56 HOOFED ANIMALS 
The female Caribou is the only female deer with antlers. 
The best deer to keep in captivity in a park is the Fallow 
Deer, of Europe; and outside of its own home the worst is 
the Columbian Black-Tail. 
Except as already stated, nearly every country in the 
world is provided with representatives of the Deer Family, 
according to conditions. Nature has fitted the caribou to 
live in the awful lands of desolation in the Far North, and the 
moose in the forests fringing the Arctic barrens. The elk 
is fashioned for the plains, the foot-hills and open-timbered 
mountains of western America and central Asia. The white- 
tailed deer skulks in safety through the thickest forests of 
temperate North America, and in India and the Far East 
the axis deer, the sambar and the tiny muntjac, with only 
one or two tines on each antler, have been formed to slip 
through the tangled jungles with ease and safety. 
North America has the good fortune to be rich in Cervidae. 
It has six prominent types, and at this date (1914) a full 
count reveals twenty-four recognized species and subspecies, 
which form a group combining the grand, the beautiful and 
the picturesque, and of very decided value to man. In the 
exploration and settlement of the United States and in the 
exploration of Alaska and the Far North, the wild herds have 
played an important part. 
The unvarying distinctive mark by which any American 
representative of the Deer Family can be recognized is the 
presence on the male of solid horns of bone, called antlers, which 
are shed once a year, close down to the skull, and are fully 
renewed by rapidly growing out in a soft state called “‘the velvet.” 
