436 AVniTE MARL HILLS. 



can be detected : their acute instincts ; — their power 

 of smelling ; — their quick eye and sensitive ear 

 rendering it absolutely impossible, by any expedient, 

 to take them by surprise, or, in the steep and clifF- 

 bound hills in which they are located, to approach 

 them by any precautions whatever. Under ordi- 

 nary circumstances they are inaccessible to dogs. 

 Though they have been tracked with the bloodhound, 

 they have gained steep after steep with such facility 

 that no untiring perseverance could circumvent them. 

 Some short time ago, a negro searching after strayed 

 cattle in the forest, in one of our recent droughts, 

 crossed a herd marching in file along a path that they 

 had been accustomed to take without molestation for 

 a long period. Making sure of finding them in a 

 locality so confidingly made their own, and so much 

 frequented by them ; — with a believing simplicity, 

 very much in contrast with the doubting caution and 

 careful strategy of deer-stalking, he gathered a host 

 of adventurers with dogs to waylay them in their 

 coming and going. The party lay out all night, 

 expecting the herd to return from their accustomed 

 feeding ground by the well-trodden trackway, but 

 they had scented the footsteps of the human intruders 

 and their hounds, and not only avoided that path for 

 that morning, but quitting it for ever afterwards, 

 shifted their haunts to other mountain fastnesses. The 

 last locality in which they were encountered was in 

 the upland forests of a friend of mine overlooking the 

 Caymanas plain, — a place called Mount Gotham, 

 As I am acquainted with this and the neighbouring 

 holds, I should say that the wild-deer are destined 



