Just where
these furthest sheep were grazing there was a scattered troop of
seventy or eighty horses grazing too, and when I rode to that spot I
all at once found myself among a lot of rheas, feeding too among the
sheep and horses. Their grey plumage being so much like the cardoon
bushes in colour had prevented me from seeing them before I was right
among them.
The strange thing was that they paid not the slightest attention to
me, and pulling up my pony I sat staring in astonishment at them,
particularly at one, a very big one and nearest to me, engaged in
leisurely pecking at the clover plants growing among the big prickly
thistle leaves, and as it seemed carefully selecting the best sprays.
What a great noble-looking bird it was and how beautiful in its loose
grey-and-white plumage, hanging like a picturesquely-worn mantle about
its body! Why were they so tame? I wondered. The sight of a mounted
gaucho, even at a great distance, will invariably set them off at
their topmost speed; yet here I was within a dozen yards of one of
them, with several others about me, all occupied in examining the
herbage and selecting the nicest-looking leaves to pluck, just as if I
was not there at all! I suppose it was because I was only a small boy
on a small horse and was not associated in the ostrich brain with the
wild-looking gaucho on his big animal charging upon him with a deadly
purpose. Presently I went straight at the one near me, and he then
raised his head and neck and moved carelessly away to a distance of a
few yards, then began cropping the clover once more. I rode at him
again, putting my pony to a trot, and when within two yards of him he
all at once swung his body round in a quaint way towards me, and
breaking into a sort of dancing trot brushed past me.
Pulling up again and looking back I found he was ten or twelve yards
behind me, once more quietly engaged in cropping clover leaves!
Again and again this bird, and one of the others I rode at, practised
the same pretty trick, first appearing perfectly unconcerned at my
presence and then, when I made a charge at them, with just one little
careless movement placing themselves a dozen yards behind me.
But this same trick of the rhea is wonderful to see when the hunted
bird is spent with running and is finally overtaken by one of the
hunters who has perhaps lost the bolas with which he captures his
quarry, and who endeavours to place himself side by side with it so as
to reach it with his knife.
