Whitetailed Deer 103 



multitude of observations, made through a course of years, is 

 conclusive that nature prompts the animal to denude its antlers 

 of their covering at a certain period of its growth, while yet 

 the blood has as free access to that covering as it ever had." 



That is to say, the buck voluntarily subjects himself to a 

 painful operation while yet the horn is living and sensitive. 

 Why ? There must be good reason. I can only suppose that 

 the earlier his antlers are cleaned, the sooner he can enter the 

 arena in which wives go to the winner; natural selection, there- 

 fore, would tend to foster the habit. 



All summer he has been living as quietly as the doe; 

 sometimes frequenting the same places, but ignoring her if they 

 chance there together. The margin of the forest and of the 

 lake have powerful charms for him now, not only for his food 

 supply, but because there he knows he can protect himself 

 at once from the torment of the flies and the fiercer summer 

 heat. In Audubon and Bachman^^ we find a most interesting 

 case which shows his method of doing this, as well as the cun- 

 ning of the old buck: 



**To avoid the persecution of mosquitoes and ticks, it 

 occasionally, like the Moose in Maine, resorts to some stream 

 or pond and lies for a time immersed in the water, from which 

 the nose and a part of the head only project. We recollect 

 an occasion when, on sitting down to rest on the margin of the 

 Santee River, we observed a pair of antlers on the surface of 

 the water near an old tree, not ten steps from us. The 

 half-closed eye of the buck was upon us; we were without 

 a gun, and he was, therefore, safe from any injury we could 

 inflict on him. Anxious to observe the cunning he would 

 display, we turned our eyes another way and commenced a 

 careless whistle, as if for our own amusement, walking grad- 

 ually toward him in a circuitous route, until we arrived within 

 a few feet of him. He had now sunk so deep in the water that 

 an inch only of his nose and slight portions of his prongs were 

 seen above the surface. We again sat down on the bank for 



*•' Quad. N. A., 1849, Vol. II, p. 223. 



