336 BRITISH MAMMALS 



their bachelor condition. Male stags seldom fight seriously 

 out of the brief period of the rutting season, and during winter 

 and spring great friendships sometimes arise between an old 

 male and a young one, the young one often acting as sentry 

 or as pioneer. In great migrations to new feeding-grounds, 

 hinds, fawns, and stags mix together, and a hind generally leads 

 the way. In June, after the fawns are born, stags often seek 

 out a particular hind, perhaps a wife of the year before, and 

 consort with her. The extreme limit of age for a male red 

 deer seems to be thirty years, and for a hind twenty-one or 

 twenty-two. Both sexes, however, shows signs of age after 

 fourteen years. Their dentition is not complete till they are 

 five years old, and it is not until that age that stags completely 

 develop their upper canine tusks. 



Red deer are good swimmers and readily take to the water, 

 but it is doubtful whether they would possess the necessary 

 strength to swim a strait of more than ten miles broad. They 

 make nothing, of course, of crossing rivers and small lakes or 

 narrow arms of the sea. When swimming they keep the whole 

 of the body under water. The neck is outstretched, and the 

 horns (in the case of the male) are thrown well back. Mr. 

 Millais considers that when the deer reach shallow water, cease, 

 in fact, to be out of their depth, they raise the head and neck 

 considerably above the water. 



Their senses of sight, hearing, and smell are all keen, 

 but they are not all as intelligent in discriminating dangerous 

 from harmless objects as the roebuck. 



The food of the red deer consists of grass, leaves and leaf 

 shoots, mushrooms and such fungi as would be wholesome to 

 the human being, beech-nuts, and acorns. Deer will also eat 

 heather, and they are particularly fond of that fine emerald- 

 green grass that grows in the bare patches and on the edges 

 of rills and watercourses in and out amongst the heather. 

 They are said also to eat dry seaweed on the coasts of some 

 of the Scotch islands. In captivity they can become strangely 

 omnivorous, and even slightly carnivorous, not even objecting to 



