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 fox 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.
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