few years later, as a patriot, a freebooter, a Brazilian general, an
Argentinian commander, as President of Uruguay against Lavalleja, as an
outlaw against General Oribe, and finally against Rosas, allied with
Oribe, as champion of the Banda Oriental del Uruguay, Rivera had certainly
ample opportunities for perfecting himself in that study of which he was
the ardent devotee.

Cooper has told us how and by what signs, in years that have forever
faded, the Huron tracked his flying foe through the forests of the North;
we read of Cuban bloodhounds, and of their frightful baying on the scent
of the wretched maroon; we know how the Bedouin follows his tribe over
pathless sands;--and yet all these are bunglers, in comparison with the
_Gaucho rastreador_!

In the interior of the Argentine every Gaucho is a trailer or
_rastreador_. On those vast feeding-grounds of a million cattle, whose
tracks intersect each other in every direction, the herdsman can
distinguish with unerring accuracy the footprints of his own peculiar
charge. When an animal is missing from the herd, he throws himself upon
his horse, gallops to the spot where he remembers having seen it last,
gazes for a moment upon the trampled soil, and then shoots off for miles
across the waste. Every now and then he halts, surveys the trail, and
again speeds onward in pursuit. At last he reaches the limits of another
_estancia_, and the pasturage of a stranger herd. His eagle eye singles
out at a glance the estray; rising in his stirrup, he whirls the lasso for
a moment above his head, launches it through the air, and coolly drags the
recalcitrant beast away on the homeward trail. He is nothing but a common,
comparatively unskilled, _rastreador_.

The official trailer is of another stamp. Like his kinsman, the