entrails ofa deer, tied up in the animal's fresh skin,until we came to the base of a rocky,jungle-covered hill, possibly three hun-dred feet high and three miles around atthe base. Two indentations, near thecrest, gave the small mountain the ap-pearance of a skull, and so the Chiapane-cos named it—calavera. Thick mosscovered the hill, topped with a tangle ofbrush, all bound together with lianas—vines from the size of a man's little fin-ger to two inches in diameter. Thisbrush was higher than a tall man's head,and the only ways through it were the

trails of the deer, few in number andalmost grown up to fresh jungle, appar-ently unused since el tigre had come totake up his abode on lá calavera.

We dragged the deerskin bag allround the base of the hill and then hungit to a stout branch of a tree about twelvefeet from the ground and ten feet fromthe trunk of the tree. We slept on theroof of Felipe's house that night, onlyto be awakened by a commotion amongthe half hundred dogs of the village. Inthe morning, Felipe's one remaining pigwas gone, and down the main street ofthe village led the tracks of a huge tiger,almost hidden by the paws of many dogswhich had followed. At the fartheredge of the village were two dead dogs,each with a broken neck, the flesh tornfrom one side of their faces. But thiswas not the tiger which got the pig, forthat cat came straight to the little adobepen, vaulted over, and returned the wayit came. Evidently the tiger of Nicapahad become a pair and one had trickedthe dogs while the other stole the pig.

Felipe vowed a million or two of can-dles to the saints if we should kill thetiger, and followed by about thirty vil-

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FELIPE ALVAREJO, CHAMPION NATIVE JAGUAR HUNTER OF MEXICO,AND THE AUTHOR'S HORSE, ON ONE OF THE

EXPEDITIONS IN GUERRERO

lagers armed with weapons ranging froma 20-gauge muzzle-loading shotgun toone of those nickel-plated repeating riflesmade especially for revolutions, we struckout before daybreak, bound for the Hillof the Skull. Arrived at the tree where-on the deerskin had been left, we foundthat the tiger, leaping straight up, hadbroken the limb, discarded it, and madeaway with the skin. We tried to fol-low the plain tracks with their four largeand one small pad, but we could make noway into the jungle. We wasted twohours trying to find deer trails wideenough to let us in, and then Felipe,sending his men out in a line around thebase of the hill and providing every manwith a torch of dry ocote wood, fired thegrass and upper layer of moss.

There was not much flame, but aterrific smoke, and what little fire therewas ran like a thousand red serpentsthrough and under and around the brush,until it gained the more open upper areaand there burst out into a sturdy blaze.On four sides of the irregular hill ranthe creek, while on two others theground had been grazed closely by thegoats of the village, so that the flamescould easily be confined to the hill alone.Animals began to come from the tangle.Parrots, disturbed from their middayrest, flew in green and red and yellowclouds; monkeys fled through the tops ofthe trees until it seemed as if heavy galesof wind were moving the branches; rab-bits and rats and mice scurried under-foot, and once an ocelot, a little spotted

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jungle cat, brought the rifle to my shoul-der in the momentary belief that a youngjaguar was escaping us. A python, prob-ably twelve feet long and as thick asmy thigh, scuttled through the grass, andan Indian, drawing his machete, slashedoff the snake's head, pulling the body toone side to furnish food for a feast inthe village.

Then came the jaguar. It developedlater that an Indian on the farther sideof the hill saw him first and fired a loadof fine shot at the big cat, turning himback into the smoking jungle. Then,crossing the sloping side of the hill, the

tiger appeared to Felipe, and the fellow,proud of the '73 repeater I had broughtwith me from Mexico City for him,fired as the spotted apparition crossed anopen space in the tangle. OrdinarilyFelipe is a good shot; I know for he shota tiger off me in the semi-darkness ofan Indian ramada in Guerrero, but therifle was new to him and he managedonly to put the lead slug in the cat's foreshoulder.

