"On the juices of flowers and small insects. Look! there is one hovering, and its wings are moving too fast for us to see them. Don't stir! I see a branch so covered with blue flowers that it can hardly fail to attract the bird. Now it is settled above one of the corollas, and plunges its head into it without ceasing to beat with its wings. Its cloven tongue soon sucks out the honey concealed in the flower, and its little ones will greet it when it gets back with open beaks to receive their share of the spoil." "They are funny birds, those," said l'Encuerado to Lucien. "In three months--that is, in October--they will go to sleep, and will not wake up till April." "Is that true, father?" "I rather fancy that they migrate." [Illustration: "And the Indian went away, saluting."] "Now don't teach Chanito wrongly," said l'Encuerado, repeating a common phrase of mine; "the _huitzitzilins_ do not migrate; they go to sleep." "This fact has been so often related to me by Indians living in the woods," said my friend, "that I feel almost disposed to believe it." "Don't they say the same of the bats and swallows? and yet we know they change their habitat." "Yes; but with regard to humming-birds, they assert that they have seen them asleep. At all events, it is certain that they disappear in the winter." The clucking of a bird of the gallinaceous order, called the hocco--_Crax alector_--interrupted our discussion, and my two companions carefully proceeded towards a dark-foliaged tree, a little outside the edge of the forest. The clucking suddenly ceased; we heard the report of a gun, and I saw three of them fly away into the forest. L'Encuerado was climbing a tree when I came up, for the bird he had shot had lodged among the branches. "Do you see the long pods which hang on that tree?" cried Lucien. "It is a locust-tree covered with fruit," said my friend; "it is a relation of the bean and the pea." "Are the pods eatable?" asked the child, as one fell at his feet. "You may taste the dark pulp which surrounds the seeds--it is slightly sweet; but don't eat too much, for it is used in Europe as a medicine." L'Encuerado dropped at our feet the great bird which Sumichrast had killed. It was larger in size than a fowl, with a crest upon its head. Its cry--a sort of clucking of which its Spanish name gives an idea--tells the traveller its whereabout, although it is ready enough in making its escape. L'Encuerado returned to the bivouac, and Sumichrast led us along the edge of a ravine, obstructed by bushes and shaded by large trees. We had been quietly on the watch for a minute or two, when three young wolves, of the species called by the Indians _coyotes_, came running by, one after the other. They were soon followed by a fourth, and then the mother herself appeared. She glared at us with her fiery eyes, and then raised a dull, yelping noise, which brought her young ones to her.