Q24 THE PRESENT AND FUTURE 
tana, because so many deer were there it did not seem to spell 
extermination. Now conditions have changed. Since last 
winter’s great slaughter in northwestern Montana, of eleven 
thousand hungry deer, the species has been so reduced that 
it is no longer right to kill mule deer anywhere in our coun- 
try, and a universal close season for five years is the duty 
of every state which contains that species. 
Tue Reavt Buacx-Tamep Deer, of the Pacific coast 
(Odocoileus columbianus), is, to most sportsmen of the Rocky 
Mountains and the East, actually less known than the okapi! 
Not one out of every hundred of them can recognize a mounted. 
head of it at sight. It is a small, delicately formed, delicately 
antlered understudy of the big mule deer, and now painfully 
limited in its distribution. It is the deer of California and 
western Oregon, and it has been so ruthlessly slaughtered 
that to-day it is going fast. As conditions stand to-day, and 
without a radical change on the part of the people of the 
Pacific coast, this very interesting species is bound to disap- 
pear. It will not be persistent, like the white-tailed deer, but 
in the heavy forests it will last much longer than the mule 
deer. 
My information regarding this deer is like the stock of 
specimens of it in museum collections—meagre and unsatis- 
factory. We need to know in detail how that species is faring 
to-day, and what its prospects are for the immediate future. 
In 1900 I saw great piles of skins from it in the fur-houses of 
Seattle, and the sight gave me much concern. 
Tue Carrpou GENERALLY.—I think it is not very diffi- 
cult to forecast the future of the genus Rangifer in North 
