o f no place where they now exist in a perfectly wild state except in the hills of Cork (some
fifteen miles from Fermoy). When I was quartered there in 1892 I saw two bucks brought
in which had been killed by some peasants, but again these animals may have worked their
way down from Kerry.
But few sportsmen know anything about fallow deer and their ways in a wild State,
and unless it has .come immediately under their notice to study these animals, they consign
them at once to a back seat in degree o f importance. In feet, they judge them as they have
seen them in parks. Appearances are sometimes deceitful, anM m no wild creatures may
this be saif jjo be the case mortjs&'than with the animals we are now considering. Fallow
deer by nature are by far the shyest and most cunning, o f the three deer that inhabit our
islands. It is we who have forced upon these animals that we wish them to be gregarious,
and that we enjoy seeing their pretty forms wandering about in the glades and opensjojfi pur
parks. Their habits are not s# in a wild state, for they seldom move in parties exceeding
five or six even in their own home in Southern Europe. Neither are they by nature,
dwellers in the open, being, like the roe, lovers o f thick covert, from which they only move
out to feed at dawn and sunset. T h e l0 isual observer lolls in .the grass of-Greenwich or
Richmond Park, and the fallow deer come close by, and perhaps feed from his hand, and are
altogether so very tame and stupid-looking that he at -pfice considers.: them to be endowed
with only a poor order o f intellect, and wanting in the caution displayed by their more,
dignified relations, the red deer. But that 11 exactly where he is wrong again. Give a
fallow buck his liberty, let him once know that men are making a practice o f killing his relations,
and there is no deer, in this country at any rate, that is* so capable o f maintaining. a whole
skin as he is.
I have always noticed that the most intractable and cunningest birds and animals in
a wild state, when captured and carefully treated become in the end by far the tamest. I
could name plenty of examples, a good one perhaps being the Aoudad or Barbary wild sheep,
which has broken the heart o f more than one sportsman, and which in confinement became
far too tame and inquisitive. A ll the sheep are like this, and they are not fools.
Now as an example which will, I think, speak for itself as to the, powers o f observation
and cunning which can be displayed by an old fallow buck, a certain sportsman had for
some years a large island ofF the west coast o f Sbotland in which were red deer and a few
fallow. A certain big fallow buck he and his stalker were most anxious to obtain. The
beast regularly frequented a hill-side by a wood, and when he was out in the open and there
were stags there too, the chance o f a shot at the latter was very small, as a fallow buck
invariably picked the stalkers out from whichever direction they advanced. T h e head
stalker, whom I used often to meet at Dunalastair, o f which place he was afterwards head-
keeper, dearly loved a crack about deer. Shaking his head he would say, “ Don t talk
about a stag being able to see and smell ; he!s no intilt ava w i’ a bit buckie I aince kent.
He told me that he made a vow that he would have that fallow buck’s life, but when he
left the island after four years’ stalking that vow was still unfulfilled. Whilst declaring that
any stag on the ground could have been shot for certain, the stalker stated that during these
four years he had made five or six separate moves for the old buck, with the result that
two difficult chances only were obtained, and both had resulted in failure. I am not pre