We started after breakfast,riding powerful cow-ponies,well trained to gallop at full speed through the dense chaparral.The big black hound slouched at our heels.We rode down the banks of the Nueces,crossing and recrossing the stream.Here and there were long,deep pools in the bed of the river,where rushes and lilies grew and huge mailed garfish swam slowly just beneath the surface of the water.Once my two companions stopped to pull a mired cow out of a slough,hauling with ropes from their saddle horns.In places there were half-dry pools,out of the regular current of the river,the water green and fetid.The trees were very tall and large.The streamers of pale gray moss hung thickly from the branches of the live-oaks,and when many trees thus draped stood close together they bore a strangely mournful and desolate look.
We finally found the queer little hut of the Mexican goat-herder in the midst of a grove of giant pecans.On the walls were nailed the skins of different beasts,raccoons,wild-cats,and the tree-civet,with its ringed tail.The Mexican's brown wife and children were in the hut,but the man himself and the goats were off in the forest,and it took us three or four hours'search before we found him.Then it was nearly noon,and we lunched in his hut,a square building of split logs,with bare earth floor,and roof of clap-boards and bark.Our lunch consisted of goat's meat and /pan de mais/.The Mexican,a broad-chested man with a stolid Indian face,was evidently quite a sportsman,and had two or three half-starved hounds,besides the funny,hairless little house dogs,of which Mexicans seem so fond.
Having borrowed the javalina hound of which we were in search,we rode off in quest of our game,the two dogs trotting gayly ahead.The one which had been living at the ranch had evidently fared well,and was very fat;the other was little else but skin and bone,but as alert and knowing as any New York street-boy,with the same air of disreputable capacity.It was this hound which always did most in finding the javalinas and bringing them to bay,his companion's chief use being to make a noise and lend the moral support of his presence.
We rode away from the river on the dry uplands,where the timber,though thick,was small,consisting almost exclusively of the thorny mesquites.Mixed among them were prickly pears,standing as high as our heads on horseback,and Spanish bayonets,looking in the distance like small palms;and there were many other kinds of cactus,all with poisonous thorns.Two or three times the dogs got on an old trail and rushed off giving tongue,whereat we galloped madly after them,ducking and dodging through and among the clusters of spine-bearing tress and cactus,not without getting a considerable number of thorns in our hands and legs.It was very dry and hot.Where the javalinas live in droves in the river bottoms they often drink at the pools;but when some distance from water they seem to live quite comfortably on the prickly pear,slaking their thirst by eating its hard,juicy fibre.
At last,after several false alarms,and gallops which led to nothing,when it lacked but an hour of sundown we struck a band of five of the little wild hogs.They were running off through the mesquites with a peculiar hopping or bounding motion,and we all,dogs and men,tore after them instantly.
