United States or Papua New Guinea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"They would need to be, for this is the 'rutting' season, and the bucks fight furious battles with each other, clashing their horns together, as if they would break them to pieces. Very often a pair of bucks, while thus contending, 'lock' their antlers, and being unable to draw them apart, remain head to head, until both die with hunger, or fall a prey to the prowling wolves.
He may not have as much principle as a tomcat in rutting time, but he poses before all men as a "guardian of public morals." When he places the awful seal of his disapproval upon a fellow mortal he expects to see him shrivel ups like a fat angle-worm on a sea-coal fire. He's a modern Balaam, peddling God's blessings and curses for the long green.
In the rutting season the testes become much larger and descend into the scrotal sacs, at other times of the year being apparently more or less abdominal. In rabbits and hares, which have a much more impulsive progression, the organs seem to be always in the scrotal sacs.
Besides being able to whistle, the lynx far surpasses the domestic cat in the range and volume of his evening song; and during the rutting season, at sunrise and sunset, he has a peculiar habit of beating or drumming with his forepaws on the hard snow or earth. No doubt it is a form of challenge, used much in the same way as the drumming of cock-grouse; martens and rabbits do the same.
Then, when a bull answers with his guttural grunt of Oo-ah, Oo-ah, the Indian imitates that sound, too, to give the first bull the impression that a second is approaching, and thus provokes the first to hurry forward within range of the hunter's gun. But when the rutting season is over, the hunting is done by snaring or stalking or trailing.
The Indian shook his shaven head. "The rutting month is past, my brother," said he, speaking in broken French, "but ere the month of the bird-laying has come there will be no white man upon this river save only behind stone walls." "What, then? We have heard little! Have the Iroquois broken out so fiercely?" "My brother, they said they would eat up the Hurons, and where are the Hurons now?
In our country we have the Columbia black tail deer. Of course, only bucks should be shot; as an old forest ranger said to me, "Does ain't deer." And no one but a starving man would shoot a fawn. Here bucks are hunted only in the fall, just as they shed their velvet and before the rutting season. At this time they keep pretty quiet in the brush or seek the higher lookout points on mountain ridges.
The way of all others, that he liked best, was to hunt them by calling, and the best time for that was during the mornings and evenings of the rutting season. Later in the year, when the ice is gone, and the beaver is swimming, say a foot under water, the hunter can easily follow his course from the appearance of the surface. The same applies to the muskrat, mink, and otter.
A usual practice is to pin brass faces on the cylinder, allowing the valve to retain its cast iron face. Some makers employ brass valves, and others pin brass on the valves, leaving the cylinder with a cast iron face. If brass valves are used, it is advisable to plane out two grooves across the face, and to fill them up with hard cast iron to prevent rutting.
It must also be taken into account, that some of the accidents recorded may have occurred in the rutting season, when elephants are subject to fits of temporary fury, known in India by the term must, in Ceylon mudda, a paroxysm which speedily passes away, but during the fury of which it is dangerous even for the mahout to approach those ordinarily the gentlest and most familiar.
Word Of The Day