134 Life-histories of Northern Animals 



still the Deer did not move. I began to wonder if I had not 

 made a mistake after all, and watched a stump that had some- 

 what the form of a Deer. Then I thought, "No, I saw her 

 walk there/* Six minutes — eight minutes — ten minutes passed 

 and still the Deer stood. 



*'It is not possible," I said to myself, "no Deer would 

 stand like that for ten minutes. And yet there she is. That 

 was plainly a Deer when it went there." I waited another 

 minute — still no move. "I'll give her five minutes more, and 

 if there is no move I shall know I have been fooled by a stump." 

 Eleven and a half minutes, not counting the time before my 

 watch was out, and there was a change, for it was a Deer that 

 had been so intently watching me all the time, and it so hap- 

 pened that she now decided that she had been fooled by a 

 stump. She changed her pose, turned to graze, and I had 

 won the game of "freeze." I brought my camera slowly to 

 bear and snapped it, but the light was too poor to get a picture. 

 The Deer now saw me move and bounded away. 



SLEEP- J. B. Goff tells me that he has often come on Deer standing 



asleep in the daytime, with tightly closed eyes, and has some- 

 times approached within twenty feet. One day he watched a 

 ranger named Jack Dunn as he crawled up to one of these 

 sleeping Deer and caught its hind leg. Then ensued a re- 

 markable fight, in which finally Dunn, though much scratched 

 and dragged about, succeeded in killing the Deer with his 

 knife. 



BEDS Deer beds are well known in the Deer ranges. They are 



hollow nests in prominent but sheltered places on the hillsides 

 and hilltops, roughly circular, and about four feet across. 

 They are used continually, possibly by the same individuals, 

 and some of them are remarkably deep. One which I exam- 

 ined on Wilson's Flat-tops, Col., September 26, 1901, was on 

 the hillside facing east and cut down three feet at the back to 

 make a comfortable saucer shape. 



At one point on the main trail where it crossed a burnt 

 ridge was what the guides called a ''deer hotel." It covered 



