The sight of a mounted man would set them off at
once, while a person on foot could walk quite openly to within easy
shooting distance of them; yet their fear of a horseman dates only two
hundred years back--a very short time, when we consider that, before the
Indian borrowed the horse from the invader, he must have systematically
pursued the rhea on foot for centuries. The rhea changed its habits when
the hunter changed his, and now, if an _estanciero_ puts down ostrich
hunting on his estate, in a very few years the birds, although wild
birds still, become as fearless and familiar as domestic animals. I have
known old and ill-tempered males to become a perfect nuisance on some
estancias, running after and attacking every person, whether on foot or
on horseback, that ventured near them. An old instinct of a whole race
could not be thus readily lost here and there on isolated estates
wherever a proprietor chose to protect his birds for half a dozen years.
I suppose the Talegallus--the best-known brush-turkey--must be looked on
as an exception to all other birds with regard to the point I am
considering; for this abnormal form buries its eggs in the huge mound
made by the male, and troubles herself no more about them. When the
young is fully developed it simply kicks the coffin to pieces in which
its mother interred it, and, burrowing its way up to the sunshine,
enters on the pleasures and pains of an independent existence from
earliest infancy--that is, if a species born into the world in full
possession of all the wisdom of the ancients, can be said ever to know
infancy.
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