The Mule- deer 199 



out to a dead run until pretty well tired with the 

 other pace, a good dog can overtake a mule-deer 

 on open ground much more quickly than the 

 Virginia deer. 



But it is not necessary to squander sympathy on 

 this account. The deer rarely strays from rough 

 ground more than enough to encourage the dog 

 at the start. The minute he is among brush and 

 rocks the sympathy is all needed by the dog. If 

 there is anything in the shape of brush that this 

 deer cannot smash or twist through without ap- 

 parent delay to his rapid foot, I have not yet seen 

 it. The chaparral of southern California is wholly 

 unique, that of the northern mountains being mere 

 oak openings compared with most of it. Manza- 

 nita, scrub-oak, thorny lilac, adenostama, cercocar- 

 pus, and mountain-mahogany, with laurel, choke- 

 cherry and baccharis, stiff and unyielding, with 

 fifty times the number of twigs and branches 

 needed for lusty life, all are trying to strangle 

 each other with a myriad arms, beginning the 

 strife often at a point where a man would have 

 to crawl to get through and sometimes rising- 

 fifteen feet in the struggle. This makes a vest 

 of evergreen that rolls for miles over hill and dale, 

 with shining boulders projecting here and there, 

 and groves of live-oak massed in the heads of 

 little gulches or engirdling some tiny meadow. 

 So dense is the mass of green and so small the 



