NEW ZEALAND DEER-STALKING 127 



a whole season's stalking so much trash as was to be 

 met with in one day on the block I occupied. I tried 

 to keep a careful record of all the stags I saw, and 

 though I may have omitted a few and counted the 

 same stag twice in some instances, as a whole my 

 observations are fairly accurate. I went into camp on 

 April 1st and stalked the Devil's Block for exactly a 

 fortnight. During that time I saw sixty-one stags, ten 

 of them being young six-pointers. Of the remaining 

 fifty-one, thirty-three stags might be called normal, 

 ten were pronounced malforms, one was a switch, 

 whilst the remaining seven had but one horn apiece. 

 Of the thirty-three stags I have called normal, 

 thirteen were probably old stags going back, and four 

 carried heads of seven points. This brings our total 

 down to sixteen good stags, and of this number I con- 

 sider three were shootable beasts. One a royal I 

 missed ; the other two, the twelve- and nine-pointers I 

 have spoken about, we secured. 



Burton, in one corrie, saw five stags having only 

 one horn apiece, all of them with hinds varying in 

 number from three to ten. I may here remark that 

 during the whole of my stay in New Zealand I never 

 saw more than a dozen hinds in the possession of one 

 stag. Hawley also saw a large number of malforms, 

 including one which, unsatisfied with his present 

 status in the animal kingdom, was endeavouring to 

 qualify as a unicorn, and another which, like a stag I 

 saw, had a growth of horn twelve or fifteen inches 

 in length extending down one side of its face. 