The tiger growled, a noise betweenthe scream of a wounded puma and thehiss of a maddened python, and leapedstraight up into the air. When he came

ROSENDO JIMINEZ, HIS MACHETE WITH WHICH HE KILLED ATIGER, AND THE PRECIOUS BAG GIVEN HIM IN 1900

BY PROFESSOR WILLIAM NIVEN

THE TRAIL OF THE AMERICAN TIGER

down, all thought of flight had left himand he headed for Felipe and myself,standing, as we were, about thirty yardsfrom the spot where he had first ap-peared. The Indian commenced to pumpbullets at the tiger, and I remembernoticing that the cat was not leaping ashe came forward, nor was he running,but was trotting rapidly, as one oftensees a house cat trot when moving un-frightened about its own home. I hadnever seen a mountain lion travel at thisgait, nor a jaguar, an ocelot, nor a lynx,and I distinctly remember, though timewas precious, that I made a mental noteof the big cat's gait.

This probably sounds ridiculous, themore so as we were confronting the mostdangerous and most powerful animal inthe New World with the single excep-tion of the Kadiak bear, and I doubtvery much if any bear in the world couldwhip a maddened Mexican tiger. I re-member that the jaguar's mouth wasopen and his tail streaming straight outbehind, not lashing from side to side, asmaddened cats are supposed to do.

At ten yards, Felipe had emptied hismagazine, dropped his rifle, and whippedout his machete, when I found the tiger's

forehead over the sights of the rifle, andas the gun cracked the jaguar halted,staggered forward a short step or two,sank to his fore shoulders, and turnedover dead. On skinning this tiger wefound that one of Felipe's rifle balls hadgone completely through the animal'sheart. Another had broken the right foreshoulder; a third had ranged throughthe intestines, and the remaining fourhad found lodgment in the body, withthe exception of one which had piercedthe lower abdomen and gone out the far-ther side. My bullet had penetrated be-tween the eyes and, leaving the skull,had torn away a third of the back of thehead. Probably this was the cause ofthe animal's sudden stopping, but thetiger must have been practically dead formore than half the distance of his run.At the same time, I am glad the steel-shod bullet found the spot between thatjaguar's eyes.

Scarcely had we drawn this tiger a lit-tle way from the place where he fell thanthere arose a great cry of "Mira! Mira!La Tigresa!" ("Look! Look! Thetigress!") from the Indian beaters, who,hearing our fusillade of shots, had comeup from the far sides of the hill. We

THE AUTHOR'S CAMP IN THE JUNGLE OF THE MEXICAN STATE OF CHIAPAS

668 OUTING

GROUP OF CHIAPANECO INDIANS WHO AIDED THE AUTHOR AND FELIPEALVAREJO IN THE FIRST HUNT

had not been expecting two tigers in oneplace, though we knew there was a pairof the cats hunting together around thevillage, and the second jaguar, evenlarger than the first, clearing the groundin great, fifteen-foot leaps, was throughour line of Indians and away before wecould locate her over the sights of ourrifles.

I can see her now as plainly as then.In her mouth she carried a young jaguar,as large as a Canada lynx, holding himby the loose skin of his back, just as ahouse cat carries her kitten. She heldher head high, and the feet of her youngone, which hung limply from her teeth,did not touch the ground. She seemedto gather herself for each leap, even be-fore her feet had touched the earth atthe end of the last. I fired with the riflehalfway to my hip, just as she disap-peared into the thickest part of the jun-gle along the creek, but the only satis-faction I got was the screaming of aflock of parrots as the idle bullet whinedits way among them. Then with ourears we followed the course of the tigress

for several minutes by the chattering ofmonkeys and the screaming of parrots asshe passed under the trees they had ap-propriated in flight from the burning hill.

After the blaze had worn itself downnext day we found the tigers' cave. In itwere what seemed almost a ton of bonesand among them we found the skulls ofthree children and one adult, evidentlya woman, who did not seem to have beendead more than a few months. Nowoman was missing from Nicapa, asthe body of the one killed by the tigershad been recovered, so this must havebeen all that remained of some poor un-fortunate overtaken by the hunting pairin the jungle trails.

