WHITE-TAILED DEER 
like, triangular tail snowy white. All the western varieties 
are pale, while those of the damp woods of the Gulf states are 
deepest in tint. The winter coat of long, coarse, crinkled hair 
is much grayer, and hunters speak of the animal as then “‘in the 
blue.” The antlers may attain in an old buck as many as six 
or seven points, but after six years, when five points are attained, 
age is reckoned more by the size and thickness of the antlers 
than by the number of the points. This deer, in one or another 
form, is found from New Brunswick, central Ontario, and 
Manitoba to Florida and southern Mexico; and a whole volume 
would be required to detail its habits under all the varying 
circumstances it meets. In general, it is a deer of the woods, 
although in the middle West it fed far out on the prairies, and 
there, as is always likely to happen with grazing animals in 
open regions, it formerly gathered into large herds, as it never 
does in forested districts. Nowhere is it more at ease than in 
the Adirondacks, and no one knows it there better than Dr. 
C. Hart Merriam.** 
“This beautiful and graceful animal,” he tells us, “‘by far the fleetest 
of our Mammalia, roams over all parts of the wilderness, being found high 
up on the mountain sides, as well as in the lowest valleys and river bottoms. 
It frequents alike the densest and most impenetrable thickets, and the open 
beaver meadows and frontier clearings. During the summer season 
its food consists of a great variety of herbs, grasses, marsh and aquatic 
plants, the leaves of many deciduous trees and shrubs, blueberries, black- 
berries, other fruits that grow within its reach, and largely of the nutritious 
beechnut. While snow covers the ground, which it commonly does about 
half the year, the fare is necessarily restricted; and it is forced to subsist 
chiefly upon the twigs and buds of low deciduous trees and shrubs, the twigs 
and foliage of the arbor vite, hemlock, and balsam, and a few mosses and 
lichens. In winters succeeding a good yield of nuts, the mast constitutes 
its staple article of diet, and is obtained by following the beech ridges and 
pawing up the snow beneath the trees.” 
The places where they spend periods of deep snowfall become 
a tangle of trampled paths, as in the “yards” of the moose. 
327 
