It is a large deer, standing fully four feet at the shoulder, and its antlers are peculiar and have a large number of tines, or points. One set of antlersers was found to have sixty-six points – but this, of course, was considerably more than the normal number.

The red deer actually is red in color – at least, in summer, it is a bright reddish brown. The fur becomes longer in winter and is more of a brownish gray color.

Young male animals are called harts, and females are known as hinds.

Fully grown male red deer are known as stags and these are the lords of the herd until they are vanquished in autumn fights by some younger and sturdier male. Stags generally dropp their antlers in February or March, but young animals keep theirs until later in the spring. New ones start to grow immediately.

Animals whose teeth are specialized for gnawing are called rodents, and many kinds of them are found all over the world. Rats, mice, porcupines and squirrels are some common and familiar rodents. But the largest of all rodents is the capybara, or carpincho, of eastern south America. It is about 4 feet long and weighs approximately 100 pounds.

The natives sometimes call it the water hog because it is so fond of the water, and is almost always found it around the margins of a lake or stream. It can swim and dive with astonishing speed, for such a big and clumsy looking animal. It’s feet are webbed – at least, there is a short web between the toes – but the webs are probably not of much use.

The capybara is a quiet and peaceful animal and never shows any friskiness or playfulness. Its life is spent in feeding in a leisurely manner on water plants, the bark of young trees, or any tasty melons and vegetables it can steal from cultivated gardens. Between periods of feeding, it likes to lie quietly on the riverbank, ready to leap into the water at the slightest sign of danger.

Five to eight babies are born into each litter. They follow their parents closely while they are small, but do not seem to be very affectionate. Altogether, the capybara is a rather solemn and stupid at animal.

Among the dwarf antelopes of Africa, the common duiker is comparatively a giant, for it stands almost 2 feet high at the shoulders and its horns (which usually only the male carries) are as much as 5 inches long.

Duiker of various species are found all the way from the tropical parts of Africa down to the Cape. All of them are small; the common duiker is one of the medium-sized ones. Its body color is pale grayish brown, more or less grizzled, with black hair on its throat and under parts of its body.

Duiker is a Boer word meaning diver, but in this case it does not mean that the duiker dive into the water – rather, that they dive quickly into the bushes when they were alarmed.

Duikers travel singly or in pairs through brushy places, and when danger threatens, they dodge among the bushes, leaping over some and around others, so that they seem to be going in all directions at once. As soon as they reach a safe place they stand up on their hind legs, look all around, and then start ducking and diving through the bushes again.

In the wild, the dingo does not bark, although it can make yelping and howling sounds, and often learns to imitate domestic dogs.

Its appearance is very much like that of any yellow haired mongrel and it is about the size of a small collie, with a rather short yellowish brown hair. Dingo puppies are quite as cute and appealing as the puppies of domestic dogs. Nevertheless, they are wild and may be dangerous when they grow up.

The dingo is not common now because it has been severely hunted. It has a very bad habit of killing sheep, often destroying far more than it eats, and it is destructive to poultry too.

The Australian bushman sometimes used game dingos as hunting dogs, but it is not very good for is apt to run away. The natives say when a dingo gets tired of hunting it stops and refuses to go any further – so the owner has to pick it up and carry it home on his shoulder!

All through the Orient there are large, coarse haired, dark deer that belong to the sambar group. The powerful Indian sambar, standing about 5 feet high and weighing more than 600 pounds, is typical of this group and is often seen in zoos.

Although India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and the islands of the Southwest Pacific are tropical, some forms of the sambar deer range up to heights of 9000 or 10,000 feet in mountainous areas and thus are accustomed to cold weather. But even the deer from the low lands, where the heat is oppressive, can become used to North American winters when they are brought to zoos in this country. Many sambar deer have been exhibited in the Bronx zoo in New York City, and in three or four years they are able to stand the cold winter winds perfectly well. Each winter they are left out of doors a few weeks longer, until they are quite at home in the snow. Their hair grows longer and thicker.

The sambar are deer of the forests and wild jungle lands. They wander about singly or in small groups of four or five animals, feeding mostly at night and at daybreak seeking sheltered nests of grass among the trees.

Hunters say they are among the most difficult animals to kill, for they must be hit just right, with the powerful bullets, before they will drop.

