The Gold Diggings of Cape Horn: A Study of Life in Tierra del Fuego and PatagoniaSpears, John Randolph
History
The Gold Diggings of Cape Horn: A Study of Life in Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia
Spears, John Randolph
Patagonia (Argentina and Chile) -- Description and travel
Along the Andes many Virginia deer are found, but it is only near the
forests. They emit a rank odor from the leg glands that is said to be
fatal to the desert snakes. The gray fox flourishes everywhere and grows
to a rather larger size than in the United States, but he is remarkable
for being very short-winded. At least, he is easily tired out. A race of
a few hundred yards with a desert horse uses him up, and he falls a
victim to the well-nigh unerring bolas of the plainsmen. He is not often
killed by the Indians, for he is not fit to eat, but the shepherds slay
him at sight because of the number of lambs he kills in the season.
Then there is the skunk, a counterpart in all respects of the skunk of
the States. Skunks are very numerous in all parts, and often serve the
Indians as food when larger game fails. It is an interesting fact, too,
that the Indians capture them when young and make pets of them. There is
rarely a collection of wigwams on the desert without a couple of tame
skunks playing about.
The skunks, when tame, seem in all respects inoffensive. The gauchos I
met when told that a skunk's bite is supposed in parts of the United
States to cause a malady akin to hydrophobia were incredulous. They had
never heard of such a thing.
Any reference to the animals of Patagonia that omitted the armadillo
would be noticeably defective. It is an animal with habits that must
interest an amateur naturalist greatly. There are two forms of the
armadillo. Roughly speaking, one is like a hairy guinea pig with a
pointed turtle shell over its back and head, while the other is like a
thick turtle without any breastplate. The former is very rare even in
its haunts on the Andes. The latter is everywhere abundant. As described
by all who have seen it, the latter will eat and get fat--very fat--on
anything from grass roots to decayed fish or cattle, from an ant to a
poisonous serpent, from strawberries to rats and mice. In the wilderness
it roams about by day because the cats of the desert persecute it most
at night. Near the settlements, where, by the way, it thrives best, it
is abroad at night, because man persecutes it in the day. Slow moving,
as it seems to be when the traveller sees it at sunset, it overtakes the
serpents of the region in a fair race, and kills them by squatting on
them and sawing its body to and fro so that the edges of its protective
shell cut the snake to pieces. It captures mice by sneaking on them
cat-fashion and throwing its body over them like a trap. It grubs for
worms; it robs nests of eggs and fledglings. Now, although it eats a
great many things that are repulsive to civilized tastes, the armadillo
is itself a most delicious article of food for any human taste,
civilized or uncivilized. In my journeys as a reporter of _The Sun_ I
have eaten nearly every kind of fish, flesh, and fowl served between
Ivigtut, Greenland, and Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, but found nothing
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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