THE MULE-DEER 233 



different. Throughout this region there are no whitetail 

 and never have been, although in the winter range of 

 the mule-deer there are a few prongbuck; and the wapiti 

 once abounded. The mule-deer are still plentiful. They 

 make a complete migration summer and winter, so that 

 in neither season is a single individual to be found in 

 the haunts they frequent during the other season. In 

 the summer they live and bring forth their young high up 

 in the main chain of the mountains, in a beautiful country 

 of northern forest growth, dotted with trout-filled brooks 

 and clear lakes. The snowfall is so deep in these wooded 

 mountains that the deer would run great risk of perish- 

 ing if they stayed therein, and indeed could only winter 

 there at all in very small numbers. Accordingly, when 

 the storms begin in the fall, usually about the first of 

 October, just before the rut, the deer assemble in bands 

 and move west and south to the lower, drier country, 

 where the rugged hills are here and there clothed with 

 an open growth of pinyon and cedar, instead of the tall 

 spruces and pines of the summer range. The migrating 

 bands follow one another along definite trails over moun- 

 tains, through passes and valleys, and across streams; and 

 their winter range swarms with them a few days after 

 the forerunners have put in their appearance in what has 

 been, during the summer, an absolutely deerless country. 

 In January and February, 1901, I spent five weeks 

 north of the White River, in northwestern Colorado. It 

 was in the heart of the wintering ground of the great 

 Colorado mule-deer herd. Forty miles away to the east, 

 extending north, lay the high mountains in which these 



