The Paraguayan Chaco is a vast, flat plain that stretches from the River Paraguay to the base of the Andes. It is as flat and almost as smooth as a billiard table, and for half the year it is baked dry as a bone by the hot sun, and for the other half it is flooded three or four feet deep in water by the winter rains. As it lies between the tropical forests of Brazil and the grassy pampas lands of Argentina it is an odd country, being a mixture of the two. Here are great grassy fields in which grow palm trees or thorn scrub hung with strange tropical flowers; mixed with the palm trees there are other types of trees not unlike those out of an English wood, except that their branches are covered with long streamers of grey Spanish moss that wave gently in the wind.
We made our base camp in a small township on the banks of the River Paraguay. From here, deep into the interior, ran the Chaco railway; the buckled rails were only some two feet apart and on this rickety and dangerous track ran Ford Eights. By this uncomfortable mode of travel we journeyed quite far inland in search of specimens. The railway line was built on a raised embankment, which was probably one of the only bits of high ground in the territory, and all the animal life would make use of this as a roadway. Travelling along in one of the little cars I could see hundreds of extraordinary birds in the undergrowth along the sides of the track: toucans, with their great clownish bags, jumping and scuttling among the branches of the trees, seriemas, looking like big grey turkeys, strutting across the grass fields; and every where beautiful black and white fly-catchers and humming-birds. Sometimes in rounding a comer we would come across some animal on the track. It might be an armadillo, or perhaps an agouti, which looks like a gigantic reddish-coloured guinea pig; or it might, if you are lucky, be a maned wolf, a huge animal with long slender legs clad in untidy, loose, red-coloured fur.
It was not long after our arrival that we obtained our first specimens. The local people, when they learnt that we were willing to buy animals, used to go out hunting for us, and one of the creatures they were very successful in capturing was the three-banded armadillo, or, as it is known in Spanish, the orange armadillo, from its habit of rolling up into a complete ball roughly orange-shaped. It is in fact the only armadillo which can roll itself up like this and is, moreover, the only one of this family that regularly comes out during the daytime. Trotting about in search of food, which consists of roots and insects, the little creature will curl itself up tightly into a ball and remain quite still if it suspects anything dangerous is approaching, in the hope that its enemy will mistake it for a stone, which, as a matter of fact, it very much resembles. These armadillos, once you catch sight of them, are very easy to capture. The men would ride through the undergrowth until they saw one of these animals and then they would just simply dismount from their horses, pick it up and pop it into a bag.
Now normally members of the armadillo family are very easy to keep in captivity. They are fed on fruit and vegetables and carrion, but these little three banded armadillos were a very different proposition. They refused, a first, to take any of the food which must have been their natural diet and seemed positively afraid when offered insects. After a lot of experimenting, I got them on to a diet of raw meat mixed with egg and milk, to which vitamins were added. On this they seemed to thrive, but another difficulty soon made itself apparent. The wooden floor of the cage affected their hind feet and very soon the soles became worn so that they were all red and raw. Therefore, everyday the little creatures had to be taken out of the cage and have the soles of their feet treated with penicillin ointment; but the real problem was to find a suitable flooring for them. I tried them on mud, but they just simply plastered this into a sort of cement by slopping their milk on to it and treading it down, and this had much the same effect on their paws as the wooden boards. After a time, I found the ideal bottom surface for them was a thick layer of sawdust. On this they could trot about quite happily without damaging their feet in any way,
Like the Argentinian gauchos, the Paraguayans eat these little animals when they catch them, but unlike the Argentinian armadillo, the hard horny carapace of the three-banded armadillo can be used for a variety of things. Sometimes the shell is rolled up into a ball, fastened with wire and made into a little round work-basket, and at other times skin is stretched across the hollow inside of the carapace, a handle fixed, and some strings fixed to it, and it is thus made into a small guitar. So the three-banded armadillo is much sought after by the inhabitants of the Chaco, because he is not only good to eat but is useful for other reasons.
