Latin America & the Caribbean - Travel Essays & Descriptions - General & Miscellaneous, Natural History - General & Miscellaneous, Natural Literature & History, Central America - Travel
Log in to track your reading progress.
Overview
This book is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS series. The creators of this series are united by passion for literature and driven by the intention of making all public domain books available in printed format again - worldwide. At tredition we believe that a great book never goes out of style. Several mostly non-profit literature projects provide content to tredition. To support their good work, tredition donates a portion of the proceeds from each sold copy. As a reader of a TREDITION CLASSICS book, you support our mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion.Synopsis
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ch. I.] ALLIGATORS. '. sand-bank that extends down to the mouth of the river. A long, deep branch from the river is a favourite resort for alligators. At the far end of a sand-spit, near where some low trees grew, I saw several dark objects lying close to the water on the shelving banks. They were alligators basking in the sun. As I approached, most of them crawled into the water. Mr. Hollenbeck had been down a few days before shooting at them with a rifle, to try to get a skull of one of the monsters, and I passed a dead one that he had shot. As I walked up the beach, I saw many that were not less than fifteen feet in length. One lay motionless, and thinking it was another dead one, I was walking up to it, and had got within three yards, when I saw the film over its eye moving, otherwise it was quite still, and its teeth projecting beyond its lips added to its intense ugliness and appearance of death. There was no doubt, however, about the movement of the eye-covers, and I went back a short distance to look for a stick to throw at him; but when I turned again, he was just disappearing into the water. It is the habit of these animals to lie quite still, and catch animals that come near them. Whether or not he was waiting until I came within the swoop of his mighty tail I know not, but I had the feeling that I had escaped a great danger. It was curious that he should have been so bold only a few days after Mr. Hollenbeck had been down shooting at them. There were not less than twenty altogether, and they swam out into the middle of the inlet and floated about, looking like logs in the water, excepting that one .stretched up his head and gave a bellow like a bull. They sometimes kill calves and young horses, and I was told of one that had seized a full-grown horse, but its str...Book Details
Published
June 17, 2026
Publisher
General Books LLC
Pages
294
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9781458929082