94 Deer and Antelope of North America 



I occasionally saw him shift his head. Then he 

 got up and after carefully scrutinizing all the 

 neighborhood, moved down into a patch of fairly 

 thick brush, where I could see him standing and 

 occasionally feeding, all the time moving slowly 

 up the valley. I now slipped most cautiously 

 back and trotted nearly a mile until I could come 

 up behind one of the ridges bounding the valley 

 in which he was. The wind had dropped, and it 

 was almost absolutely still when I crawled flat on 

 my face to the crest, my hat in my left hand, my 

 rifle in my right. There was a big sage bush con- 

 veniently near, and under this I peered. There 

 was a good deal of brush in the valley below, and 

 if I had not known that the buck was there, I would 

 never have discovered him. As it was, I watched 

 for a quarter of an hour, and had about made up 

 my mind that he must have gone somewhere else, 

 when a slight movement nearly below me attracted 

 my attention, and I caught a glimpse of him, 

 nearly three hundred yards off, moving quietly 

 along by the side of a little dry watercourse which 

 was right in the middle of the brush. I waited 

 until he was well past, and then again slipped 

 back with the utmost care, and ran on until I was 

 nearly opposite the head of the coulie, when I 

 again approached the ridge line. Here there was 

 no sage brush, only tufts of tall grass, which were 

 stirring in the little breeze which had just sprung 



