man o f very good judgment too, will look at nothing but moose and fallow deer heads. A
still more extraordinary individual is one o f the very best sportsmen o f our time. Some fifty
years ago he spent eight or ten years big game shooting in India, and was altogether a most
successful hunter. His house in London is simply full o f heads, but they are principally
American and African, which he has bought or have been given to him by his friends. O f
his own trophies from the East there is but a solitary moth-eaten tiger skin and one Sambhur
head. He has in his day probably shot more stags and roe than most men, and as I was
looking over his collection I noticed an exceptionally fine Highland stag’s head over the
dining-room door and asked the owner its history. “ A h , yes,” he said, “ isn’t that a topper ?
I bought that at an auction in Edinburgh several years ago.” Now is not that a funny man ?
when he might, as most men would have been proud to do, have covered his walls with
trophies o f his own shooting, each o f which might have its own little history.
T h e bucks cast their horns in May, and, as in the case o f all other deer, the oldest beasts
first, and so on, till the prickets shed theirs about the end o f June. After the first buck is
devoid o f horns, the distended sides o f the skin round the top rim o f the pedicle, which are
already charged with blood, flap over gradually till they meet on the summit, and the new
horns then make a start. T h e growth goes on just in the same way as in the stag, and I need
say nothing further, as I give a drawing done direct from nature o f a buck’s head as it
actually grew from start to finish. In the same way the reader can follow the phases o f horn-
growth during succeeding years from the pricket to the fullest development. The buck
reaches its Complete head in the sixth year, and generally decline sets in after the ninth.
In parks where feeding is good it is quite common to see bucks o f the third year with
horns on that are typical o f a fourth-year beast. In the same way, where the feeding is poor
the horn-growth may be arrested.
The fallow buck never has the “ bay ” tine, but one will often see another little point
fully developed at the base o f the brow point, but more often it is only rudimentary. It
is quite common to see in any park the back point on the head o f an adult buck carried away
up into the palm, and, with others, forming itself into a collateral branch, as in the case o f
the New Forest heads, but this, as a rule, only takes place in one horn, the buck having the
back tine in its right place on the other one. A t Castle Caldwell, however, in Scotland,
all the bucks have this development o f horn-growth in both horns, palms being split right
down the middle.
Having been turned wild so very recently, the wild fallow deer o f the Dunkeld district
do not grow heads at all different from park deer, but they are shorter, thicker, and not
so broad in the palms. T h e best head I have seen, and, in fact, about the only good one,
was on a big buck that had been drowned whilst trying to swim the river above Murthly,
and was found by James Miller, the fisherman, who now has it hanging in his house.
Unfortunately the rats had got at it and gnawed off a number o f points. Macintosh, the
Dowager Duchess o f Athole’s head keeper, tells me they never carry good trophies. But
there are two really fine heads, that is to say for wild ones, in Blair Castle, which were killed
near that place about twenty years ago. T h ey measure respectively 27 and 28 inches in
length, one o f them being 7 inches round the coronet.
Next, to come to what we may almost call semi-feral fallow deer, are those o f Drummond
Y