Before I returned to Mexico City,Felipe and I went on horseback aboutforty miles through the jungle to Cata-zaja, and thence in canoa down a smallstream to the Rio Usumacinta to the sea.After we struck the main river, wepassed many long sand bars, and on oneof these Felipe's ever-roving eyes discovered a tigre asleep. The jaguar laystretched out on his belly, his nose on his

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paws, the water almost laving the crueltalons of his front feet. We were aboutfifty yards away when we first sightedhim, and I raised the rifle to fire. Thecanoa rocked a trifle and I lowered therepeater, raising it again almost immedi-ately, but Felipe seized my hand, saying:

"Don't shoot, señor, the tiger is dead."The remarkable intuition of Felipe

proved correct, as it has on many a tripinto the jungle, but when I asked himhow he knew, he merely replied that thetiger looked like he was dead. We land-ed a yard from the jaguar, and saw,crushed in the powerful teeth, the bodyof a snake, something like the watermoccasin of the lower Mississippi River.The fangs of the snake were imbeddedin the tiger's jaw and the reptile's bodywas cut completely in twain. It was as

water the snake had sent home the dead-ly poison. According to Felipe, also, ajaguar never runs when he can fight, andthe result lay before us. We skinned thetiger and the last time I saw Felipe, in1912, he had made the hide into a saddleblanket for a huge mule he was riding inthe army of the bandit-rebel leader,Emiliano Zapata, in Southern Mexico.

In June of 1910, I found myself inTlacotepec, a village of some three hun-dred souls, largely of the old Aztec stock,on my way to look at the magnificentruined city, more than fifty miles inlength, discovered by Professor WilliamNiven in that section. As a matter offact, I simply had a bad case of the "itch-ing foot" and I took this direction asleading me into new fields and giving me,at the same time, an opportunity to see

THE BALSAS RIVER, WHICH LEADS INTO THE HEART OF SOME OF THE BESTJAGUAR COUNTRY IN MEXICO, AND DOWN WHICH THE AUTHOR

SAILED TWICE IN QUEST OF THE BIG SPOTTED CATS

dead as the creature it had killed, thoughneither had been dead more than twen-ty-four hours.

According to Felipe, the tiger hadcome down to the stream to drink and asthe great round head lowered to the

something of the people who filled Amer-ica's Egypt about the time Pharaoh andMoses were having their argument overrights of way through the Red Sea.

Wandering one afternoon into a littlecantina in Tlacotepec, in, search of a

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drink made from the seeds of the tamar-inda, I beheld Felipe Alvarejo, clad incotton pants and shirt, sandals on hisfeet, three belts of cartridges about hiswaist, and the rifle I had given him in hishand. He was speedily installed in myhouse, after he had explained that, the

remainder left open. I slept in the cov-ered end, my netting-covered hammockslung between two posts, while the twomozos wrapped themselves in theirscrapes and slept in the open section. Ro-sendo, who looked like an Arab, shouldhave been one, for he was an incessant

THE TOWN OF TLACOTEPEC, GUERRERO, MEXICO, NEAR WHICH THE TIGERCUB WAS CAPTURED

mahogany cruising business failing inChiapas, he had come over into Guerreroto hunt deer. I had already secured Ro-sendo Jimenez, a youth who had beenmozo for Professor Niven in the latter'sexplorations and whose most prized pos-session was a stout, leather-bound, canvasmail bag, bearing the words, "G. Niven,Tlacotepec, Guerrero, 1906," stenciledon the outside. Guillermo is the Spanishequivalent of William, hence the ini-tial G.

We moved out to a lot of brush-cov-ered hills, nearer to the central part ofthe ruins, and there Felipe and Rosendobuilt for me what is known as a ramada.Brush is cut and bound in bundles andthen set up in a sort of fence, or stock-ade, around a small area, usually rect-angular, half of which is roofed and the

and an uncontrollable wanderer. Onthe third day out, after we had foundthe ruins of a temple 400 feet long by180 in width, with a stone altar twentyfeet high in the center and just whenwe were full of work, he wandered outinto the brush-covered hills, armed onlywith his machete.

