48 The Wilderness Hunter 



we loped homeward, bending to the cold, slanting 

 rain. 



Although in places where it is much persecuted 

 the blacktail is a shy and wary beast, the successful 

 pursuit of which taxes to the uttermost the skill and 

 energy of the hunter, yet, like the elk, if little mo 

 lested it often shows astonishing tameness and even 

 stupidity. In the Rockies I have sometimes come 

 on blacktail within a very short distance, which 

 would merely stare at me, then trot off a few yards, 

 turn and stare again, and wait for several minutes 

 before really taking alarm. What is much more ex 

 traordinary, I have had the same thing happen to 

 me in certain little hunted localities in the neighbor 

 hood of my ranch, even of recent years. In the fall 

 of 1890, I was riding down a canyon-coulie with 

 my foreman, Sylvane Ferris, and a young friend 

 from Boston, when we almost rode over a barren 

 blacktail doe. She only ran some fifty yards, round 

 a corner of the coulie, and then turned and stood 

 until we ran forward and killed her for we were 

 in need of fresh meat. One October, a couple of 

 years before this, my cousin, West Roosevelt, and 

 I took a trip with the wagon to a very wild and 

 rugged country, some twenty miles from the ranch. 

 We found that the deer had evidently been but little 

 disturbed. One day while scrambling down a steep, 

 brushy hill, leading my horse, I came close on a doe 

 and fawn; they merely looked at me with curiosity 



