Hunting from the Ranch 41 



ward saw through the waning light the quaint, 

 home-like outlines of the ranch house. 



After all, however, blacktail can only at times 

 be picked up by chance in this way. More often 

 it is needful to kill them by fair still-hunting, among 

 the hills or wooded mountains where they delight 

 to dwell. If hunted they speedily become wary. 

 By choice they live in such broken country that it 

 is difficult to pursue them with hounds; and they 

 are by no means such water-loving animals as 

 whitetail. On the other hand, the land in which they 

 dwell is very favorable to the still-hunter who does 

 not rely merely on stealth, but who can walk and 

 shoot well. They do not go on the open prairie, 

 and, if possible, they avoid deep forests, while, 

 being good climbers, they like hills. In the moun 

 tains, therefore, they keep to what is called park 

 country, where glades alternate with open groves. 

 On the great plains they avoid both the heavily tim 

 bered river bottoms and the vast treeless stretches 

 of level or rolling grass land; their chosen abode 

 being the broken and hilly region, scantily wooded, 

 which skirts almost every plains river and forms a 

 belt, sometimes very narrow, sometimes many miles 

 in breadth, between the alluvial bottom land and 

 the prairies beyond. In these Bad Lands dwarfed 

 pines and cedars grow in the canyon-like ravines and 

 among the high steep hills; there are also basins 

 and winding coulies, filled with brush and shrubbery 



