THE MULE AND WHITE-TAILED DEER 
“ bad-lands ” that fringe these bottoms or the low hills and gorges covered 
with patches of ash, buck brush, cedar and dwarf pine. Sometimes, 
especially late in the season, it is found on almost open hills, where it can 
see well around and use its fine eyes with as much effect as the pronghorn 
and the mountain sheep. Yet in parts of Montana and Wyoming mule 
deer do inhabit densely afforested areas high up in the timber at eleven 
to twelve thousand feet. I killed my first mule deer, a fine twenty pointer, 
just under Cloud Peak (12,000 feet), the highest mountain in the Bighorns, 
in timber so thick that it was scarcely possible to make one’s way through 
the mass of windfalls and fallen pines, in fact on typical wapiti ground. 
In such places the mule deer lives almost entirely by browsing on lichens, 
etc., for grass is scarce. The forest was covered with a carpet of blueberries 
and the deer are said to eat both the fruit and the leaves of this as well as 
other low growing shrubs. In this dense timber the mule deer make well- 
worn paths along which they travel at dawn and sunset, either to feed or 
to drink, and one of the best methods of obtaining a good buck is to lie in 
wait within view of one of these roads on which fresh spoor and droppings 
are visible. I think that the majority of these deer that live high in the 
summer, as they do in Colorado, Wyoming and Montana, move south 
or west in October, as the snow is so heavy in winter that they cannot get 
about and are constantly exposed to the attacks of wolves and cougars, 
and so most of them move south or west to the lower and drier country 
where the hills are covered with cedars and pinyon instead of tall pines. 
The White River, in North-Western Colorado, is a great mule deer resort 
in winter, and there is a comparatively light snowfall there, although the 
cold is intense. Although there are many small ranches here the deer are 
not much persecuted, for the close season is respected to a certain extent, 
and so even to-day the herds are numerous. 
Mule deer like to lie in the sun in small herds. At night they feed like 
other deer, and at early morn and late evening, but in winter they often 
graze all day and keep moving about, especially in places where they are 
little disturbed. In heavy snow they retire to the gorges or thick timber 
and wait until the storm has passed. They seem to pay but little attention 
to wire fences and do not jump over them as red deer do but go through 
them after the manner of roe, making a swift turn on the side to avoid 
entrapping the horns. They often go under the lowest wire and seem hardly 
to check their speed, so swiftly is the manoeuvre effected. 
There is a great charm in hunting the mule deer, for it affords that ideal 
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