Friday, June 22, 2007

Interlocked Antlers Make Great Trophy

1896

Curious and Valuable Trophy of a Michigan Hunter

In a taxidermist's window in Madison street a pair of antlered deer heads are displayed. The taxidermist says they form the greatest curiosity ever seen in that line. The antlers are interlocked, and, he says, it is the only pair in existence with the heads well preserved. Other pairs of antlers have been found tangled together but he says it was after the animals to which they belonged had long been dead and nothing but the whitened skeletons remained. The theory has always been that the animals had died thus fighting. The deer of which this exhibit originally formed a part were discovered in combat, and with their horns inseparably tangled.

H. L. Brown, of Albion, Mich., was hunting near Bismarck, North Dakota, November 15 last, when he came upon two Virginia deer bucks locked in a mortal tangle. How long they had been thus he could not say, but it must have been some time, because they had plowed up about two acres of ground in their struggle. They could not run away and Mr. Brown ended their struggle by shooting them. He cut off the heads and sent them to this city to have them mounted as he found them. N. Slotkin, the taxidermist who prepared them, say the horns could only be untangled by breaking them or loosening them from the skull, and this was never done, so they remain as the hunter found them.

The deer were young bucks of about the same age, probably two years old. The taxidermist said if they had been mounted full figure they would have been worth more than $3000. As they are now, he says, the pair of heads is worth $500. They belong to the man who killed them, and who will keep them as a trophy of his rare good lack as a sportsman. — Chicago Chronicle.

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