For what?
Has Nature made them to pierce, wound, and destroy?
Strange as it may seem, these weapons of offence are used for little but defence; less as spears than as bucklers they serve the deer in battles with its kind.

And the long, hard combats are little more than wrestling and pushing bouts; almost never do they end fatally.

When a mortal thrust is given, it is rarely a gaping wound, but a sudden springing and locking of the antlers, whereby the two deer are bound together, inextricably, hopelessly, and so suffer death by starvation.

The records of deer killed by their rivals and left on the duel-ground are few; very few and far between.

The records of those killed by interlocking are numbered by the scores.
There were hundreds of deer in this country that Rolf and Quonab claimed.