Although naturalists believe that large part of its food consists of fish which it gets out of the streams, it certainly does not live on fish alone, for it is often seen in captivity, and, while an occasional fish may be given it as a sort of desert, it eats meat most of the time.

The fishing cat is rather short legged, grayish brown, with a brown or black spots. It has markings that are somewhat like those of certain varieties of domestic cats, but it is a good deal larger than our house cats, being about 2 ½ feet high.

The natives of India give the fishing cat a very bad reputation, and say it has been known to kill sheep and cows and dogs, and even to carry off human babies. It probably does not deserve such a bad reputation, but in any event it is a fierce fighter. One naturalist put a fishing cat in a stout cage, next to a tame leopard. The next morning he found the cat had broken through the partition and had killed the leopard, although the leopard was twice its size.

The smartest of all the foxes are probably the English ones, which have been hunted for so many years. Old, wise foxes know many tricks to throw the pursuing dogs off the scent when they are being hunted. The scent of a fox comes from a small gland beneath the tail.

In the United States, the red fox lives both on the prairies and in forest areas, but it likes land where there is plenty of cover – bushes, trees, rough ground that give it a chance to hide. Here, if there is plenty of food such as birds, ground squirrels, rabbits, mice, fruit and berries, a fox is likely to spend the whole year virtually without traveling.

The red fox digs a burrow in a bank or hillside, or finds a hole ready made in a log or stump. In this the puppies are born in the spring. There are 4 to 9 of them, and both the father and mother take care of them and bring food. Silver and cross colors or markings or simply varieties of the commoner red color.

The Patagonian cavy lies in burrows and is shy and timid, dashing for its underground hiding place at the first sign of alarm, or else making a galloping hopping leaping run to get away as far as possible. However, it is full of curiosity as well as of tenacity, and so after it has run a couple of hundred feet, it is apt to sit up and look around.

The Patagonian cavy breeds very freely in captivity. One zoological garden acquired three of the animals, and a few short years later there were thirty-five of them!

Natives of the cavy country are very fond of eating them, but to many people the flesh seems rather dry and tasteless.

Many naturalists say that the handsomest dearer in the world is the axis deer of India and Sri Lanka, perhaps because it is reddish brown body is spotted the whole year round with big, regularly spaced, white dots. We are likely to think of baby deer, or fawns, as being spotted, or may have seen in zoos some of the Asiatic deer or the European fallow deer that are spotted in summer. The axis deer however, has spots when it is born and keeps them all through life, winter and summer.

It is not a large deer, standing only about 3 feet at the shoulders. Its antlers are not as elaborately branched as those of many deer, and vary a good deal in size, but they average about 30 inches long.

In India, the native name of this dear is the chital, a word that refers to the dappled hide. The chital lives in the bamboo forests, or in bushy, grassy country, generally near a stream of some sort. One might think that a brightly marked deer, with such bold white spots, would be very conspicuous, but hunters say that the brown color of its hide blends with the dead leaves and the white spots resemble the dancing spots of sunlight, so that the animal is really very heard to see.

It seems to realize that it is well hidden even in the daytime, for it often feeds until mid morning, and again well before sundown, spending the heat of the day and shady places.

Africa and the nearby parts of Asia are the home of the many kinds of antelopes, ranging all the way from the tiny royal antelope that is scarcely larger than a rabbit up to the comparatively gigantic eland, the largest of all antelopes. Old males have been found to weigh 1500 pounds.

Unlike a good many antelopes, both male and female elands have horns – heavy twisted spears that the female uses to good advantage when she is protecting her calf. Hunters tell of seeing a female eland lower her head and slash at a pack of hunting dogs with her horns, often stabbing a dog clear through the body with a single lightning quick stroke. These horns are about 2 feet long on the full grown eland, but they are worn down in fights and rubbing against trees and brush, and so they are scarcely a foot long on some old bulls.

A curious fold of skin, called a dewlap, hangs from the throat and neck of the eland and makes the animal look even larger than it is.

The eland lives in wooded country in some parts of Africa, in deserts and others. It can go for many days without drinking water, getting moisture from the grass, leaves, melons and other plants that it eats. In protected areas where it has not been hunted severely, the animals travel in herds of 50 to 100. Although they are powerful creatures, they are not dangerous to men except when they are guarding their calves.