Transcribe Hornaday, W. T. Letter to Ward, Henry A. (1878-08-30)

Then he stopped short and let go with his left hand which fell down at his side & reached fully to his knee. And there he hung by his right hand, almost motionless, & with his face toward us, while we stood waist deep in water & looked up at him. He was about 50 feet above us. Presently his hold gave way, </s and > he came crashing and tearing down through the branches & fell in the water with a tremendous splash. He was still alive, the Malays rushed at him yelling & hacking at him with their stout parongs & before I could stop them one had </s and > made an ugly slash across the orang's breast. The old fellow flung his long arms wildly about, struggled in the water & gnashed his huge black teeth at us, growling hoarsely in his throat, But he was done for, after a moment or two he settled down quietly in the water. & </u my first Orang > was dead.

    He was a large one - not the largest however - but still

a fine large specimen. His height was 4 feet, and it was 7 feet 3 inches between the tips of the fingers. What an ever-lasting, double- geared hug he could have given a fellow with those tremen- dous long arms! But we took him in tow and waded & swam back to the boat, tumbled him into ^the^ luggage boat, hurrahed a time or two and went on. </s Before night > we went on up the river & before night had bagged </u two more > orangs in just about the same way, only we didn't have to swim for them. We pursued the same tactics pre- cisely, firing at first sight & disabling them so they couldn't run away, & then wading painfully to them. For the third one we had to wade nearly 50 yards neck-deep in water through a </s g > dense growth of those water palms, which was worse than swimming would have been. They are good for nothing towards helping a fellow along; and when one is wading up to his shoulders & gets his feet tangled in creepers and comes against stems fallen </s in > crosswise in the water it isn't pleasant. But what does that amount to when we get </u 3 orange in one day! > Such a thing had never been done before by native or white man, and it astonished even the natives. Long live the Hornaday Expedition! and Ward's Museum forever, don't you say so?

    Well, the next day was spent at a Dyak house skin-