animal of the deer family. Its colour was light red,
its coat short and smooth, and, on a closer view, Caspar saw that it had
a tusk in each jaw, projecting outside the mouth, something like the
tushes of the musk-deer. It was, in fact, a closely allied species. It
was the "kakur," or "barking-deer;" so called from its barking habit,
which had drawn the attention of the hunter upon it.

Of the barking-deer, like most other deer of India, there are several
varieties very little known to naturalists; and the species called the
"muntjak" (_Cervus vaginalis_) is one of these. It also has the
protruding tushes, and the solitary antler upon its horns.

The "barking-deer" is common on the lower hills of the Himalaya
Mountains, as high as seven or eight thousand feet; but they sometimes
wander up the courses of rivers, or valley gorges, to a much higher
elevation; and the one now observed by Caspar had possibly strayed up
the glacier valley in midsummer, guided by curiosity, or some instinct,
that carried it into the beautiful valley that lay beyond. Poor little
fellow! it never found its way back again; for Caspar bored its body
through and through with a bullet from his right-hand barrel, and hung
its bleeding carcass on the branch of a tree.

He did not shoot it upon sight, however. He hesitated for some time
whether it would be prudent to waste a shot upon so tiny a morsel, and
had even permitted it to run away.

As it went off, he was surprised at a singular noise which it made in
running, not unlike the rattling of two pieces of loose bone knocked
sharply together; in fact, a pair of castanets. This he could hear
after it had got fifty yards from him, and, perhaps, farther; but there
the creature suddenly stopped, turned its head round, and stood barking
as before.

Caspar could not make out the cause of such a strange noise, nor,
indeed, has any naturalist yet offered an explanation of this
phenomenon. Perhaps it is the cracking of the hoofs against each other,
or, more likely, the two divisions of each hoof coming sharply together,
when raised suddenly from the ground. It is well-known that a similar,
only much louder noise, is made by the long hoofs of the great
moose-deer; and the little kakur probably exhibits the same phenomenon
on a smaller scale.

Caspar did not speculate long about the cause. The creature, as it
stood right before the muzzle of his gun, now offered too tempting a
shot, and the r