122 Through the Brazilian Wilderness 



nary monkey; these two were found at dawn, having 

 stayed out too late. i 



The early morning was always lovely on these rivers, 

 and at that hour many birds and beasts were to be seen. 

 One morning we saw a fine marsh buck, holding his head 

 aloft as he stared at us, his red coat vivid against the 

 green marsh. Another of these marsh-deer swam the 

 river ahead of us; I shot at it as it landed, and ought 

 to have got it, but did not. As always with these marsh- 

 deer — ^and as with so many other deer — I was struck 

 by the revealing or advertising quality of its red colora- 

 tion ; there was nothing in its normal surroundings with 

 which this coloration harmonized; so far as it had any 

 effect whatever it was always a revealing and not a 

 concealing effect. When the animal fled the black of 

 the erect tail was an additional revealing mark, although 

 not of such startlingly advertising quality as the flag of 

 the whitetail. The whitetail, in one of its forms, and 

 with the ordinary whitetail custom of displaying the 

 white flag as it runs, is found in the immediate neigh- 

 borhood of the swamp-deer. It has the same foes. 

 Evidently it is of no survival consequence whether the 

 running deer displays a white or a black flag. Any com- 

 petent observer of big game must be struck by the fact 

 that in the great majority of the species the coloration is 

 not concealing, and that in many it has a highly reveal- 

 ing quality. Moreover, if the spotted or striped young 

 represent the ancestral coloration, and if, as seems proba- 

 ble, the spots and stripes have, on the whole, some slight 

 concealing value, it is evident that in the life history of 

 most of these large mammals, both among those that 



