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. The
shepherd was wanted in the plantation and could not go to the flock
just yet, and I was told to look for the flock and turn it towards
home.

I found the flock just where I had been told to look for it, the sheep
very widely scattered, and some groups of a dozen or two to a hundred
were just visible at a distance among the rough bushes. Just where
these furthest sheep were grazing there was a scattered troop of
seventy or eighty horses grazing too, and when I rode to that spot I
all at once found myself among a lot of rheas, feeding too among the
sheep and horses. Their grey plumage being so much like the cardoon
bushes in colour had prevented me from seeing them before I was right
among them.