Prudencio sat on his ox with his rifle in his hands. His keen eyes shifted from side to side taking in everything: the distant horizon, the shady depth of the jungle, the grass on the pampa. Prudencio, a full-blooded Bororo native, had grown up knowing the ways of the wild animals of the Brazilian cattle ranch where he lived as well as a city boy knows bells and traffic lights. Most of the natives on the ranch worked as cowboys, but Prudencio was the official hunter. It was his job to keep jaguars and pumas from killing too many cattle. But now he was on a special job helping the North American naturalists of the Captain Marshall Field Brazilian Expedition collect animals for Chicago Natural History Museum.
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| A calf of the South American tapir grazes. |
As he rode along he saw a sleeping tapir almost hidden by the jungle growth. He knew that the Museum needed enough of these animals to make a habitat group, but Prudencio would not shoot a tapir. Tapirs are sacred to Bororos. Instead, he headed his ox back to camp to report the tapir's whereabouts. After a tapir was shot he did not mind helping to skin it, but he would not kill one.
Its short neck, legs, and tail and its general shape give the tapir a pig-like appearance, though it is more closely related to the horse and the rhinoceros. Its long snout and upper lip form a trunk (similar to the elephant's but not so long) used for getting food into its mouth. Tapirs have four toes on the front feet and three on the hind ones. Each toe ends in a small hoof. Baby tapirs are dark brown with white stripes and spots that suggest the pattern of deer fawns. The babies gradually replace their spotted coats with adult coats of medium gray-brown.
Prudencio was good at tracking tapirs and knew where, when, and how to find them. He knew that they bed down in jungle undergrowth in early morning, and so it is not easy to find them after dawn. But just after midday they rouse and go to water. After drinking their fill, they return to rest until dark. They feed during the night upon tree leaves and fruits. Prudencio knew the swamps where they get their noontime drink. He also knew where to hunt them at night, but that is when the jaguar hunts them too. The jaguar is the main enemy of the tapir.
On another afternoon hunt Prudencio and Marcelino, his son, startled a mother tapir and her half-grown babe in a clearing. The mother bounded into the undergrowth, but Prudencio lassoed the young one. He called Marcelino to help him tie the animal. The boy took off his belt, threw it to his father, and then, as frightened as the mother tapir, he too turned and fled. If his father was going to anger the Dororo gods, Marcelino was not going to stay!
With the belt and leather lasso Prudencio fashioned a sort of harness for the tapir. But it was a difficult animal to manage. No amount of coaxing, prodding, pulling, pushing, or straining could budge it. The tapir was just as stubborn as its distant cousin, the donkey. Prudencio tied the tapir to a tree and returned to camp for the naturalists, who got their specimen for the Museum. Worsham.
Why are muesum specimens important?
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