THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
“ I saw only three stags and cannot, therefore, speak with authority 
as to their horn growth. They shed in April, the horns being complete 
in September. They are said to start roaring about the third week in 
October, though we did not hear one until the 1st of November. 
“ Their roar is quite different from the wonderful ringing bugle of 
the North American wapiti, which is one of the most musical sounds 
emitted by a wild animal. It resembles the sound made by a red deer, 
but is rather deeper in tone, and in the case of one or two stags I heard 
there was just a suspicion of ‘ bugling * at the end of the roar. . . . 
Speaking generally, I should describe the stags we saw as resembling 
red deer in shape and build, but more uniform in colour, much larger, 
with the roar of a Scottish stag and the horns of a wapiti ” (“ The Big 
Game of Central and Western China ”). 
Mr Lydekker, though admitting that the horns of this species “ approxi- 
mate in a considerable degree to the wapiti type, having the three terminal 
tines nearly in a plane, parallel to the long axis of the skull, although the 
fourth tine is relatively smaller than in typical wapiti,” does not rank them 
as wapiti. In the “Field ” (Sept. 27, 1913), apropos of a note which I wrote 
regarding their call, he says: “The information given on this subject 
by Mr Frank Wallace in your issue of last week is in exact accord with 
what might have been suspected on zoological grounds. . . . The Kansu 
deer (C. kansuensis ), like the Szechuan C. macneilli y is not a wapiti but a 
relative of the Kashmir hangul (C. cashmirianus ) which has a call to some 
extent intermediate between that of a red deer and a wapiti, or, in other 
words, probably very similar to that of the Kansu deer as described by Mr 
Wallace.” 
The Kansu deer are found in the Minshan Mountains of West Kansu over 
an area of about fifty by twenty -five miles. They do not extend to the 
north-east or west, but are said to exist to the south beyond the mountains, 
and the deer already mentioned, the horns of which were purchased by Mr 
Wilson, may be identical. They are kept in captivity by the border chiefs, 
the horns being sawn off annually when in the velvet, as in this condition 
they fetch high prices among the Chinese owing to their supposed medi- 
cinal and aphrodisiac qualities. Although a very large number of wapiti 
horns are to be seen in the shops of traders in Chinese towns, it by no 
means follows that they belong to the species found in Kansu. By far the 
greater majority come from elsewhere. Chungking, Tachienlu, Sungpan, 
Chung-pa, Kiung-chow and Sui-fu are all centres for the trade in deer 
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