In the United States the peccary is only found in the southernmost corner of Texas.In April 1892,I made a flying visit to the ranch country of this region,starting from the town of Uvalde with a Texan friend,Mr.John Moore.My trip being very hurried,I had but a couple of days to devote to hunting.
Our first halting-place was at a ranch on the Frio;a low,wooden building,of many rooms,with open galleries between them,and verandas round about.The country was in some respects like,in others strangely unlike,the northern plains with which I was so well acquainted.It was for the most part covered with a scattered growth of tough,stunted mesquite trees,not dense enough to be called a forest,and yet sufficiently close to cut off the view.It was very dry,even as compared with the northern plains.The bed of the Frio was filled with coarse gravel,and for the most part dry as a bone on the surface,the water seeping through underneath,and only appearing in occasional deep holes.These deep holes or ponds never fail,even after a year's drought;they were filled with fish.One lay quite near the ranch house,under a bold rocky bluff;at its edge grew giant cypress trees.In the hollows and by the watercourses were occasional groves of pecans,live-oaks,and elms.Strange birds hopped among the bushes;the chaparral cock--a big,handsome ground-cuckoo of remarkable habits,much given to preying on small snakes and lizards--ran over the ground with extraordinary rapidity.Beautiful swallow-tailed king-birds with rosy plumage perched on the tops of the small trees,and soared and flitted in graceful curves above them.
Blackbirds of many kinds scuttled in flocks about the corrals and outbuildings around the ranches.Mocking-birds abounded,and were very noisy,singing almost all the daytime,but with their usual irritating inequality of performance,wonderfully musical and powerful snatches of song being interspersed with imitations of other bird notes and disagreeable squalling.Throughout the trip I did not hear one of them utter the beautiful love song in which they sometimes indulge at night.
The country was all under wire fence,unlike the northern regions,the pastures however being sometimes many miles across.When we reached the Frio ranch a herd of a thousand cattle had just been gathered,and two or three hundred beeves and young stock were being cut out to be driven northward over the trail.The cattle were worked in pens much more than in the North,and on all the ranches there were chutes with steering gates,by means of which individuals of a herd could be dexterously shifted into various corrals.The branding of the calves was done ordinarily in one of these corrals and on foot,the calf being always roped by both forelegs;otherwise the work of the cowpunchers was much like that of their brothers in the North.As a whole,however,they were distinctly more proficient with the rope,and at least half of them were Mexicans.
There were some bands of wild cattle living only in the densest timber of the river bottoms which were literally as wild as deer,and moreover very fierce and dangerous.The pursuit of these was exciting and hazardous in the extreme.The men who took part in it showed not only the utmost daring but the most consummate horsemanship and wonderful skill in the use of the rope,the coil being hurled with the force and precision of an iron quiot;a single man speedily overtaking,roping,throwing,and binding down the fiercest steer or bull.
There had been many peccaries,or,as the Mexicans and cowpunchers of the border usually call them,javalinas,round this ranch a few years before the date of my visit.Until 1886,or thereabouts,these little wild hogs were not much molested,and abounded in the dense chaparral around the lower Rio Grande.In that year,however,it was suddenly discovered that their hides had a market value,being worth four bits --that is,half a dollar--apiece;and many Mexicans and not a few shiftless Texans went into the business of hunting them as a means of livelihood.They were more easily killed than deer,and,as a result,they were speedily exterminated in many localities where they had formerly been numerous,and even where they were left were to be found only in greatly diminished numbers.On this particular Frio ranch the last little band had been killed nearly a year before.There were three of them,a boar and two sows,and a couple of the cowboys stumbled on them early one morning while out with a dog.After half a mile's chase the three peccaries ran into a hollow pecan tree,and one of the cowboys,dismounting,improvised a lance by tying his knife to the end of a pole,and killed them all.
Many anecdotes were related to me of what they had done in the old days when they were plentiful on the ranch.They were then usually found in parties of from twenty to thirty,feeding in the dense chaparral,the sows rejoining the herd with the young very soon after the birth of the litter,each sow usually having but one or two at a litter.At night they sometimes lay in the thickest cover,but always,where possible,preferred to house in a cave or big hollow log,one invariably remaining as a sentinel close to the mouth,looking out.If this sentinel were shot,another would almost certainly take his place.They were subject to freaks of stupidity,and were pugnacious to a degree.Not only would they fight if molested,but they would often attack entirely without provocation.
Once my friend Moore himself,while out with another cowboy on horseback,was attacked in sheer wantonness by a drove of these little wild hogs.The two men were riding by a grove of live-oaks along a woodcutter's cart track,and were assailed without a moment's warning.
