Fallow Deer Horns 
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man of very good judgment too, will look at nothing but moose and fallow deer heads. A 
still more extraordinary individual is one of the very best sportsmen of our time. Some fifty 
years ago he spent eight or ten years big game shooting in India, and was altogether a most 
successful hunter. His house in London is simply full of heads, but they are principally 
American and African, which he has bought or have been given to him by his friends. Of 
his own trophies from the East there is but a solitary moth-eaten tiger skin and one Sambhur 
head. He has in his day probably shot more stags and roe than most men, and as I was 
looking over his collection I noticed an exceptionally fine Highland stag’s head over the 
dining-room door and asked the owner its history. “ Ah, yes,” he said, “ isn’t that a topper ? 
I bought that at an auction in Edinburgh several years ago.” Now is not that a funny man ? 
when he might, as most men would have been proud to do, have covered his walls with 
trophies of his own shooting, each of which might have its own little history. 
The bucks cast their horns in May, and, as in the case of all other deer, the oldest beasts 
first, and so on, till the prickets shed theirs about the end of June. After the first buck is 
devoid of horns, the distended sides of the skin round the top rim of the pedicle, which are 
already charged with blood, flap over gradually till they meet on the summit, and the new 
horns then make a start. The growth goes on just in the same way as in the stag, and I need 
say nothing further, as I give a drawing done direct from nature of a buck’s head as it 
actually grew from start to finish. In the same way the reader can follow the phases of horn- 
growth during succeeding years from the pricket to the fullest development. The buck 
reaches its complete head in the sixth year, and generally decline sets in after the ninth. 
In parks where feeding is good it is quite common to see bucks of the third year with 
horns on that are typical of a fourth-year beast. In the same way, where the feeding is poor 
the horn-growth may be arrested. 
The fallow buck never has the “ bay ” tine, but one will often see another little point 
fully developed at the base of the brow point, but more often it is only rudimentary. It 
is quite common to see in any park the back point on the head of an adult buck carried away 
up into the palm, and, with others, forming itself into a collateral branch, as in the case of 
the New Forest heads, but this, as a rule, only takes place in one horn, the buck having the 
back tine in its right place on the other one. At Castle Caldwell, however, in Scotland, 
all the bucks have this development of horn-growth in both horns, palms being split right 
down the middle. 
Having been turned wild so very recently, the wild fallow deer of the Dunkeld district 
do not grow heads at all different from park deer, but they are shorter, thicker, and not 
so broad in the palms. The best head I have seen, and, in fact, about the only good one, 
was on a big buck that had been drowned whilst trying to swim the river above Murthly, 
and was found by James Miller, the fisherman, who now has it hanging in his house. 
Unfortunately the rats had got at it and gnawed off a number of points. Macintosh, the 
Dowager Duchess of Athole’s head keeper, tells me they never carry good trophies. But 
there are two really fine heads, that is to say for wild ones, in Blair Castle, which were killed 
near that place about twenty years ago. They measure respectively 27 and 28 inches in 
length, one of them being 7 inches round the coronet. 
Next, to come to what we may almost call semi-feral fallow deer, are those of Drummond 
Y 
