puma, which, as he further related, had appeared first upon the scene, and sat for some time near him, though without appearing to notice him. It was not till after midnight that he first saw the jaguar, which was crouching only a little way off, but with its head turned in the opposite direction. Doubtless it was watching the puma, for shortly afterwards, when it had crawled farther off and had become invisible, the dreadful sounds of strife rose suddenly out of the darkness of the night. There can be little doubt, I think, that the jaguar would have seized and devoured the Gaucho had it not been for the puma; but it does not, therefore, follow that the puma, knowingly and of set purpose, protected the man. As its enemy, he would have been likely to attack the jaguar in any case, and if we suppose the latter to have kept all night near the man, because it wished to attack him, this would account for the fighting having been always near him, too, instead of the scene of it having gradually shifted; for the puma would have stayed where the jaguar was, in order to fight with it. We have, of course, only the Gaucho’s word for the truth of his story; but I think myself that if he had been romancing he would have made up a very different one, containing much more varied incidents, wherein he himself would have played a much more considerable part. It looks to me like a true tale, but, as I say, it does not quite prove that the puma stayed by the man all night, in order to take care of him. His strange love of man might have brought him there at first, and then all the rest would have followed as it did. That for some reason or other, perhaps to do with his scent—we must remember how fond cats are of valerian—the puma really does like man, and becomes quite mild in his presence, can hardly,[5] I think, be doubted. All the Gauchos and all the Indians—the two races of men that come most in contact with the animal—assert that such is the case, and the very name which the Gauchos give to the puma is “El amigo del hombre” (“the friend of man”). They say that not only will it never attack man, but that, if attacked by him, it will allow itself to be slaughtered without making any resistance. Why should they assert things so unlikely in themselves, and which are in such contrast with the known character of the puma where other animals are concerned, and especially in regard to the jaguar, if they were not the actual truth? The Spaniards, when they first came to America, were not prepared for anything of the sort, and if they had wished to invent they would have been much more likely to have invented tales of the puma’s fierceness, and of their own skill and courage in hunting it. Perhaps they did at first, but gradually the truth became manifest, so that such stories no longer “went down,” as we say. Instances of the puma’s strange attachment to mankind became more and more numerous, until