BIG GAME OF NORTH AMERICA 423 



Let me be honest to the little beast. On nearly every occa- 

 sion C. virginianus has got the best of me (I never hunted him 

 with dogs or torches, or any other such abomination, and never 

 mean to), but once on a red-letter day I caught a big buck of 

 his kind dreaming on a hardwood hill. He was two hundred 

 yards off, and though the bullet from my Express broke his 

 foreleg, he jumped ' at a stand ' a log by his side over which I 

 could not look, though I stand nearly six feet in my boots, and 

 gave me an hour's excessively hard work before I killed him. 

 I should think that about 150 Ibs. would be the extreme weight 

 of the largest bucks of this variety when cleaned, but there are 

 stories of exceptionally large white-tail bucks in the Okanagau 

 district of British Columbia, and the heads which come from 

 that country are certainly very fine. Mr. Rowland Ward gives 

 27^ ins. as the length and 19 ins. as the span of the best head 

 of this deer known to him. 



(7) THE BLACK-TAIL (C. columbianus) 



Although not quite so exasperating an animal as C. virginia- 

 tws, this, the common deer of Vancouver Island, of the islands 

 all along the Pacific coast from Victoria to Alaska, and of the 

 Pacific slope generally, is desperately fond of thick timber and 

 the deep jungles of noisy sal lal bush. In size C. columbianus is 

 considerably smaller than the mule deer : a buck which would 

 weigh 175 Ibs. would be a big buck for Vancouver Island, and 

 I am not aware that the deer of this island are smaller than 

 those of the mainland. But if C, columbianus is small, he is 

 at least abundant. A week from the date of writing this, a 

 friend of mine and myself saw fourteen deer in two days' still 

 hunting within a drive of Victoria, and a grateful memory of 

 my dinner reminds me that the venison of a yearling buck 

 hung for one week is as good meat as any Esau ever brought 

 home to Isaac. In 1892 a couple of half-breeds sold over 

 eighty bucks in Victoria in two months, and in 1893 the same 

 two (excellent shots and woodsmen) are reported to have killed 



