British Deer and their Horns 
146 
of no place where they now exist in a perfectly wild state except in the hills of Cork (some 
fifteen miles from Fermoy). When I was quartered there in 1892 I saw two bucks brought 
in which had been killed by some peasants, but again these animals may have worked their 
way down from Kerry. 
But few sportsmen know anything about fallow deer and their ways in a wild state, 
and unless it has come immediately under their notice to study these animals, they consign 
them at once to a back seat in degree of importance. In fact, they judge them as they have 
seen them in parks. Appearances are sometimes deceitful, and in no wild creatures may 
this be said to be the case more so than with the animals we are now considering. Fallow 
deer by nature are by far the shyest and most cunning of the three deer that inhabit our 
islands. It is we who have forced upon these animals that we wish them to be gregarious, 
and that we enjoy seeing their pretty forms wandering about in the glades and opens of our 
parks. Their habits are not so in a wild state, for they seldom move in parties exceeding 
five or six even in their own home in Southern Europe. Neither are they by nature 
dwellers in the open, being, like the roe, lovers of thick covert, from which they only move 
out to feed at dawn and sunset. The casual observer lolls in the grass of Greenwich or 
Richmond Park, and the fallow deer come close by, and perhaps feed from his hand, and are 
altogether so very tame and stupid-looking that he at once considers them to be endowed 
with only a poor order of intellect, and wanting in the caution displayed by their more 
dignified relations, the red deer. But that is exactly where he is wrong again. Give a 
fallow buck his liberty, let him once know that men are making a practice of killing his relations , 
and there is no deer, in this country at any rate, that is so capable of maintaining a whole 
skin as he is. 
I have always noticed that the most intractable and cunningest birds and animals in 
a wild state, when captured and carefully treated become in the end by far the tamest. I 
could name plenty of examples, a good one perhaps being the Aoudad or Barbary wild sheep, 
which has broken the heart of more than one sportsman, and which in confinement became 
far too tame and inquisitive. All the sheep are like this, and they are not fools. 
Now as an example which will, I think, speak for itself as to the powers of observation 
and cunning which can be displayed by an old fallow buck, a certain sportsman had for 
some years a large island off the west coast of Scotland in which were red deer and a few 
fallow. A certain big fallow buck he and his stalker were most anxious to obtain. The 
beast regularly frequented a hill-side by a wood, and when he was out in the open and there 
were stags there too, the chance of a shot at the latter was very small, as a fallow buck 
invariably picked the stalkers out from whichever direction they advanced. The head 
stalker, whom I used often to meet at Dunalastair, of which place he was afterwards head- 
keeper, dearly loved a crack about deer. Shaking his head he would say, “ Don’t talk 
about a stag being able to see and smell ; he’s no intilt ava wi’ a bit buckie I aince kent.” 
He told me that he made a vow that he would have that fallow buck’s life, but when he 
left the island after four years’ stalking that vow was still unfulfilled. Whilst declaring that 
any stag on the ground could have been shot for certain, the stalker stated that during these 
four years he had made five or six separate moves for the old buck, with the result that 
two difficult chances only were obtained, and both had resulted in failure. I am not pre- 
