The Neihart herald. [volume] (Neihart, Mont.) 1890-1901, 1895-08-31
CURIOUS INSTINCT OF THE LLAMA.
Bouth American Animals Which Always
Hunt Up One Dying Place.

ScutH Atuff'cAti animals Hhich A1wayt
Hunt Up One Dying Place.
1t is well known that at the south
ern extremity of Patagonia the qua
nacos have a dying place, a spot to
which all individuals inhabiting the
surrounding plain repair at the APP
proach OF death to deposit their
bones. Darwin and Fitzroy first re.
corded this strange instinct in their
personal narratives, and their obser-
vations have since been fully con-
firmed by others. The best known of
these dying or burial places are on
the banks of the Santa Cruz and Gal.
iegos rivers, where the river valleys
arc covered with dense primeval
thickets of bushes and trees of stunt
ed growth. There the ground is COW
cred with the bones of countless dead
generations.
THE animals, says Darwin, sin
most cases must have crawled before
dying beneath and among the BUSH
es. A strange instinct in a creature
SO prominently social in its habits,
e. dweller all its life long on tho
open, barren plateau and mountain
sides. What a subject for a painter,
the gray wilderness of dwarf thorn
trees, aged and grotesque and scanty
leaved, nourished for /, ZOO years in
the bones that whiten the stony
ground at their roots, the interior
lit family with the rays of the de
parting sun, chill and gray, and 81
lent and motionless-the guanacos'
Golgotha! In the long centuries,
stretching back into a dim immeas-
urable past, so many of this race
have journeyed hither from the
mountain and the plain to suffer the
sharp pang of death, that, to the
imagination, something of it all
seems to have passed into that hush
ed and mournful nature. And now
one more, the latest pilgrim, has
come, all his little strength spent in
his struggle to penetrate the close
thicket, looking old and gaunt and
ghostly in the twilight, with long,
ragged hair, staring into the gloom
out OF death dimmed sunken eyes.
To this account of the animals dy-
ing place and instinct Darwin adds,
II do not at all understand the rea-
son of this, but l may observe that
the wounded guanacos at the Santa
Cruz invariably walked toward the
river"
1t would no doubt be rash to affirm
of any instinct that it is absolutely
unique; but, putting aside some
doubtful reports about a custom of
the Asiatic elephant, which may
have originated in the account of
Sindbad the sailors discovery of an
elephants burial place, we have no
knowledge of an instinct similar to
that OF the guanacos in any other
animal, So far us we know, it stands
alone and apart, leading up or sug-
costing any family likeness to it. But
what chiefly attracts the mind to it
is its strangeness. 1t looks, in fact,
less like an instinct of one of the in
ferior creatures than the supersti-
tiOus observance of human beings,
who have knowledge Of death and
believe in a continued existence after
dissolution of a tribe that in past
times had conceived the idea that
the liberated spirit is only able to
find its way to its future abode by
starting at death from the ancient
dying place of the tribe or family,
and thence moving westward or sky
ward IL underground 7er the well
worn immemorlal track invisible to
material eyes. Land and Water