Late that night he returned, carryingin his arms a cub jaguar about the sizeof a well-grown Boston Bull terrier.The cat's feet were tied with strips tornfrom Rosendo's shirt, and in its mouthwas a gag made from a green pinebranch. It seemed that Rosendo hadstumbled on a cave containing the youngtiger while the parent pair were away,had smoked the youngster almost intoinsensibility, and then captured it.

"What would you have done," asked

THE TRAIL OF THE AMERICAN TIGER

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Felipe, "if the tigress had come backwhile you were at the cave?"

"Killed her with my machete," re-plied the valiant Rosendo.

A machete, it should be said, is a knifewith a wide blade, about three feet inlength, and is the constant companionof the Indian of interior Mexico, Withit he kills his enemies, beats his wife,spanks his children, hunts his food, andcuts the brush which goes into the mak-ing of his hut. On it he fries his meat,bakes his cornmeal cakes, and on it, ingeneral, he depends for his livelihood.The best of Toledo swordmakers havevied with each other in producing theseblades, and, rightly handled, they arecapable of slitting a man from pate toheel, or of cutting off the head of a cowat one blow. The standing of an In-dian in remote Mexico is measured bythe length of his machete and the amountof silver on its handle. Rosendo's ma-chete was long, as may be seen" by aglance at the photograph, and sharp as arazor, but he, being of the mozo class,had no silver on its handle.

Taking a coil of copper wire, broughtto bind up packs of artifacts from theruins, I made a sort of braided chain andcollar for the young jaguar and tied himsecurely to a stone pillar, thoughtfullyleft by some son of Montezuma, in thecenter of our ramada. Later in the daya shower threatened, and I moved himinside the covered section, leaving himthere, against Felipe's protests, when Iwent to sleep. The gray false-dawnwas filtering into the ramada, when Iwoke to see Felipe wide awake and lyingflat on his stomach outside, the riflepointed at the place where I had leftthe jaguar cub the night before. Follow-ing the muzzle of the rifle, I saw a fullgrown tigress crouching beside the cub.

Then I did a foolish thing; I reachedout to the head of the hammock for myrifle, and on the instant that my armmoved the jaguar sprang. She was inmidair when Felipe fired, and she hadcovered half the twelve or fifteen feetseparating her from me when the bulletmet her and she crumpled to the dirtfloor of the ramada. Even then sheraised herself off the ground and startedfor me again, and Felipe's second bullet

finished her. On skinning the cat wefound that the first bullet passed throughboth lungs and heart and the secondthrough her head, yet she gave signs oflife for ten minutes after she had beenhit by the second ball. Indeed, I havenever seen an animal, in a number ofyears of nondescript hunting in the NewWorld, possessed of the vitality andpower to resist death which is character-istic of the Mexican tiger.

The male of this pair we never saw,but the cub, now nearly three years old,is a captive on the hacienda of RamonOviedo, not far from Jamay on theshores of Lake Chapala. It is nearlyseven hundred miles from Tlacotepec toJamay, yet the cub traveled it well, some-times on the horn of my saddle and some-times in my lap in the train. This year,however, he has become so savage thatno one can approach within the circleof his chain, and the probabilities are thatOviedo will give him to some zoo or tosome traveling showman if his disposi-tion does not improve.

This same Oviedo and myself oncespent three weeks around the head ofLake Chapala, just where the LermaRiver, winding through interminablemarshes, makes its way into the mostbeautiful body of water in the NewWorld, all in pursuit of a mythical"white tiger." We first heard of himfrom a boatman who had convoyed ussuccessfully into the great marshes in1908, but it was not until November of1910 that I dropped off the Guadala-jara train at Ocotlan, stepped into alaunch in the river, and sputtered awayup to Lake Chapala and then along itsshores until I came to Oviedo's resi-dence.

