One Day I Was Standing On
The Mound At The Side Of The Moat Or Foss Some Forty Yards From
Where
the men were at work, when an armadillo bolted from his earth and
running to the very spot where
I was standing began vigorously digging
to escape by burying himself in the soil. Neither men nor dogs had
seen him, and I at once determined to capture him unaided by any one
and imagined it would prove a very easy task. Accordingly I laid hold
of his black bone-cased tail with both hands and began tugging to get
him off the ground, bait couldn't move him. He went on digging
furiously, getting deeper and deeper into the earth, and I soon found
that instead of my pulling him out he was pulling me in after him. It
hurt my small-boy pride to think that an animal no bigger than a cat
was going to beat me in a trial of strength, and this made me hold on
more tenaciously than ever and tug and strain more violently, until
not to lose him I had to go flat down on the ground. But it was all
for nothing: first my hands, then my aching arms were carried down
into the earth, and I was forced to release my hold and get up to rid
myself of the mould he had been throwing up into my face and all over
my head, neck, and shoulders.
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.
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