[Illustration: _Photo by Ottomar Anschütz_] [_Berlin._
This shows a puma alert and vigilant, with ears pricked forward.]
The PUMA is a far more interesting creature. It is found from the mountains in Montana, next the Canadian boundary, to the south of Patagonia. Yankee stories of its ferocity may have some foundation; but the writer believes there is no recorded instance of the northern puma attacking man unprovoked, though in the few places where it now survives it kills cattle-calves and colts. It is relentlessly hunted with dogs, treed, and shot. As to the puma of the southern plains and central forests, the natives, whether Indians or Gauchos, agree with the belief, steadily handed down from the days of the first Spanish conquest, that the puma is the one wild cat which is naturally friendly to man. The old Spaniards called it _amigo del Cristiano_ (the Christian's friend); and Mr. Hudson, in "The Naturalist in La Plata," gives much evidence of this most curious and interesting tendency: "It is notorious that where the puma is the only large beast of prey it is perfectly safe for a small child to go out and sleep on the plain.... The puma is always at heart a kitten, taking unmeasured delight in its frolics; and when, as often happens, one lives alone in the desert, it will amuse itself for hours fighting mock battles or playing hide-and-seek with imaginary companions, or lying in wait and putting all its wonderful strategy in practice to capture a passing butterfly." From Azara downwards these stories have been told too often not to be largely true; and in old natural histories, whose writers believed the puma was a terrible man-eater, they also appear as "wonderful escapes." One tells how a man put his _poncho_, or cloak, over his back when crawling up to get a shot at some duck, and felt something heavy on the end of it. He crept from under it, and there was a puma sitting on it, which did not offer to hurt him.
[Illustration: _Photo by Ottomar Anschütz_] [_Berlin._
Note the elongated spots, and their arrangement in chains.]
As space forbids further quotation from Mr. Hudson's experiences, which should be read, the writer will only add one anecdote which was told him by Mr. Everard im Thurn, C.B., formerly an official in British Guiana. He was going up one of the big rivers in his steam-launch, and gave a passage to an elderly and respectable Cornish miner, who wanted to go up to a gold-mine. The visitor had his meals on the boat, but at night went ashore with the men and slung his hammock between two trees, leaving the cabin to his host. One morning two of the Indian crew brought the miner's hammock on board with a good deal of laughing and talking. Their master asked what the joke was, whereupon, pointing to the trees whence they had unslung the hammock, one said, "Tiger sleep with old man last night." They were quite in earnest, and pointed out a hollow and marks on the leaves, which showed that a puma had been lying _just under the man's hammock_. When asked if he had noticed anything in the night, he said, "Only the frogs croaking wakened me up." The croaking of the frogs was probably the hoarse purring of the friendly puma enjoying his proximity to a sleeping man. Mr. Hudson quotes a case in which four pumas played round and leapt over a person camping out on the Pampas. He watched them for some time, and then went to sleep! Many of those brought to this country come with their tempers ruined by ill-treatment and hardship; but a large proportion are as tame as cats. Captain Marshall had one at Marlow which used to follow him on a chain and watch the boats full of pleasure-seekers at the lock.