We spent a day watching the ChapalaIndians catching thousands of little charafish, about an inch in length, pouringthem alive into great stone pots of dough,and baking them, fins, tails, heads, andall, into their queer fish bread. Wedipped in the sulphur springs at Jamay,took a look at the great statue of thePope which dominates the village, sawthe. large stone tiger's head which lies,half buried in the earth, in the church-yard of Jamay and, next morning,climbed into the thirty-foot canoa to go

THE TRAIL OF THE AMERICAN TIGER

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after the white jaguar. Neither Oviedo.nor. I believed the white tiger to exist,but his skin to-day lies in Ovjedo's resi-dence in Mexico City, and this is how hecame to get it:

Lying in wait at a spring one moon-light night, three days out from Jamay,in one of the landward rivers of themarsh, we killed a small brown bear anda deer. Next day, having heard shots inthe vicinity, two Indian fishermen cameto the canoa, seeking to sell us cornmealand fish. We gave them deer and bearmeat for their cornmeal, but our m ozokept us supplied with fish. In the courseof. a conversation with the elder of thetwo men, we mentioned killing the bearand the deer at this spring. Instantly hecrossed himself, muttering a word or twoof prayer, and then gravely informed usthat the spring was haunted; that theIndians never went near it, for theredwelt in the hills thereabouts a tigrebianco, impervious to arrows or bullets,but perfectly able to kill both of us atone blow of either of his mighty paws.

Four nights thereafter we lay in waitat the spring. Deer and lesser animalscame and went; once a mountain liondrank unharmed and never even notedour presence, concealed as we were in aheavy thicket of thorny bushes. Thespring lay at the head of a little ravine,completely hidden from the mesa, ortableland above, and on the fourth nightwe must have dozed for a few minutes,for when we rose to go back to sleep allday on board the canoa, the marks ofthe pads of an extraordinarily large tigerappeared as if by magic on the side of thepool next to our blind. And in one ofthese tracks were three pure white hairs.

Instead of sleeping that day we putthe canoa about and with her lateen sailbellying in the wind, sent her skimmingdown the river and across the lake toJamay. There we secured a small dog,one of any number from fifty to half athousand which range the streets of thelittle Indian town, and from Oviedo'sguncase two ten-gauge shotguns, withshells loaded with BB shot, intendedprimarily for use in hunting the greatgeese and swans which winter every sea-son in the Lerma marshes. Back at thespring, just a week from the day we left

it, we found fresh tracks of the big tiger,and with the dog tied to a stake near thepool, we lay down in the blind that night.

As the moon rose the dog, after themanner of his Indian kind, set up ayowling which brought a horde of co-yotes to the surrounding hilltops. Theirstaccato barking silenced the frightenedpup, but it was not until midnight thatthey drifted away from the spring to at-tend to the field mice and sleeping ducksof the marshes. Then came a deer, sawor smelled the dog, and left the springin great, graceful bounds that soon car-ried him over the rim of the ravine.After this an armadillo came and drank,and three skunks followed him, but thesepaid no attention to the dog. Rabbitsinnumerable played through the glade inthe early evening hours, but the dog'syelping and the answering chorus of thecoyotes soon drove them into their bur-rows. An owl, one of the big, brown-horned owls of the Mexican uplands,swooped down on the unfortunate pup,but he snapped at the bird, and the nighthunter rose hastily to seek other fields forhis killing.

About three o'clock the tiger came.The dog saw him first and he was toofrightened even to bark; he simply layflat down on the ground, his nose ex-tended on his paws, and whined. Thisfirst attracted our attention, and then wesaw a light blotch on the side of the knollacross the pool, which rapidly resolved it-self into the tigre blanco, the haunter ofthe spring, which had so terrified Indianhunters of the villages a few miles away.

