CHAPTER XXXI

THE WORLD'S HERDS AND FLOCKS--_Continued_

CAMELS, DEER, GIRAFFES AND PRONGHORNS

This is a rather miscellaneous group introducing the typical Herbivora. The most ancient of them in the style of their structure are certain little spotted creatures, like miniature deer in appearance, that inhabit the forests of western Africa and the Orient, and are known as chevrotains. The fact that in their metapodial bones they resemble the structure of camels causes these apparently so distant animals to be placed next to camels in classification.

The history of the camels (Camelidæ) is very similar to that of the horse. The family originated in North America, where it developed from little creatures, by changes and adaptations to a life on dry uplands, as did the horses, into a species which in the Pleistocene was a third larger than any now living. Meanwhile camels had made their way over the land which in the later Tertiary connected Alaska with Siberia, into the high plains of Asia, where the camels found favorable circumstances and developed into the two species we know. Others migrated, earlier in the family history, into South America, where they ceased to grow tall after the camel model, but became the huanacos of Patagonia, of which the llamas (yah-mas) are prehistorically domesticated descendants, and into the woolly vicuñas of the Andean mountains.

Modern camels are of two kinds--the single-humped and the double-humped. The latter, or "Bactrian," is confined to Asia, and is able to endure the cold and snows of the tablelands of that continent, where its burdens are carried in winter as well as summer. What was the extent to which the single-humped, or ordinary camel, ranged before its prehistoric enslavement by men, we do not know--if it roamed the deserts of Arabia and northern Africa as well as those of Turkestan, no evidence of it remains. A few small-sized, gaunt, wary, and swift-footed camels still run wild among the almost inaccessible sand dunes of the Gobi Desert, but it is not certain that they are relics of the original wild stock. At any rate the camels have always been creatures of the world's waste places, and all their quaint peculiarities such as their sole pads and the water-storing sacs in their stomachs (rumens) are adaptations to their desert home.

The deer family (Cervidæ) is of great extent, and world-wide in its distribution, except that it is entirely absent from Africa and Australia. In none are more than two toes of use in walking, the second and fifth toes hanging at some distance behind and above the functional hoofs, which are narrow and pointed. All have slender, long legs, giving swiftness and great leaping power; and very short tails, with the exception of the rare and peculiar David's deer of China, whose tail is almost like that of a cow. The coat of hair is short and brittle, reddish brown or foxy in summer, grayer in winter, in some species plain, or spotted only when fawns, in others variegated with small, whitish spots. The distinctive badge of the family, however, is the pair of horns borne on the heads of the males (also by females in the reindeer and caribou), collectively and more properly called "antlers," since they are not composed of horn, but of true bony material. They are poised on two protuberances on the top of the skull, where in spring arises a growth of fleshy material, covered with velvety hair, that rapidly takes the shape of the antler characteristic of the species (and age) of the deer, and as it grows is filled with lime salts that gradually replace all the tissues. Then the "velvet" dries and scales off and the ivorylike antler emerges. This remains as a serviceable weapon and ornament of the buck until the beginning of winter, when its attachment to the skull loosens, and the antler drops off. This happens annually in the case of all deer--one of the common and universal facts in zoölogy that many find it hard to believe. The "horns" of the various deer vary in size from short and simple "spikes" to the wide-branching antlers of the moose and wapiti; but these last are acquired only when the buck is fully matured, the yearling showing only a spike, and acquiring branches ("tines") one by one annually as he grows until his proper complement is reached; but in a few small species no branching ever occurs.

The family contains many genera and species, but only the most noticeable can be mentioned. The most familiar one, probably, is the small, spotted fallow deer of southern Europe, bands of which ornament the parks of grand estates in Great Britain and on the continent; its antlers broaden at the end into the form known as "palmated," on account of its resemblance to an open hand with fingers. Even more celebrated in song and story is the red deer, the males of which are "stags" and the females "hinds." These are large, dark, reddish brown animals, with grandly symmetrical antlers, every tine or "point" on which--seven on each side in a "full head"--has its name in the language of hunting. This deer, still wild in the highlands of Scotland and in the mountainous forests of eastern Europe, is also to be found right across Asia, where local varieties go by the names of "maral" in northern Persia, "hangul" in Kashmir, and so on to eastern Siberia, where far taller species live than are known to Europe; and all vary in minor particulars only from our wapiti--which it is fair to regard as of the same stock.

None of all these stags is more stately than the American wapiti--the "elk" of all western men--which once abounded from the Adirondacks and southern Alleghenies to California and the borders of Alaska. Everywhere of old it was plentiful and easy to kill, and the pioneers swiftly destroyed it as civilization was pushed westward, until its mighty herds have vanished almost as completely as those of the bison. It thrived anywhere and everywhere, climbing the wooded heights of the Appalachians (where the very last one was killed near Ridgway, Pennsylvania, in 1869), loafing in the warm, well-watered valleys of the Mississippi basin, herding in the sun-baked plains, or scrambling up and down the roughest of western sierras. Equally broad in its appetite, those that browsed or ate mast and fruits in the eastern woods did no better than those which grazed on the bunch-grass plateaus from the Rio Grande to Peace River; and in winter it would keep fat where other deer or cattle might starve, because able to paw through the snow to the dried grass.

