THE LIFE OF MAMMALS 
dense coat of crisp, pinkish fawn hair, but for its enlarged 
puffy nose, due, perhaps, to the need of breathing more co- 
piously the thin air of its lofty home than is required 
at lower levels. Remarkable, also, are the mark- 
ings which distinguish the male,—a sooty black muzzle 
and a narrow black stripe down the front of each leg; and 
still more the straight, sharply ringed, strikingly erect horns, 
which are perhaps unsurpassed among antelopes as effective 
weapons. They measure twenty-three to twenty-six inches 
in length or height, and are in demand among the people of 
Tibet not only for their practical excellence as handles, etc., 
but for miraculous virtues, —in fact, the whole animal is 
“sacred” in the opinion of the llamas and is not eaten. Few 
Chiru. 
book writers have seen the chiru, one of the fullest accounts 
being that by Kinloch.’ 
“Tn the mornings and evenings,” he tells us, ‘‘it frequents the grassy 
margins of glacial streams, which frequently flow between steep banks 
gradually scarped out by the floods of centuries and now remote from the 
ordinary water’s edge. The ravines have for the most part been cut 
through gently sloping valleys; and on ascending their steep sides, slightly 
undulating plains will be found to stretch away until they merge in the easy 
slopes of the rounded hills which bound the valley. To these plains the 
antelope betake themselves during the day, and there they excavate hollows 
deep enough to conceal their bodies, from which, themselves unperceived, 
they can detect any threatening danger at a great distance.” 
Far more ugly in countenance, by reason of the swollen 
shape of the nose, is the somewhat larger saiga (Russian, sdz- 
gak; WKirghiz, ktik), formerly numerous throughout 
southern Russia and still roaming in small herds 
over the steppes east and west of the Caspian Sea, and migrat- 
ing with the seasons. Their habits are much the same as 
those of our pronghorn. In Pleistocene times this and another 
species of saiga abounded in all parts of Europe, and was hunted 
by the primitive sportsman, who found its flesh, as do modern 
hunters, unusually good. 
Saiga. 
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