Tbe Mule- deer 201 



not so dry as to consume the stubs too much, was 

 the grandest of all places to see this deer perform. 

 Other deer leaping through the wildest windfalls 

 are but an approach to the skill with which this 

 mule-deer defied both rifle and dog. On almost 

 any rough ground and especially up hill, common 

 dogs are soon willing to resign ; but it is in burnt 

 chaparral, where black stubs that are all the stiffer 

 for being burnt curl upward from six to eight feet 

 and almost dense enough for a cornfield, with 

 enough granite boulders among the rows to rep- 

 resent giant pumpkins, that this deer exhibits 

 best. Through this he riots with his loftiest 

 jumps and most erratic twists. The sticks he 

 sweeps so gayly aside throw back the largest dog, 

 many deflect the best-aimed bullet, while the ever 

 changing curve from high to low and from side 

 to side leave you wondering where you are to aim. 

 Nothing in all my field experience was ever quite 

 so interesting as being one of a party posted on 

 the ridges around such a brushy basin, each one of 

 us emptying the whole magazine of his repeater at 

 a two-hundred-pound buck in wild career through 

 the middle of it, and half a dozen "deer dogs" 

 led by a great Scotch deerhound of tremendous 

 speed struggling vainly in his rear ; yet the quarry, 

 dashing sunlight from his glittering antlers at the 

 farther edge, skipped gayly up a gulch of rocky 

 stairs from which the last bullet sung on high a 



