These Wolves Are Well Known
From Byron's Account Of Their Tameness And Curiosity, Which
The Sailors, Who Ran Into The Water To Avoid Them, Mistook
For Fierceness.
To this day their manners remain the same.
They have been observed to enter a tent, and actually pull
some meat from beneath the head of a sleeping seaman.
The
Gauchos also have frequently in the evening killed them,
by holding out a piece of meat in one hand, and in the other
a knife ready to stick them. As far as I am aware, there
is no other instance in any part of the world, of so small
a mass of broken land, distant from a continent, possessing
so large an aboriginal quadruped peculiar to itself. Their
numbers have rapidly decreased; they are already banished
from that half of the island which lies to the eastward of
the neck of land between St. Salvador Bay and Berkeley
Sound. Within a very few years after these islands shall
have become regularly settled, in all probability this for
will be classed with the dodo, as an animal which has perished
from the face of the earth.
At night (17th) we slept on the neck of land at the head
of Choiseul Sound, which forms the south-west peninsula.
The valley was pretty well sheltered from the cold wind,
but there was very little brushwood for fuel. The Gauchos,
however, soon found what, to my great surprise, made nearly
as hot a fire as coals; this was the skeleton of a bullock
lately killed, from which the flesh had been picked by the
carrion-hawks.
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