DAILY LIFE OF DEER AND ANTELOPE. 53 



ridge well covered with acorns, picking up one or two 

 here and there and going on a few yards for more, or 

 eating half a dozen here and there and going on a 

 hundred yards for more. In such particulars he is 

 governed mainly by whim. 



A deer may straggle over fifty acres, feeding and 

 finishing very quickly, or he may take three or four 

 hours about it. The same when feeding on a small 

 space. He may stand and browse half an hour on one 

 bush, or after one or two bites leave it for the next 

 one, which perhaps is not half so good, and spend an 

 hour in trying fifty bushes. In all these respects he is 

 a provokingly aggravating beast, governed largely by 

 caprice and often upsetting your best calculations. 

 And it is often very important to make these calcula- 

 tions correctly, especially in hunting open country, 

 where you see a deer feeding a long way off and need 

 some time to get within good shot. But in general, 

 the length of time a deer will feed will depend, as in 

 case of the space over which he will wander in feed- 

 ing, upon the moon and the amount of persecution 

 he has. It will depend also upon the weather. In very 

 hot weather he will, as a rule, finish feeding and lie 

 down sooner than in cool or cold weather. 



In nearly every case in which deer are foraging in a 

 garden, a turnip-patch, or other cultivated crop, they 

 understand perfectly what they are about. Daybreak 

 will nearly always find them gone or departing. When 

 feeding in such a place they must generally be sought 

 far away from it in the daytime. 



But when feeding after daybreak there is one thing 

 a deer rarely fails to do, and that is to keep up a 

 pretty constant watch for danger. Every moment or 

 two the head comes up and scans at least half the cir- 



