rtunity to examine them through my glasses.
Much to my disgust I saw that the velvet was not yet off the antlers
and that their winter coats were only partly shed. They were
valueless as specimens and forthwith I abandoned the hunt. Before
leaving Peking I had visited the zoological garden to make sure that
the captive sika had assumed their summer dress and antlers. But at
the _Tung Ling_, spring had not yet arrived, and the animals were
late in losing their winter hair.

In summer the sika is the most beautiful of all deer. Its bright red
body, spotted with white, is, when seen among the green leaves of
the forest, one of the loveliest things in nature. We wished to
obtain a group of these splendid animals for the new Hall of Asiatic
Life in the American Museum of Natural History, but the specimens
had to be in perfect summer dress.

My hunter was disgusted beyond expression when I refused to shoot
the deer. The antlers of the sika when in the velvet are of greater
value to the natives than those of any other species. A good pair of
horns in full velvet sometimes sells for as much as $450. The
growing antlers are called _shueh-chiao_ (blood horns) by the
Chinese, who consider them of the highest efficacy as a remedy for
certain diseases: Therefore, the animals are persecuted relentlessly
and very few remain even in the _Tung Ling_.

The antlers of the wapiti are also of great value to the native
druggists, but strangely enough they care little for those of the
moose and the roebuck. Hundreds of thousand of deerhorns are sent
from the interior provinces of China to be sold in the large cities,
and the complete extermination of certain species is only a matter
of a few decades. Moreover, the female elk, just before the calving
season, receive unmerciful persecution, for it is believed that the
unborn fawns have great medicinal properties.

Since the roebuck at the _Tung Ling_ were in the same condition as
the sika, they were useless for our purposes. The goral, however,
which live high up on the rocky peaks, had not begun to shed their
hair, and they gave us good shooting. One beautiful morning Smith
killed a splendid ram just above our camp. We had often looked at a
ragged, granite outcrop, sparsely covered with spruce and pine
trees, which towered a thousand feet above us. We were sure there
must be goral somewhere on the ridge, and the hunters told us that
they had sometimes killed them there. It was a stiff cli