Virginia or Red Deer. 75 



used, loaded with a charge of buckshot, and were particularly 

 effective when driving deer with dogs. 



The deer subsists on tender vegetation of various kinds, 

 and is careful to select that which is suited to its taste. It is 

 particularly fond of plants and grasses growing in wet and 

 swampy places. In winter, when snow covers the ground, it 

 feeds on twigs, half -dried grasses, mast and anything it can 

 get. Some of the stomachs examined presented a curious 

 mixture. 



The animals become fat in the fall, and as the rutting season 

 comes on in November, they are in their finest condition. The 

 necks of the bucks swell, and they are very pugnacious, fight- 

 ing each other with great fury. It sometimes happens, in 

 these battles, that their horns become interlocked, so that it is 

 impossible to separate them, and the animals perish as a result. 

 I have seen several pairs that were found in such a condition. 

 The horns of two of these fighting bucks, in the Museum of 

 the Cincinnati Society of Natural History, are so firmly locked 

 together 'that it is impossible to get them apart without break- 

 ing. The animals evidently rushed together with such force 

 that the impact sprung one pair apart and the other pair to- 

 gether, causing them to be locked in the manner described. The 

 two sets of horns are evenly matched, and probably belonged 

 to rival bucks of about the same size and age. Two pairs in 

 the Cuvier Club Museum in Cincinnati show a similar condi- 

 tion. Another pair of interlocked horns were found in ]\Iichi- 

 gan in 1905. "These animals were discovered by a hunter after 

 they had been dead for several days. The man who found them 

 said it looked to him as though one had died several days before 

 the other. One of the points of one deer penetrated the jaw 

 of the other, breaking it. One of the points of the other, 

 which was a double point, penetrated the head of its enemy 

 half way between the eye and nostril. The harder they pulled 

 to get apart, the deeper the points penetrated into each other's 

 head." The horns of this deer are shed in the winter or spring 

 and come off at the burr, which is close to the skull. In the 



33 



