In The Other Case, One Of My Older Brothers Seeing The Dogs Sniffing
And Scratching At A Large Burrow, Took
A spade and dug a couple of
feet into the soil and found an adult black-and-white opossum with
Eight or nine half-grown young lying together in a nest of dry grass,
and, wonderful to tell, a large venomous snake coiled up amongst them.
The snake was the dreaded _vivora de la cruz_, as the gauchos call it,
a pit-viper of the same family as the fer-de-lance, the bush-master,
and the rattlesnake. It was about three feet long, very thick in
proportion, and with broad head and blunt tail. It came forth hissing
and striking blindly right and left when the dogs pulled the opossums
out, but was killed with a blow of the spade without injuring the
dogs.
This was the first _serpent with a cross_ I had seen, and the sight of
the thick blunt body of a greenish-grey colour blotched with dull
black, and the broad flat head with its stony-white lidless eyes, gave
me a thrill of horror. In after years I became familiar with it and
could even venture to pick it up without harm to myself, just as now
in England I pick up the less dangerous adder when I come upon one.
The wonder to us was that this extremely irascible and venomous
serpent should be living in a nest with a large family of opossums,
for it must be borne in mind that the opossum is a rapacious and an
exceedingly savage-tempered beast.
This then was the world in which I moved and had my being, within the
limits of the old rat-haunted foss among the enchanted trees. But it
was not the trees only that made it so fascinating, it had open spaces
and other forms of vegetation which were exceedingly attractive too.
There was a field of alfalfa about half an acre in size, which
flowered three times a year, and during the flowering time it drew the
butterflies from all the surrounding plain with its luscious bean-like
fragrance, until the field was full of them, red, black, yellow, and
white butterflies, fluttering in flocks round every blue spike.
Canes, too, in a large patch or "brake" as we called it, grew at
another spot; a graceful plant about twenty-five feet high, in
appearance unlike the bamboo, as the long pointed leaves were of a
glaucous blue-green colour. The canes were valuable to us as they
served as fishing-rods when we were old enough for that sport, and
were also used as lances when we rode forth to engage in mimic battles
on the plain. But they also had an economic value, as they were used
by the natives when making their thatched roofs as a substitute for
the bamboo cane, which cost much more as it had to be imported from
other countries. Accordingly at the end of the summer, after the cane
had flowered, they were all cut down, stripped of their leaves, and
taken away in bundles, and we were then deprived till the following
season of the pleasure of hunting for the tallest and straightest
canes to cut them down and strip off leaves and bark to make beautiful
green polished rods for our sports.
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