The other round-horned deer of the United States are the familiar Virginian, white-tailed, or willow deer, which is to be found all over the country, and in similar species in Mexico and Central America; the larger black-tailed, long-eared "mule deer," or "jumping deer," of the plains and the foothills of the Rocky Mountain region, and the small, forest-keeping, black-tail, or Columbian deer of Oregon and northward.

Canada, Alaska, and the northern parts of Maine and Minnesota, are the refuge of that biggest of all the deer, which we call by the Indian name "moose," but which is known to Europeans as "elk," for it is a circumpolar species that once roamed in great numbers through the woods of all Europe, and in this country far southward along the Appalachians. Until the World War the elk was preserved in certain large forests of Lithuania and central Russia, but it is doubtful if any survived the desolation of that region during and after the war. The moose is everywhere a forest-ranging animal, especially fond of regions where rivers and lakes abound, in which it finds desirable food in summer and takes much pleasure; yet in the mountainous West it often climbs to high and dry heights. Its principal diet is leaves and twigs, pulled off by the long, flexible lips that are so characteristic a feature. The moose is a huge, immensely strong and ungainly animal, blackish brown with pale legs and belly, and with a neck so short that it can graze only by kneeling. A very large bull may stand six and a half to seven feet high at the withers, which, with the neck, are clothed in a thick mantle of long, coarse, stiff hair; and from the throat hangs a long hairy strip of dew-lap skin (the "bell"), which in old age draws up into a sort of pouch. The long and narrow head ends in an overhanging, flexible muzzle, that may be curled around a twig like a proboscis. On this massive head and neck the bulls carry a wonderful pair of flattened antlers, always surprisingly wide in spread, but varying greatly in weight, and that irrespective of the relative bigness of the animal. The moose of the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska, are famous for the immensity and complication of their horns; one pair preserved in the Field Columbian Museum, Chicago, have a spread of seventy-eight and a half inches, show thirty-four points, measure fifteen inches around the burr, and with the dry skull weigh ninety-three pounds; but very few reach such dimensions.

Another flat-horned deer is the famous reindeer of the boreal regions of both hemispheres, for our arctic caribou are the same animals under another name. No truly wild reindeer now exist in the Old World, but they are scattered over all the Barren Grounds, or treeless coast areas and islands, from Greenland to Alaska; and the Eskimos depend on them not only for food to some extent, but even more for clothing and tentage. Every autumn enormous herds of these caribou, gathered in migration, sweep southward to less frigid and snowy feeding grounds in the region between Hudson Bay and Great Slave Lake, and there enable the Indians to provide themselves with meat and skins for the winter. These arctic caribou feed mainly on the lichen called "reindeer moss." Another kind, the "woodland" caribou, inhabits the uncivilized forest borders south of the Barren Grounds, and the mountain region from British Columbia to the arctic shore of Alaska and Yukon; and in the east occurs in Ungava, Labrador, Newfoundland, and New Brunswick. They are not regularly migratory, but wander in small herds, prefer swampy woods, and their habits approach those of the moose. There is no great difference otherwise between them and the arctic caribou; but they vary a good deal, so that several species have been named among those of the west, one of which, in Alaska, is quite white.

Southeastern Asia has many kinds of deer, such as the large staglike sambar of India and eastward; the spotted axis, or chital; the sika of Japan; and a variety of small Oriental species exist.

The giraffes of equatorial Africa (family Giraffidæ) are closely related to the deer. They are hornless, but from the top of the skull project two protuberances, several inches in length, which answer to the horn-cores of the deer, but carry no antlers, and are permanently covered with hairy skin; between them is a third shorter protuberance of the skull. A few years ago it was discovered that there existed in the dense forests of the lower Congo valley an animal of this family, but smaller and more antelopelike in body, and without the towering characteristics of the giraffe, called by the Pygmies of that district "okapi" or "o'api." It is chestnut in color, with yellowish cheeks and the legs marked with wavy, whitish stripes. It is perhaps not rare, but is exceedingly difficult to obtain in the dense jungle it inhabits.

Two singular animals remain to be mentioned here, as standing intermediate between the deer and the cattle family, next to be considered. One of these is the musk deer of the Himalayas, from which is taken the "pod," or ventral gland, that contains the odorous substance "musk." This is a strange, old-fashioned, solitary little creature, the size of a half-grown kid, and having very large ears, almost no tail, and no horns, but wearing a pair of keen weapons in the long upper canines which hang well down below the lower jaw. The four toes of the feet are almost equal, and the hoofs so free that they can fairly grasp any projection, so that the animal is a marvel of agility and surefootedness.

Our American pronghorn "antelope" is the second of these intermediate animals, and is not far removed in its structure from our white mountain goat. It foreshadows the sheathed-horned ruminants, but differs from all of them in the fact that its horns bear a prong, and also in that they are periodically shed and renewed. This beautiful and graceful little animal, truly antelopelike in form and habit, stands about three feet high at the shoulder, has slender legs and feet, with no false hoofs, and is exceedingly swift in its bounding gait. It is now almost gone from the wide plains where only a few years ago it was to be seen in summer from the Saskatchewan to the Rio Grande and southward. In the autumn it would gather in the North into ever-increasing herds that swept southward to pass the winter in Texas and New Mexico, and then would return northward with the advance of spring. The extension of fenced ranching, but most of all the spanning of the plains by railroads, rapidly put an end to these migrations, and the wasteful killing of the pronghorns in sport, or as food, completed the virtual extermination of one of the most interesting and desirable animals of the New World.