THE SUNDAY TIMES — APRIL 17, 1910
A TRAVELLER'S TALL TALE.
“My cause for rejoicing is that an all wise nature taught monkeys how to cross a stream,” Montroan Macintosh, whose card bears the words “globe trotter” under his name, said as he smoked his after dinner pipe to a San Francisco hotel. Mr. Macintosh had just arrived from British Guiana, South America, on a tramp steamship. He had been spending six months in the hot, Amazon country. “It was quite extraordinary of course,” he said, “but the fact remains that if it hadn’t been for those monkeys I wouldn’t be here to tell the story. I was hunting along the Jamunda, last May, when the blooming thing happened. Our party was in a canoe, but I saw a bird I wanted to shoot, and got out and pushed back some distance into the swampy forest.
Imagine my horror when I saw a boa constrictor reaching at me from a limb, so sure he had me, he actually was grinning. My weapon went off by mistake, and I had to drop it, you know, and run. He slipped along behind so easily I could see he was just making sport of me before devouring me. I finally scrambled through the tangled growth to the bank, to find that my companions had rowed further on. Quite inconvenient. Eh! What?
“I ran along the bank yelling like mad. Suddenly I swung round a big tree which had a branch reaching over the water, and then I saw a ray of hope, for here was a string of monkeys getting ready to cross the stream. Monkeys, you
