THE ANTLERS OF THE RED-DEER 235 



selves. Whether the stags ever participate in this 

 strange food is doubted, but that the hinds eat 

 them is beyond dispute. They have been seen 

 at it. When a herd of hinds find a horn one gnaws 

 at it till she is tired, and when she abandons it 

 another takes it up. There is a case on record 

 of a hind found dead with a part of a chewed antler 

 sticking in its throat, and another case of a deer 

 shot the tips of whose antlers had been gnawed 

 on his living head. Though entire antlers are so 

 rarely discovered, the basal bosses of antlers are 

 a common enough find, and in these cases the thin 

 end is always gnawed. 



But stag horns are not the only objects capable 

 of gratifying this curious appetite of the deer. 

 Any kind of bone left exposed on a moor or hill 

 inhabited by them quickly vanishes, and there is 

 a Hebridean case of the skeleton of a horse being 

 completely consumed by deer in a few months. 

 Probably the skeletons of dead deer vanish in the 

 same way. Every one familiar with deer-forest 

 exploration have observed the abundance of dead 

 deer and the rarity of skeletons. I have happened 

 upon as many as a dozen dead deer in a day. The 

 fresher of them bore evidence of the recent 

 attention of foxes and crows, and the oldest were 

 still providing food for maggots. But clean 

 skeletons hardly ever occur. If we assume that the 

 ribs and the bones of the legs have been gnawed 

 by the deer themselves, the burial of the rest by 

 vegetation would be a simple affair. In justice 

 to the deer, however, it must be said that this 

 taste for bones is not peculiar to them;. Other 



