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Show BY PATH AND TRAIL. 99 gers. Here is what Father Ugarte writes of the things on which they sustained life: " They live on rats, mice and worms, lizards and snakes, bats, grasshoppers and crickets; a kind of harmless green caterpillar, about a finger long, on roots and barks and an abominable white worm, the length and thickness of one's thumb." Father Clavigero adds they never washed themselves, and that in their filthiness they surpassed the brutes. Their hair was crawling with vermin, and their stupidity was so dense that they could not count beyond five, and this number they expressed by one hand. The different tribes, Father Basgert tells us, represented by no means rational beings, but resembled far more herds of wild swine, which run about according to their own liking, be ing together to- dayand scattered to- morrow, till theymeet again by accident at some future time. They had no mar riage ceremony, nor any word in their language to express marriage. Like birds and beasts they paired off accord ing to fancy. They practiced polygamy, each man taking as many wives as would attach themselves to him, they were his slaves and supported him. Their forebears had exterminated or driven into the inaccessible mountain canyons the larger game of the peninsula, the deer, the antelope, the big- horn, the ibex. They tracked the flight of buzzards, with greedy eyes, and followed to share with them the putrefying carcasses of animals dead from dis ease or killed by pumas or mountain lions. When, by good luck, they captured a hare or a jack-rabbit, they attached a small morsel of the raw and bleed ing flesh to a fiber cord and, after swallowing it, drew it out after a few minutes, and passed the partially di gested mass to another, who repeated the foul act. Yet they were not cannibals, and in abstaining from human |