In the moonlight he seemed largerthan any tiger we had ever seen. Hewalked, not with the furtive, sidelongmovement of the puma, nor yet thestealthy, carefully thought out motionof the Canada lynx; indeed, he seemedto come up with something of the slow,majestic walk of an African lion, if thepictures I have seen of this great cat inmotion are accurate. I do not think hesaw the dog, or smelled him, until hehad dropped down on his hams and long,thick forepaws, to drink. When he didsee our shrinking "bait" he cleared theten-foot pool of the spring at a boundand lit on all fours, his back arched,within three feet of the terrified dog.

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Both our guns covered the jaguar,now plainly visible and less than fortyfeet from their muzzles. Oviedo pressedhis foot against mine, and, with the pumpgun pointed as nearly as I could aim inthe dim light of the blind, straight at thetiger's brilliant eyes, I pulled the trig-ger. There was a crashing roar whichthe little hills gave back a hundredfold,and the big cat leaped again, but this timetoward the clump of brush whence, hedivined, came the stinging, killing pelletsof lead.

Before I could pump in a new shellRamon sent the full charge of heavyshot into the snarling mouth, and thewhite tiger doubled up, quite dead, al-most at the muzzles of the shotguns.We released the dog and we never sawhim again. Fright or some other emo-tion lent him wings, and he disappearedwith the rapidity of a scared jackrabbit."No coyote ever will catch that dog,"said Ramon, and we bent to examinethe tiger.

Both loads of shot had taken effect,and the massive head was literally shotto pieces. Only with the greatest dif-ficulty was it preserved to adorn myfriend's home. The white tiger meas-ured six feet nine inches from tip of pinknose to the end of his cream-colored tail.He was not white, with the exception ofbelly and the under sides of his legs, butpale golden-brown, something less thanthe ruddy gray which comes on theflanks of the puma in spring, yet notwhite. His body was lightly ocellatedwith darker brown, and his tail was adeep cream color, with markings almostblack in their intensity. Both eyes hadbeen shot out, but his nose was pink,and both Oviedo and I believe that hewas simply an albino jaguar, not a freakwhite "sport" or branch from the fam-ily, but an accidental albino.

Both black and white mountain lionsare found rarely in Mexico. I haveseen skins of both, but neither is the"black" puma black nor the "white" onewhite. They are merely strong varia-tions of natural colors, leaning stronglytoward the darkest forms or the light-est, as the case may be. The under partsof the tigre bianco were purest white andpractically unmarked, though in typical

tigers heavy black ocelli are prevalent onthe under side of the belly and inside thelegs.

In the spring of 1911 the scourge ofrevolution and anarchy was laid on Mex-ico by an ambitious dreamer in the stateof Coahuila. In 1913 he paid for thestarting of this disturbance with his life,but in the interim all the outlying por-tions of the republic were made unsafefor foreigners by powerful bands of ban-dits who robbed and killed men and car-ried women off to their haunts in thehills. The peace under which Amer-icans had lived in Mexico for thirty yearswas shattered, and thousands fled thecountry, leaving their sugar mills, corn,and pineapple and coffee ranches in thehinterland of Mexico to the care ofMexicans.

To my old guide, Felipe Alvarejo,whom I had not seen for more than ayear, fell the care of a sugar hacienda inGuerrero. Again securing the aid of aletter writer, he informed me that hehad discovered a "whole tribe of tigers,which were likely to carry both himselfand the hacienda into the hills if I did notcome to his rescue."

In April and May I rode with thebandit-rebel, Emiliano Zapata, to the lootof Yautepec and Jojutla; May 13 and14 I was a spectator at the battle ofIguala, and the end of June found meon my way down the Balsas River in acanoa, bound for Zirandara. The rebelswere my friends, for I had sent the talesof their battling and their looting overland and under the sea to the newspapersof the United States. Consequently, Icarried in my pockets enough passportsand letters of introduction to rebel lead-ers to make an excellent and lifesize bon-fire.

