The wild oxen were tame unless wounded, and their hides were generally from eleven to thirteen feet long. They were very strong and very swift, in spite of their short and slender legs. In the course of a single century from their introduction, they had so increased, that the French Buccaneers, when they landed, seldom went in search of them, but waited for them near the shore, at the salt pools where they came to drink. The herds fed at night on the savannahs, and at noon retired to the shelter of the forests. A wounded bull would often blockade, for four hours, a tree in which a hunter had taken refuge, bellowing round the trunk and ploughing at the roots with his horns. The French hunters generally shot them; but the Spanish "hocksers" rode them down on horseback, and hamstrung them with a crescent-shaped spear, in form something like a cheese-knife with a long handle. The wild boars, when much pressed, adopted the same military stratagem as the oxen. They threw themselves into the form of a hollow square, the sows in the rear and the sucking pigs in the middle, the white sabre tusks of the boars gleaming outwards towards the foe. The dogs always fastened upon the defenceless sow in preference to the ferocious male, whom they seldom attacked if it got at bay under a tree, though it might be alone, glaring before the red jaws of eighty yelping dogs. The wild boar hunting was less dangerous than that of the wild oxen, and less profitable. The hogs soon grew scarce, a party of hunters sometimes killing 100 in a day, and only carrying home three or four of the fattest. It was not uncommon for solitary hunters or _engagés_ who had lost their way in the woods to amuse themselves by training up the young hogs they found basking under the trees, and teaching them to track their own species and pull them down by tugging at their long leathery ears. Oexmelin, the most intelligent of the few Buccaneer writers, relates his own success in training four pigs, whom he taught to follow at his heels like dogs, to play with him, and obey his orders. When they saw a herd of boars they would run forward and decoy them towards him. On one occasion, one of them escaped into the plains, but returned three days after, very complacently heading a herd of hogs, of which his master and his _matelot_ killed four. It is not many years since that an English gamekeeper brought up a pig to get his own bread as a pointer.