Being so flat, large areas of the Chaco are, of course, permanently flooded, and in these swampy districts the most extraordinary forms of reptile and amphibian life are to be found. One of the commonest creatures, and one which all the natives fear, is the horned toad. These weird-looking beasts grow to a very large size. The biggest one we caught would have covered a fair-sized saucer. They are beautifully coloured with bright emerald-green, silver, and black on a cream background. They have what must be one of the largest mouths in the toad world: it is so wide that it looks as though, like Humpty Dumpty, if they grinned they would split themselves in half. Over each eye the skin is hitched up into a little pyramid, like two sharply pointed horns.
Now, this toad is probably the most bad-tempered and ferocious amphibian not only in the Chaco but in the world. It spends most of the day buried in soft mud with just its horns and its eyes sticking above the surface. If you find one and dig him out, he will become terribly indignant and will not hesitate to attack. Standing on his fat, stumpy legs, he will give little jumps towards you, blowing himself up and opening his mouth wide to show the bright primrose yellow interior; at the same time he will utter loud screaming yaps, rather like an angry pekinese.
The inhabitants of the Chaco are quite convinced that the horned toad is deadly poisonous. Well, of course, there are no poisonous toads in the world, and so, when I caught my first homed toad, I decided to show the people that they were really quite harmless. I lifted him out of his box and he immediately started struggling in my hand, uttering his loud piercing yaps and opening his mouth wide. As soon as his mouth was open, I pushed one of my fingers into it, in order to show that his bite was harmless. A second or two later, I bitterly regretted my demonstration, for his jaws closed on it, like a vice, and the tiny, but sharp, little teeth in his jaws dug into the flesh. It felt exactly as if my finger had been jammed in a door, and it took me a minute or so before I could prise open his jaws and hurriedly withdraw it, by which time I had a deep red groove right round the finger, which took a day to disappear, and I also had a black mark on my thumb near where his jaws had snapped close. After this I treated the horned toad with more respect when I picked up one.
Another extraordinary amphibian that I caught was called the Budgetts Frog. Now these are very similar to the horned toad to look at, and in fact are related to him. They have the same wide mouth and short, stocky legs, but the bulge over their eyes is round instead of being pointed into horns. They are a dark chocolate-brown on top with whitish-coloured tummies tinged with yellow. Unlike the horned toad, they spend their whole lives in the water, floating spread-eagled on the surface, with their eyes protruding above it. Like their cousins, they are bad-tempered beasts, and when angry will give a yapping shrill cry, very like that of a horned toad only higher and more prolonged. The skin of their bodies is very fine, so that when they blow themselves up in anger it swells like a balloon. The local people say that sometimes these frogs will inflate themselves to such an extent that they will burst, and though I never saw this happen, I believe that it might well be possible.
Of course, where frogs and toads are found in any quantity, snakes, who feed on them, will automatically be found, and the Chaco is no exception to this rule, for here you find very lovely forms of snake life. There is the rattlesnake, for example; the handsome grey and black fer-de-lance, perhaps the most deadly snake in South America; also there are many extraordinary kinds of water and tree snakes, some brightly coloured and others dull.
The poisonous snakes in the world are divided into three groups: the really deadly ones are called the front-fanged snakes, which have their fangs in the front of their mouth, and which are generally large and can inject a considerable quantity of poison; and then there is the group known as the rear-fanged snakes: these have the poison fangs situated to the back of the mouth, and are generally not very long. In the rear-fanged group, the poison is not used so much for defence as for the capturing of their prey, so usually their poison is mild, and sometimes on even such a small animal as a lizard it has only a slightly paralysing effect. However, even if you were bitten by a rearfanged snake there is a chance that blood-poisoning might set in, so it is an experience which should be avoided.
One of the loveliest snakes we caught was the hooded snake. This reptile looks as though it has been cast in a mould of deep bronze with blackish markings round the edge of the body. It has the curious habit, when angry, of being able to extend the skin of the neck, so that it appears extraordinarily like a hooded cobra in a rage. It is only a mildly poisonous kind of reptile and is one of the rear-fanged group, living on frogs and small rodents, with possibly an occasional bird. The hooded snake does not require a great deal of poison to subdue his prey, and so, though he looks very deadly, his bite, which can be extremely painful, is not fatal.
