On our return late one afternoon in early spring from one of our rare
visits to Mr. Ramsdale, we witnessed a strange thing. The plain at
that place was covered with a dense growth of cardoon-thistle or wild
artichoke, and leaving the estancia house in our trap, we followed the
cattle tracks as there was no road on that side. About half-way home
we saw a troop of seven or eight deer in an open green space among the
big grey thistle-bushes, but instead of uttering their whistling
alarm-cry and making off at our approach they remained at the same
spot, although we passed within forty yards of them. The troop was
composed of two bucks engaged in a furious fight, and five or six does
walking round and round the two fighters. The bucks kept their heads
so low down that their noses were almost touching the ground, while
with their horns locked together they pushed violently, and from time
to time one would succeed in forcing the other ten or twenty feet
back. Then a pause, then another violent push, then with horns still
together they would move sideways, round and round, and so on until we
left them behind and lost sight of them.
This spectacle greatly excited us at the time and was vividly recalled
several months afterwards when one of our gaucho neighbours told us of
a curious thing he had just seen. He had been out on that cardoon-
covered spot where we had seen the fighting deer, and at that very
spot in the little green space he had come upon the skeletons of two
deer with their horns interlocked.
Tragedies of this kind in the wild animal world have often been
recorded, but they are exceedingly rare on the pampas, as the smooth
few-pronged antlers of the native deer, _corvus campestris_, are not
so liable to get hopelessly locked as in many other species.
Deer were common in our district in those days, and were partial to
land overgrown with cardoon thistle, which in the absence of trees and
thickets afforded them some sort of cover. I seldom rode to that side
without getting a sight of a group of deer, often looking exceedingly
conspicuous in their bright fawn colour as they stood gazing at the
intruder amidst the wide waste of grey cardoon bushes.
These rough plains were also the haunt of the rhea, our ostrich, and
it was here that I first had a close sight of this greatest and most
unbird-like bird of our continent. I was eight years old then, when
one afternoon in late summer I was just setting off for a ride on my
pony, when I was told to go out on the east side till I came to the
cardoon-covered land about a mile beyond the shepherd's ranch.
