The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal ObservationsHornaday, William T. (William Temple)
Science
The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations
Hornaday, William T. (William Temple)
Animal behavior
Here is a deer and puma story. In the picturesque bad-lands of
Hell Creek, Montana, I saw my comrade, Laton A. Huffman, kill a
large mule deer buck that three months previously had been
attacked by a puma. From above it, the great cat had leaped upon
the back of the deer, and laid hold with teeth and claws. In its
struggle for life the buck either leaped or fell off the edge of a
perpendicular "cut bank," and landed upon its back, with the puma
underneath. Evidently the puma was so seriously injured that it
could not continue the struggle; but it surely left its ear-marks.
One ear of the buck was fearfully torn. There was a big wound on
the top of the neck, where the puma jaws had lacerated the skin
and flesh; and both hind legs had been badly clawed by the
assailant's hind feet. The main beam of the right antler had been,
broken off half-way up, while the antlers were still in the
velvet, which enabled us to fix the probable date of the
encounter.
In the great Wynaad forest I once got lost, and in toiling through
a five acre patch of grass higher than my head, and so dense that
it was not negotiable except by following the game trails, my
simple old Kuramber and I came suddenly upon the scene of a great
struggle. In the center of a space about twenty feet in diameter,
on which the tall grass had been trampled flat, lay the remains of
a sambar stag which had very recently been killed and eaten by a
tiger. The neck had not been dislocated, and the sambar had fought
long and hard. Evidently the tiger had lain in wait on the runway,
and had failed to subdue the sambar by his first fierce onslaught.
Now an angry stag with good antlers is no mean antagonist, and it
is strange if the tiger in the case went through that struggle
without a puncture in his tawny skin.
In South Africa, Vaughan Kirby once found the dead bodies of a
"patriarchal bull" sable antelope and a lion, "which had evidently
been a fine specimen," lying close together, where the two
animals had fallen after a great struggle. The sable antelope must
have killed its antagonist by a lucky backward thrust of its long,
curved horns as the lion fastened upon its back to pull it down.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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