THE DEERSTALKER 241 



the wholesale killing year after year of the very stags 

 that should be left to reach maturity, and produce good 

 stock. But how is this to be prevented? It is next 

 door to impossible. The majority of forests are let to 

 yearly tenants who pay very large prices for them, and 

 very naturally wish to make the most they can out of 

 them, which, of course, means killing off the finest heads 

 in the said forests. As this continues year after year, 

 a good forest goes from bad to worse, till at last it be- 

 comes a wilderness of wretched, miserable stags, with 

 heads that no good sportsman would care to hang on 

 his walls. 



Now, to be brief, the best possible cure for this 

 deterioration is, of course, to spare as much as possible 

 all six, seven, or eight-year-old stags with promising, 

 well-shaped heads, and so give them a chance, when 

 they are ten or twelve years old, of carrying magnificent 

 heads such as one sees in old drawings of Landseer 

 and Crealocke. 



There is one great drawback to this attempted 

 preservation of young stags with promising heads, 

 and that is, that although you do everything in your 

 power and skill to save them, your neighbours may 

 kill anything or everything that comes within reach 

 of their rifles, and so ruin most of the good you are 

 trying to effect. 



Now, Mr. Stalker, it is very often in your power 

 (though not always) to prevent the class of stag of 



which I have been writing from being shot, and when 

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