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Updated: May 14, 2025
"I had a story from a Kyan head man which had come down to him as a tradition. A great head-hunting expedition, consisting of a thousand warriors, had set out many years ago. It had not gone far when a little muntjac, which you know is a kind of deer, ran across the path of the warriors. This was a bad omen; and they gave up the enterprise, and returned to their villages.
Heller or I examined it to make sure that it was properly treated. On our first day in camp we sent for natives to the village of Mu-cheng ten li distant. The men assured us that there were sambur, serow, and muntjac in the neighborhood, and they agreed to hunt.
I did not see a muntjac while at Hui-yao, but was fortunate in killing a splendid coal-black serow which represents a sub-species new to science; although the natives said that serow were known to occur in the thick jungle on the south side of the river, none had been seen for years.
Evidently the muntjac are somewhat irregular in shedding for, although they were all in full summer pelage, two already had lost their antlers while the other had not. I can think of no more delicious meat than the flesh of these little deer and they seem to be as highly esteemed by the English sportsmen of India as they are by the foreigners of China.
Conditions there are different, and usually the game is widely scattered. The sambar deer and muntjac of the dense forests, the axis of the bamboo glades, the thameng deer of the Burmese jungles, the sladang, or gaur, of the awful Malay tangle, and the big cats and canines will last long and well.
The thick trees at the base of the hills were literally alive with doves but there were few mammal runways and our traps yielded no results. That night a muntjac, the first we had heard, barked hoarsely behind the tents. The magistrate, who proved to be a Shan native, arrived soon after with ten or twelve men and we discovered that there was but one man in the village who spoke Chinese.
We were hardly in position when his rifle banged, followed by such a bedlam of yells and barks that we thought he must have killed nothing less than one of the hunters. He had just made a beautiful shot, for the clearing he had been watching was not more than ten feet wide and the muntjac flashed across it at full speed.
We sat absolutely motionless and listened to the breath of the jungle, which although without definite sound, was vibrant with life. Now and then a muntjac barked hoarsely and the roar of a sambur stag thrilled us like an electric shock. Once a wild boar grunted on the opposite bank of the river, the sound coming to us clear and sharp through the stillness although the animal was far away.
The muntjac which the Lisos killed had been shot in the side with a single arrow and they assured us that only the flesh immediately surrounding the wound had been spoiled for food. Two days before we left Tai-ping-pu, three of the Lisos guided my wife and me to a large cave where they said there was a colony of bats.
Thus Damong, the chief of a Malanau household, together with all his people, will not kill or eat the deer CERVULUS MUNTJAC, alleging that an ancestor had become a deer of this kind, and that, since they cannot distinguish this incarnation of his ancestor from other deer, they must abstain from killing all deer of this species.
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