IN SEARCH OF BIG GAME 
27 
the black portion being mote in evidence the younger the 
animal. The beast 1 had jnst killed had horn^^ that were 
not yellow and yet were not the proper shade of green 
but had quite clearly-defined black tips. The horns of a 
young bull appear much more brilliant in culour in life 
than they do afterwards* and in the jungle the head that 
is very distinctly seen can be put down at once as that of 
a young bull. One often hears yarns from Malays who 
will tell you that they have seen a seladang with white 
horns which were very large and so on, even hinting that the 
beast is probably invulnerable. If they s;iw a seladang at 
all they saw a youn-<i one with light yellow horns. 
It would he interesting to know at what age the horns 
change colour, and how long it takes for the change to 
take place; probably it extends over two or three years, 
the shade and grades of colour that are seen prove that 
it must be a slow process. The age of seladang is difficult 
to determine. Judging by the standard of domestic cattle, 
this beast was possibly about ten years old, but of course 
this can onlv be a rough guess. When we had the skin 
off the head I noticed a peculiar look about the jaw, and 
subsequently, when the skull was clean, found that the bull 
had had a" very severe accident to his jaw, one side of 
which had been so badly broken that it was abont an inch 
out of place. To compensate for this, one of the upper 
molars had grown half an inch longer than the others to 
enable it to close on to its mate below \\hich rested in 
the hollow where the fracture had been. It is difficult to 
conceive how the beast had lived during the time that 
the wound was healing. Now, how liad he broken his jaw ? 
It had not been done by a bullet as far as 1 could see, there 
being no traces of the missile to be found anywhere, and 
there was no sign at all of a scar on the skin. 
Now, peculiarly enough, this was not the first seladang 
that I had killed which had had its jaw broken. It was the 
third. And the previous two had no signs of specks of lead in 
the healed up bone, and no scars on the skin. One of them 
was a much worse case than this one because both sides of his 
jaw^ had been broken and there was a scar right across his 
tongue which must have been nearly cut in tw-o, also a hole in 
his forehead a little above the brain. I can only conclude 
that seladang get these severe wounds about the head when 
fighting— wounds which only an animal in a wild state 
would ever be able to survive, I have shot two seladang with 
holes in their foreheads which I do not think had been caused 
by human agency. The first seladang I shot on this trip had 
