THE DEER AND ANTELOPE OF 

 NORTH AMERICA 



CHAPTER I 



INTRODUCTORY 



WITH the exception of the bison, during the 

 period of its plenty, the chief game animals fol- 

 lowed by the American rifle-bearing hunter have 

 always been the different representatives of the 

 deer family, and, out on the great plains, the 

 pronghorn antelope. They were the game which 

 Daniel Boone followed during the closing decades 

 of the seventeenth century, and David Crockett 

 during the opening decades of the eighteenth ; 

 and now, at the outset of the twentieth century, 

 it is probably not too much to say that ninety- 

 nine out of every hundred head of game killed 

 in the United States are deer, elk, or antelope. 

 Indeed, the proportion is very much larger. In 

 certain restricted localities black bear were at one 

 time very numerous, and over large regions the 

 multitudinous herds of the bison formed until 

 1883 the chief objects of pursuit. But the bison 

 have now vanished ; and though the black bear has 

 held its own better than any other of the larger 



