Strait of Magellan. In the night he was aroused by the shriek of a man
and the barking of his dogs. As the men sprang up from where they were
lying asleep they saw a large puma run off out of the firelight into
the darkness. It had sprung on a soldier named Marcelino Huquen while
he was asleep, and had tried to carry him off. Fortunately, the man
was so wrapped up in his blanket, as the night was cold, that he was
not injured. The puma was never found or killed.

About the same time a surveyor of Doctor Moreno's party, a Swede named
Arneberg, was attacked in similar fashion. The doctor was not with him
at the time. Mr. Arneberg was asleep in the forest near Lake San
Martin. The cougar both bit and clawed him, and tore his mouth,
breaking out three teeth. The man was rescued; but this puma also
escaped.

The doctor stated that in this particular locality the Indians, who
elsewhere paid no heed whatever to the puma, never let their women go
out after wood for fuel unless two or three were together. This was
because on several occasions women who had gone out alone were killed
by pumas. Evidently in this one locality the habit of at least
occasional man-eating has become chronic with a species which
elsewhere is the most cowardly, and to man the least dangerous, of all
the big cats.

These observations of Doctor Moreno have a peculiar value, because, as
far as I know, they are the first trustworthy accounts of a cougar's
having attacked man save under circumstances so exceptional as to make
the attack signify little more than the similar exceptional instances
of attack by various other species of wild animals that are not
normally dangerous to man.