THE WHITE-EARED COB 165 



black beauty stood surrounded by a dozen pale-hued 

 pals. These being" females, their tawny pelage so closely 

 assimilated with the yellow grass around as to mock the 

 naked eye. Where the one sex was almost invisible, the 

 other, in either case, was "given away" ! 



A decade ago, the idea universally held among big- 

 game hunters and shared by zoological authorities was 

 that the career of the white-eared cob followed these 

 lines : That all alike commenced life in a common pelage 

 of tawny - fawn, but that (while females retained that 



colour unchanged) the males with age gradually assumed 

 a darker coat ; while the degree of darkness deepened 

 proportionately as you travelled south. Consequently it 

 was assumed that the farther south (within their range) 

 the hunter penetrated, the handsomer and more typical 

 would his trophies become. There exists a certain 

 substratum of truth in the idea it may be said to be 

 based on a half-truth; but half-truths are no good 

 nowadays. 1 The misfortune of the current belief was that 

 sportsmen refrained from shooting specimens of white- 

 eared cob at the northernmost limits of their range, since 



4* 



1 While writing this chapter I was rather surprised to observe by an 

 article in The Field (June 7th, 1919), that some systematists still cling to 

 the exploded belief that the dark pelage is a necessary index of age. 



