THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
excavations round London, in the caverns of the south coast, the sands 
of Lancashire and Cumberland and the old watercourses, also in the 
lacustrine deposits of England, Scotland and Ireland. 
After the severities of the Ice Age, the climate of Central Europe seems 
to have undergone a great change, and red deer were very abundant. It 
became much warmer, and this was, in itself, destructive to the plants 
on which the reindeer lives, whilst it favoured the succulent grasses and 
the growth of trees which constitute the food of the red deer. In con- 
sequence the latter rapidly increased in all the forest areas as the rein- 
deer retreated or became extinct on the open hills. There were probably 
many races of virile savages, whose shattered skulls are now occasionally 
found in the earlier Pleistocene deposits of England and Scotland, that 
hunted the red deer, the reindeer and the giant fallow deer long before the 
little Feens, Finns, Piets, Pechts or Lapps, or by whatever name the 
reader chooses to call them, came upon the scene. These little Piets are 
supposed to have gone annually from Scotland to hunt the giant fallow 
deer in Ireland, just as the Jarls of Orkney crossed the stormy waters of 
the Pentland Firth to chase the red and reindeer in the mosses of Caith- 
ness, returning to their stone -built fortresses with spoils of skins and 
meat. 
The Piets, we know, were great hunters. Scottish legends relating to 
the chase by these little people are common in the pages of Ossian and 
other ancient writers. Modern authors, such as Campbell, Stuart, Mac- 
Ritchie and others, have carefully elucidated many of these legends and 
stories. These tales of flood and field have doubtless some foundation 
in fact. The hunting of the “ Great Deer ” by the Piets, who inhabited 
Scotland for many centuries, and were countenanced, and even feared, 
by the more recent Celts, is certainly not mythical. 
It requires no stretch of imagination to reconstruct the methods by 
which primitive man slew these large ruminants, once they learnt the use 
of the bow and arrow. There are Esquimaux living to-day in the far north 
of America and Greenland, who, in killing polar bear, musk ox, and 
reindeer use precisely the same methods as Prehistoric Man, with only 
this slight difference — ^that the Esquimaux to-day employs the huskie 
dog, which is a near descendant of the wolf, and is in some cases directly 
crossed with the wolf, whilst Early Man used trained wolves to hunt the 
red deer and the megaceros to a standstill. In fact, the bones of man, 
wolf, and deer have been found lying close together, the two former having 
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