Felipe, warned by messenger fromBalsas Station, greeted me at the landing,several miles from the hacienda on whichhe was watchman, like a long lost broth-er. His story of the menace of the tigerswas not so much a myth, as I speedilyfound out, for of all the cattle, goats,sheep, and hogs left on a ranch of morethan 20,000 acres, what the rebels didnot confiscate the tigers took. Of 400men employed in the cultivation of thehacienda and the handling of its sugar

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ten remained, all old men, the remainderbeing with the rebels. Women and chil-dren, half starved, yet too lazy and tooignorant to get themselves food off thefertile acres of the ranch, remained innumbers, and it was to save these, morethan to protect himself, that Felipe hadbesought me to aid in the crusade on thetigers.

Nine children had disappeared inthree months, two women had been killedin broad daylight, and three others sobadly mauled as to be disfigured for life.So far as I could learn, after a day inquestioning these peon women and oldmen, there were three known tigers prey-ing on the hacienda. There had beenfour, but Felipe had killed one with hismachete, when the beast attacked awoman in a path between the sugar milland the house.

That night we saw that bonfires wereprepared and lighted and that the womenand children were indoors before dark-ness fell. Next morning Felipe and I,armed with rifles and revolvers, wan-dered round the jungle side of the ranchall forenoon, but we saw nothing butold tracks, and the remains of a half-eaten sheep. This gave me an idea, andat noon we set the women to work withspades and shovels, digging a pit ninefeet long, four feet wide and eight feetdeep. By dint of numbers they finishedthis hole in the earth by noon of thenext day, when I placed a quincunx ofsharpened, upstanding stakes made oftwo-inch ironwood in the bottom.

Covering the opening with a weak lat-tice work of brush, I placed the body ofthe sheep on the ranch-house side of thepit, scattered fresh blood from anothersheep which we killed for food over thetop of the trap, and, leaving my ownmozo brought from Mexico City onguard on the roof of the hacienda house,went to bed shortly after eight o'clock.

At midnight the mozo on the roofcalled down the stairway that a tigerwas walking between the sugar buildingand the house. Filipe and I clamberedout on the roof and took two shots at theprowling figure, but all to no avail be-yond getting a snarling growl from thecat when a bullet whined too close to hisshort ears. The scaring of this tiger

ended our chances with the pitfall, themore especially as the shots broughtabout half of the frightened women andchildren to the doors of their huts andstarted all the dogs to barking. Whenwe went to the pitfall in the morningwe found a skunk wandering aboutamong the stakes in the bottom of thetrap and evidences that the coyotes hadbeen at our sheep bait.

We killed the zorillo, fished him out,and reset the trap, spending most of theday in sleep. About eleven o'clock thatnight, as Felipe and I lay on the roof ofthe house, we heard one long, gutturalscream from the direction of the pit, fol-lowed by a series of growls, all accom-panied by a sound of breaking brush andsome heavy body thrashing about. Weleaped down the ladder and through thehouse, rifles in hand, and raced to thetrap. Felipe's ignorance of mince pie,Welsh rarebits, and French pastry proveda blessing, for he led by at least fifteenfeet when we reached the strip of junglebehind which lay the pitfall.

Projecting from the hole, now merelya black blotch in the moonlight, was awaving, thrashing bunch of brush, thecrumpled roof of the pit, carried downby the tiger, which was apparently wellimpaled on one of the ironwood spears.Throwing open the safety on the auto-matic, as I heard Felipe cocking his '73repeater, I caught up with the Chiapa-neco at the rim of the pit. In the bot-tom, firmly impaled, lay a tiger, tangledin the mass of brushwood, growling,spitting, hissing, and screaming, all atone and the same time,

Felipe caught his breath and startedreviling the great cat. Spanish is in nowise limited in its profane adjectives,and the manner in which the Indiancursed the maneater was perfect accord-ing to his standards. He carried the an-imal's ancestry back to the flood and wasjust calling him a son of an alligator—than which there is no more opprobriousIndian epithet—when I fired a soft-nosed bullet into the snarling head.

