ired at
him with buckshot and killed him dead. I hardly had time to think, when,
with a tremendous rush, two other large deer broke out of the wood
straight at me at full gallop. I fired a bullet at the foremost one,
which turned back into the woods apparently wounded, and so it proved,
for it ran among the beaters, evidently having lost its head, and was
soon despatched among dogs, men and guns. He was a stag also, and as I
claimed to have shot him, I may say that I had the luck to shoot a brace
of splendid stags right and left. There is not a sportsman in Europe who
would not have been delighted at such a chance of red deer like these;
such as are not seen anywhere except in Asia Minor. The largest one had
nineteen points to his antlers, weighed when cleaned a hundred and
fifteen okes, equal to three hundred and twenty pounds English measure,
and certainly was the largest stag I have ever met with, either in
Scotland or in Austria. During the sixteen years that I have passed in
the East I have only succeeded in killing four of these splendid
animals. This I attribute very much to the want of proper deerhounds,
which unfortunately I have not been able to procure.

The crowd of beaters make so much noise that the deer slip away at the
sides of the thick covers unseen, whereas dogs would drive them more in
a straight line towards the shooters if they are properly posted. In
addition to this, it is always a great advantage when the hounds give
tongue, and so warn the sportsman of the whereabouts of the game. These
hounds, called 'colpoys,' can be procured in Roumania and Hungary. There
is another description of deer found near the sea-coast in some parts of
Asia Minor, which I will describe. It is in fact the pure wild fallow
deer that stocks the parks of Europe, and if I am rightly informed is
only to be found wild in Asia Minor, and even there it is rare.

I understand that in India or in Africa, where there are hundreds of
different sorts of deer, the real fallow is not to be found. While
shooting at a place called Camaris, near to Gallipoli, two years since,
I discovered several herds of these deer, beautiful creatures, wild as
hawks, and accordingly laid myself out to shoot some of them if
possible. I tried driving, stalking, and every manoeuvre to circumvent
them, without success. At last one day I started with my beaters to a
place where there were many tracks of fallow deer. I was posted at a
sort of small mounta