26 THE RED DEER. 



reasons which, though beneficial to his kind, are 

 injurious to his own personal welfare ? 



The ears of the hare are not protective ; neither 

 are the antlers of the stag. They are there to 

 catch the eye, and for no other reason. They 

 are there to mark him out as the object of the 

 chase, while the hinds escape to safety. 



The man who understands the ways of wild 

 nature does not scoff at the seeming futility of 

 that which we, for want of a better word, call 

 society. He knows that in every grade of life, 

 from the mouse colony in the fibrous roots, from 

 the beaver city by the river, to the cities of 

 man himself, the whole fabric of Nature's scheme 

 revolves and pivots on certain laws of intercourse 

 which mark society in its various settings. We, 

 like other things, were meant to have our social 

 strata, and in the grading of societies the chase 

 stands forward as an important feature. We are 

 given beasts of the chase, many of which are 

 designed primarily for that purpose. Nature has 

 not been ungenerous in providing them with their 

 own protective means, otherwise they would be 

 imperfect as creatures of the chase ; but in their 

 creation she has deliberately included some 

 feature which stamps them unmistakably as 

 things to be hunted. They are our natural food- 

 supply. 



The deer, like the hare and the rabbit, is 

 absolutely a creature of the chase, and, like prac- 

 tically all others of this class, it is polygamous. 

 The killing of the males is the preservation of 

 the females, and in that way beneficial to the 

 species. In the deer, the noblest creature of the 

 chase, Nature has adopted no half-measures in 

 marking out what we may kill as distinct and 