Whether the tiger was already practi-cally dead from the spear on which hehad fallen, or my bullet went unusuallytrue, he lay still, and after a ten-minutesilence to be sure he was quite dead, we

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dropped down into the pit and lifted himout. He measured five feet nine inchesfrom tip to tip.

Three days later a woman, MariaJilgero, was killed and dragged into thejungle about two hundred yards fromthe workmen's huts. Tracks in the trailwhere she had been gathering sahuaripas—the red fruit of the tree cactus—showed that at least two tigers had takenpart in the killing. I put off my depar-ture for another week, and Felipe setabout making a net, twenty feet long, tenfeet wide at the open end, running to apoint with meshes about six inchessquare. Then we took up the trail ofwhat seemed to be the same pair of thebig cats, which we found behind thesugar house, and spent a day following itto a cleft in the rocks, known as the Caveof the Snake. Some wandering prehis-toric tribe had carved the common sym-bol of America's Egypt—a feathered ser-pent—on a flat rock near the entrance tothis cave and the Indians believed ithaunted.

There we found ample evidence of thetigers, and on the following day, accom-panied by all the old men who remainedin the hacienda, we set up the net. Twogreen poles, loosely held up by piles ofboulders, sustained the open end of thenet over the entrance to the cave, whilethe small end was fastened, equallyloosely, to a stake driven into the earth.

Then two of the old men started a firein the mouth of the cave, reachingthrough the net to pile on green sticksand to throw burning brands farther in.Meanwhile other men beat on tin mo-lasses cans, shouted, and even sangaround the net. Soon the smoke beganto draw well through the cave. Anhour passed; the Indians had tired oftheir tom-tomming, singing, and shout-ing and had subsided into keeping up thesmudge and throwing a stream of burn-ing brush into the cave when, snortingand growling, the tiger appeared. Eitherhe did not notice the net, or disdained it,for he hurled himself straight out of theentrance at the nearest man.

The stakes gave way and, in an instant,tiger and net were a tossing, spitting,yowling, rolling mass in the middle ofthe little level space in front of the cave.

The Indians danced up and down, yell-ing curses at the cat, until an old man,screaming that the Devil had killed hisdaughter, rushed forward and began jab-bing at the jaguar with his machete. Thetiger gathered himself and, net and all,leaped at the old man, whose nimblenessof foot alone saved him. The net itselfmust have weighed close to one hundredpounds, yet the tiger carried it as easilyas though it had been made of packthread instead of rope.

There was danger in fighting the jag-uar with machetes, lest some ill-directedthrust should sever the net, and I urgedFelipe to shoot the now thoroughly mad-dened beast. "No," he replied. "Theold men want their revenge, for the tigerhas killed their children." By this timethe jaguar had worked all four feetthrough four meshes of the net and wasstanding erect, the weight of the woventrap on his back and trailing on theground behind him. One of the Indians,leaping in suddenly, drove his pointedmachete blade into the tiger's side, justback of the foreleg.

Quick as the man was, the cat wasquicker. Before the hunter could with-draw his knife the jaguar leaped, his pawshot out, and the Indian's shoulder wasstripped as clean of clothing and of fleshas though a surgeon's knife had beenapplied. The man fell without even anoutcry, and the tiger, blood flowing fromthe machete wound in its side, leaped for-ward to finish his kill, when Felipe's riflecracked with mine. The cat turnedabout in his tracks, leaned slowly for-ward, lay down, rose to his feet, and,with one last growl, lurched forward tothe sands stone dead.

Much to Felipe's disgust, I insistedthat we attend to the man before weskinned the tiger, but despite the best wecould do he died before nightfall. Hisdaughter and grandson had been killedby the tigers and his son-in-law was withthe rebels. In 1912 I met this son-in-lawon the trail between Jonacatepec and Jo-jutla, and he secured for me a convoy oftwenty-five men of Emiliano Zapata's no-torious "Death Legion" to take me insafety through bandit-infested country—all because I had killed the tiger whichhad wiped out his family,

THE TRAIL OF THE AMERICAN TIGER