226 AN AMERICAN HUNTER 



the west it touches, and here and there crosses, the boun- 

 daries of the Coast blacktail. The whitetail is found in 

 places throughout its habitat from east to west and from 

 north to south. But there are great regions in this ter- 

 ritory which are peculiarly fitted for the mule-deer, but 

 in which the whitetail is never found, as the habits of 

 the two are entirely different. In the mountains of west- 

 ern Colorado and Wyoming, for instance, the mule-deer 

 swarms, but the whole region is unfit for the whitetail, 

 which is accordingly only found in a very few narrowly 

 restricted localities. 



The mule-deer does not hold its own as well as the 

 whitetail in the presence of man, but it is by no means 

 as quickly exterminated as the wapiti. The outside 

 limits of its range have not shrunk materially in the cen- 

 tury during which it has been known to white hunters. 

 It was never found until the fertile, moist country of the 

 Mississippi Valley was passed and the dry plains region 

 to the west of it reached, and it still exists in some num- 

 bers here and there in this country, as, for instance, in 

 the Bad Lands along the Little Missouri, and in the 

 Black Hills. But although its limits of distribution have 

 not very sensibly diminished, there are large portions of 

 the range within these limits from which it has practically 

 vanished, and in most places its numbers have been woe- 

 fully thinned. It holds its own best among the more in- 

 accessible mountain masses of the Rockies, and from 

 Chihuahua to Alberta there are tracts where it is still 

 abundant. Yet even in these places the numbers are di- 

 minishing, and this process can be arrested only by better 



