Presently I ran into a dense jungle of terrible nettles, which the natives call _mala mujer_ (bad woman). They are covered with needlelike thorns and their sting is extremely painful and annoying. I was also covered with wood-ticks, which added appreciably to my misery. It was cloudy and the night was as dark as death. Realizing that I was on the wrong route it seemed necessary to spend the night there, but I could neither sit nor stand with comfort amid the nettles. After proceeding five or six hundred yards through these miserable prickly objects (which in height ranged from two to thirty feet, thus pricking and stinging me from my face to my knees) I suddenly plunged headlong over a steep embankment into the water, when I became aware that I had reached the river; but whether I was above or below the house (which stands back about a thousand yards from the river) I couldn't tell. After groping my way along under the river bank for nearly half a mile, during the space of which I again fell in twice, I concluded that with my customary luck I was headed the wrong way, and so retraced my steps and proceeded along down the river for nearly a mile, when I came to a landing-place. Leaving the river I went in the opposite direction a short distance, and soon bumped into some sort of a habitation. After feeling my way more than half-way around the hut and locating an aperture (the door) I hallooed at the top of my voice four or five times, and receiving no response I ventured in only to find the place vacant. Returning to the open I manœuvred around until I found another hut, where I proceeded to howl until the natives woke up. I couldn't imagine how I was to make myself understood, as of course they could not understand a word of English. The man struck a match and seeing me standing in the door with a gun in my hand, and with my face all scratched and swollen to distortion from my explorations in the nettle patch, both he and his wife took fright and jumping through an opening on the opposite side of the room disappeared in the darkness, leaving me in sole possession of the place. After groping around the room in vain search of a match, and falling over about everything in the place, I returned to the open air. Meantime the clouds had begun to break away and I could see the dim outline of a large building a short distance beyond, which proved to be the sugar-mill. I was now able to get my bearings, and discovered that the hut from which the two people had fled was one of a number of a similar kind which belonged to the place and which were provided free for the workmen and their families that they might be kept conveniently at hand at all times. I was not long in finding the main road leading to the house, and when I arrived there everybody was asleep. After fumbling around all over the place in the dark I found a match and discovered that it was twenty-five minutes of three. Thus ended my first deer-hunt in Mexico.