202 
and at other times none, for a whole day.’ Cailte, it is said, shed tears 
at hearing this statement, and the whole party then moved forward to 
the hill of Ceannabrat, near the present Ardfinan, on the borders of the 
counties of Limerick and Cork; and here they came to the confluence of 
three glens within the mountains of Slieve Keen, with a lake between 
them, called Loch Bo, or the Lake of the Cow, a locality still recognis- 
able. Here they sat on the hill which lay to the east of the lake, called 
the Cnoc Maine, where, as Cailte told them, the greatest and most wary 
stag in Ireland formerly dwelt. This rogue of a buck was called Laith- 
na-tri-mbeam, or the gray buck with the three antlers, and, conti- 
nued Cailte, ‘he was killed at last by one of Finn Mac Cumhaill’s war- 
riors, after escaping all our efforts for seven and twenty years; and I 
was the man that killed him.’ Cailte then went forth and posted his 
people around the lake, east, south, and north, and then he raised his 
hunting whoop, and gave three terrible shouts, so that there was not 
within hearing of him a deer, in plain, bog, mountain, or wood, that did 
not come careering at full speed to the lake, and sprang into it, as well 
to cool themselves as to escape the dreaded enemy. The men then closed 
in upon the lake, and not one of the animals escaped unslaughtered. 
Among them were wild oxen, red deer, and wild boars, and their number 
amounted to eight hundred. On another occasion St. Patrick and his 
retinue, with Cailte, came to the house of a rich landholder who lived 
inthe southern part of the present county of Kildare, near the River Sla- 
ney. The farmer complained to Cailte that although he planted a great 
quantity of corn every year, it yielded him no profit, on account of a 
huge wild deer which every year came across the Slaney from the west, 
when the corn was ripe for cutting, and, rushing through it in all direc- 
tions, trampled it down under his feet. Cailte undertook to relieve him, 
and he sent into Munster for his seven deer-nets, which arrived in due 
time. He then went out and placed his men and his hounds in the 
paths through which the great deer was accustomed to pass, and he set 
his deer-nets upon the cliffs, passes, and rivers around, and when he saw 
the animal coming to the ford of the red deer on the River Slaney, he took 
his spear and cast a fortunate throw at him, driving it the length of a 
man’s arm out through the opposite side, and ‘The Red Ford of the 
Great Deer’ is the name of that pass on the Slaney ever since, and they 
brought his back to Drom Lethan, or the Broad Hill, which is called 
‘The Broad Hill of the Great Wild Deer.’ ”’ 
With respect to the deer with the three horns, alluded to above, it is 
curious to find that in the manuscript minutes of the Committee of An- 
tiquities for the year 1796, Mr. Ralph Ousley presented to the Academy 
‘“an account of a triple-horned moose deer found in the county of Lime- 
rick,” and a fine specimen of the head of Cervus megaceros, with a small 
third horn, was lately offered for sale in Dublin. 
From the earliest period deer have entered largely into the domestic 
history of every nation where they existed, not merely as an article of 
food, or a subject on which the poet could draw for the simile of grace, 
swiftness, and agility, but one with which have been linked many curious 
