THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
highly developed. They can take the wind of a man at a mile, and quite 
a small stick carelessly broken will put deer on the alert half a mile away 
if there is no wind. When travelling, they advance to windward, and when 
resting choose the lee -side of a hill just below the crest; for preference, 
one that forms a point between two valleys. In such a position, and espe- 
cially in bad weather, deer will remain for days in the same place. They 
know they are safe, for they can see everything that moves below and get 
the wind from both flanks and above. Once I spent five days in one of the 
best forests in Scotland with four other rifles. The wind was in the north 
and all the deer were collected in big herds at favourable points facing 
south, and not one of us obtained a shot. 
A slightly wounded stag travels up -wind and uphill, and then lies down 
looking backward, but a badly wounded animal generally goes down -wind 
and downhill. 
The habit of cunning old stags employing a youngster to keep watch 
for them is well known, and it is a common habit of a hunted stag on 
entering a fresh wood to range it up and down until he finds a young 
beast to drive into the open as a substitute, and then, to complete the decep- 
tion, the old stag occupies the couch of the youngster. 
Deer are very good swimmers and will easily travel four to six miles 
across lakes, or even over an arm of the sea. They swim at a moderate 
depth, only just showing the line of the back. Reindeer swim the highest 
out of the water and Japanese deer the lowest, the latter only showing the 
top of the head and the horns. 
Red deer are also good jumpers, and I have seen a large stag clear a 
net seven feet high. On the flat they can easily jump twenty feet broad, 
and can doubtless cover even wider spaces when frightened. The “ Hart’s 
Leap,” on the borders of Ettrick, is commemorated by two stones placed 
there by one of the Scottish kings; they are twenty -eight feet apart. 
It is a mistake to make pets of stags, for after the second year they 
invariably become dangerous. Several men have been killed by stags 
which had been allowed to become too tame, whilst even a ‘‘ gentle fallow 
deer ” killed a man a few years ago in Greenwich Park. In 1889 M’Lennan, 
the head stalker, at Fannich, was killed by a tame stag after a desperate 
struggle. On his way home from church he met the stag, which he knew 
to be dangerous, yet he did not avoid it, and completely underestimated 
the strength of the beast. Doubtless the first blows were warded off with 
his umbrella, but in time the stag got the best of it, and his body, when 
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