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 