Perhaps the most beautiful snakes found in the Chaco are the coral snakes. These are very deadly little reptiles, but by their coloration they warn you in advance of what they can do. They measure perhaps eighteen inches or two feet in length and are banded from head to tail with rings of cream, coal-black, and pink or pillar-box red.
Then, of course, there is the giant anaconda, the huge water-snake that is a relative of the python of Africa, and who catches and crushes his prey in the same way. Now, there have been a great many stories written about them, most of which are entirely untrue. The largest specimen on record is twenty-five feet long, which is not really long as these snakes go, for a Malayan python may grow to thirty feet or over. Like all these giant snakes, the anaconda is not vicious and he will not go out of his way to attack you if you leave him alone. If cornered, however, this reptile might manage to sink his teeth into you and throw a couple of coils around you, and a large specimen could prove a very nasty customer.
In the flooded areas of the Chaco there were quite a number of these anacondas, and one day a local farmer came and told me that the previous night one of them had raided his chicken-run and stolen two chickens. He had followed the trail of crushed grass and weed made by the snake into the swamp behind his farm, and said that he knew the place where the creature was lying up to digest his meal. He went on to say that he would lead me to the spot if I would like to try to catch the reptile. We set off on horseback and circled through the swamp towards the place where he said the snake was resting. In spite of our cautious approach, however, the anaconda caught sight of us before we arrived at the spot and all that could be seen were the ripples as he swam away rapidly through the water. It was impossible to follow fast enough on horseback in that depth of water, so the only thing to do was to follow him on foot. I jumped off the horse, grabbed a sack that we had brought with us, and ran as quickly as I could in the direction that the snake had taken. I found that he was wriggling towards the edge of the swamp, in order to try to escape into the dense undergrowth there and thus evade us, but he was so bloated with his chicken dinner that he could not travel at any speed, and I caught him up in the short grass at the edge of the bank long before he reached the bushes.
Now, to catch one of these big snakes is very easy: you seize him by the tail, pull him out and then try to get a good grip on the back of his head. This is exactly what I did, and I hauled the angry reptile out of the undergrowth and grabbed him behind the head before he could turn and strike me. He was about nine feet long, and so was quite safe to handle by myself. To cope with anything over that length would have required two people. Once I had a good grip on the back of his neck, I simply held him down in the grass until my companion joined me, when, with his help, I managed to get the wriggling and hissing, and extremely annoyed, anaconda into the bag.
It is necessary when catching a snake of any sort, even one like this anaconda, to examine it as soon as you reach your camp. There are several reasons for this. First, however carefully it is captured, there is a risk that you might break one of the very fragile ribs which snakes possess, and a broken rib can give a great deal of trouble. Secondly, you look for ticks. A snake can be simply covered in ticks and can do very little to get rid of them. They fasten themselves on the thin skin between the scales, sometimes in such numbers that the scales drop off and an ugly bare patch of roughened skin is left, so it is very important to remove the ticks, otherwise the appearance of your snake may be ruined.
Now you just can’t pull a tick off. If you do, its mouth parts will be left imbedded beneath the surface of the skin and create a tiny sore which might turn into a nasty ulcer. The best way to remove ticks is with a little paraffin, or failing that, by touching them with a lighted cigarette, whereupon they will loosen their grip and fall off.
Another thing you have to look for is any old wounds that the reptile might have received and which may be in need of attention. When a snake sheds its skin, which occurs regularly throughout the year, it leaves a perfect transparent replica of itself behind, even to the two scales that look like minute watch-glasses that cover its lidless eyes. Occasionally, however, as the creature wriggles through thorn bushes or rocks in an effort to work the skin loose, it will tear, and though the reptile usually gets rid of the whole of the skin it may be left with the two watch-glass scales still covering the eyes. This causes partial blindness, and if the scales are left on for too long, the creature may become permanently blind. So with a newly caught snake you must always examine its eyes to see if the last time it shed its skin its eyes were freed from the two watch-glass scales.