“The power of the alligator is in its great strength, and the chief means of its attack or defence is its large tail, so well contrived by nature to supply his wants, or guard him from danger, that it reaches, when curved into a half-circle, to his enormous mouth.  Woe be to him who goes within the reach of this tremendous thrashing instrument; for, no matter how strong or muscular, if human, he must suffer greatly, if he escape with life.  The monster, as he strikes with this, forces all objects within the circle towards his jaws, which, as the tail makes a motion, are opened to their full stretch, thrown a little sideways to receive the object, and, like battering-rams, to bruise it shockingly in a moment.”

Yet, as I have said, the alligator is but little formidable to man.  In Western Louisiana and Eastern Texas, where the animal is much hunted for the sake of his grease, with which the planters generally oil the machinery of their mills, little negroes are generally sent into the woods, during the fall, “grease-making,” as at that season the men are better employed in cotton-picking or storing the maize.  No danger ever happens to the urchins during these expeditions, as, keeping within the sweep of the tail, they contrive to chop it off with an axe.

M. Audubon says:—­

“When autumn has heightened the colouring of the foliage of our woods, and the air feels more rarified during the nights and the early part of the day, the alligators leave the lakes to seek for winter-quarters, by burrowing under the roots of trees, or covering themselves simply with earth along their edges.  They become then very languid and inactive, and, at this period, to sit or ride on one would not be more difficult than for a child to mount his wooden rocking-horse.  The negroes, who now kill them, put all danger aside by separating at one blow with an axe, the tail from the body.  They are afterwards cut up in large pieces, and boiled whole in a good quantity of water, from the surface of which the fat is collected with large ladles.  One single man kills oftentimes a dozen or more of large alligators in the evening, prepares his fire in the woods, where he has erected a camp for the purpose, and by morning has the oil extracted.”

As soon as the rider feels his horse sinking, the first movement, if an inexperienced traveller, is to throw himself from the saddle, and endeavour to wade or to swim to the cane-brakes, the roots of which give to the ground a certain degree of stability.  In that case, his fate is probably sealed, as he is in immediate danger of the “cawana.”  This is a terrible and hideous monster, with which, strange to say, the naturalists of Europe are not yet acquainted, though it is too well known to all the inhabitants of the streams and lagoons tributary to the Red River.  It is an enormous turtle or tortoise, with the head and tail of the alligator, not retractile, as is usual among the different species