Hunting the Mule -Deer in Colorado. 



259 



HEAD OF THK MULE-UEEK. 



name mule-deer was recorded by Captains Lewis and Clark in their 

 reports of the expeditions of 1804 and 1806, in which this animal, 

 with the black-tail and Virginia deer, are fully described, with their 

 mixtures and variations and respective limits of habitat. Probably 

 the two, with the burro* deer of Arizona, may prove to be merely 

 variations of the same animal, as new admixtures indicating the 

 blood of C. virginianus are sometimes found of late, and I have 

 myself noted, among some hundreds of deer killed within a radius 

 of a hundred miles from Denver, marked variations from any of 

 the descriptions given by naturalists. The prominent marks of this 

 variety are those which give the name, — immensely developed ears, 

 a thin, switchy, and brush-tipped tail, a gray and black color, and a 

 general air of sagacity and knowingness not belied by his behavior 

 in the field. Here is his inventory: A pair of immense antlers, 

 main beams well back, prongs straight up. Full length of beam in 

 a well-grown pair measured by myself, fifty-five inches from extreme 

 point to its opposite. Aggregate of growth in this instance, beams 

 and prongs, nine feet and three inches. Sixteen well -developed 

 points not unusual, though ten seems the normal limit, the excess of 

 this number being usually irregular in position and ill balanced. 

 Ears, < ight to nine inches in length, in almost constant motion. 

 Large, prominent, and beautiful eyes. Height, five and a half to six 

 feet to antlers' tips ; about four at the haunches. Body round and 

 plump, legs slender and graceful, and small feet, seeming utterly 

 inadequate to propel the two to three hundred pounds weight in such 

 wonderful leaps over formidable obstructions, through regions of 



• Burro. Spanish name for the ass kind. 



