436 
WHITE MARL HILLS. 
can be detected : their acute instincts ; — their power 
of smelling ; — their quick eye and sensitive ear 
rendering it absolutely impossible, by any expedient, 
to take them by surprise, or, in the steep and cliff- 
bound hills in which they are located, to approach 
them by any precautions whatever. Under ordi- 
nary circumstances they are inaccessible to dogs. 
Though they have been tracked with the bloodhound, 
they have gained steep after steep with such facility 
that no untiring perseverance could circumvent them. 
Some short time ago, a negro searching after strayed 
cattle in the forest, in one of our recent droughts, 
crossed a herd marching in file along a path that they 
had been accustomed to take without molestation for 
a long period. Making sure of finding them in a 
locality so confidingly made their own, and so much 
frequented by them ; — with a believing simplicity, 
very much in contrast with the doubting caution and 
careful strategy of deer-stalking, he gathered a host 
of adventurers with dogs to waylay them in their 
coming and going. The party lay out all night, 
expecting the herd to return from their accustomed 
feeding ground by the well-trodden trackway, but 
they had scented the footsteps of the human intruders 
and their hounds, and not only avoided that path for 
that morning, but quitting it for ever afterwards, 
shifted their haunts to other mountain fastnesses. The 
last locality in which they were encountered w'as in 
the upland forests of a friend of mine overlooking the 
Caymanas plain, — a place called Mount Gotham. 
As I am acquainted with this and the neighbouring 
holds, I should say that the wild-deer are destined 
