A hoofprint beside a riverbank makes a sharper claim than a tiger's paw: authority, Malay folklore suggests, belongs not to mass but to nerve. Size loses here. The mouse deer, a small even-toed ungulate in the family Tragulidae, is neither rodent nor member of the deer family, Cervidae. Its fame rests on a deliberate mismatch between zoology and imagination. That mismatch gives the stories their s...More