Considering the marvellous variety of fish which the Orinoco possesses, the result was a little disappointing to an onlooker; for the catch, though very large, consisted almost entirely of but two kinds: the electric eel, and a creature peculiar to tropical South America--the _payara_--the size of a small salmon; this had its lower jaw supplied with fangs, which the Indians said cut like razors. As the net was pulled into the shallows, an Indian waved his hand warningly to the four soldiers who were standing by. "Be careful, gentlemen; beware of the _caribe_! Pray stand farther back; your red sashes will attract them." As he spoke, some small fish leapt out of the water and into the net. "Quick; quick with the forks!" Half a dozen long slender canes, each ending in two metal prongs like those of a carving-fork, were instantly produced, and it was soon plain enough why such implements were required. Those few little green fish, so beautifully barred with red and orange, were like bulls in a china shop; they leapt, wriggled, or swam about the net, biting first the fish and then the net as viciously as rats; and Paez stared to see mesh after mesh snapped through before the Indians could eject them with their forks. "If they could have got near you they would have bitten you in the same manner," said the principal of the fishermen, when he had got rid of the last of the _caribes_. "Anything red will attract them. We dare not attempt to swim a spurred horse through here, for he would be bitten to death, or till he was mad, before he reached the other side. I have seen a white man killed by them, merely because he happened to have a red scratch on his leg when he entered the water." * * * * * The cacique was interviewed, and not only granted permission for the whole tribe to go on the hunting expedition, but announced his own intention of going; and, early the following morning, they all started southwards with a good supply of lassoes. The Indians--one of the Cariban tribes--were the finest horsemen Paez had seen; and this was the more noteworthy, inasmuch as the Caribs as a whole care little for riding; many of those of the forest regions and of the Central American mountains have never seen such a thing as a horse; and we know that the cavalry of the Spanish adventurers terrified the sixteenth-century Caribs as much as Pyrrhus' elephants disconcerted the Romans and their horses. Yet these Venezuelan natives rode as if they had been born on horseback, and made no more ado of eating their dinner while they were in the saddle than as though it had been an arm-chair.