We spent the night aboard the _Nyoac_, which had been made fast at a landing where there was only a dilapidated thatched-roof shed. Early the next morning horses were brought up and saddled and we started on a five hours’ ride to the ranch-house that was to serve as camp. Before us stretched vast marshes, dotted here and there with little islands of pastureland and groves of trees or thorny bushes. It was typical pantanal country. Parrots, parrakeets, and macaws flashed by with raucous shrieks, and _kis-ka-dee_ flycatchers calmly surveyed the cavalcade from the uppermost branches. Sometimes we flushed a small flock of beautiful Brazilian teals, and in the distance we saw ibises and jabiru storks standing in the long grass, like foam-flecks on a sea of green. For the greater part of the distance we rode through water knee-deep to the horses, but in spots the marshes were drying. In the little pools that were all that remained of what had formerly, perhaps, been an immense lagoon, myriads of imprisoned fish wriggled and churned the water into thin mud. They formed an almost solid mass, and at the borders numbers were constantly leaping out; the ground was strewn with the dead and dying by thousands, and of many species. The stench from the decomposing fish was almost overpowering. Numerous animals coming out of their hiding-places at night to gorge on the bountiful repast left their foot-prints in the soft mud. Apparently opossums, coatis, tiger-cats, and even jaguars haunted these places. In the daytime the countless numbers of water-birds exacted their share of the spoil.