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The mule deer is good for the Rocky Mountains, and can live where the white-tail can not; but it is too easy to shoot! The Columbian black-tail is the natural species for the forests of the Pacific states; but it is a trifle small in size.
Romer and I went through the thicket, working to our left, and presently came out into the open forest. Haught was leading his horse. To Romer's eager query he replied: "Shore, I piled him up. Two-year-old black-tail buck." Sure enough he had shot straight this time. The buck lay motionless under a pine, with one point of his antlers imbedded deep in the ground.
Where there weren't pictures there was gilt, and where there wasn't gilt there was naked statuary, and where there wasn't naked statuary there was Rozanov, very red and stout and smiling, gay in a tightly fitting black-tail coat, white waistcoat and black trousers. Who all the people were I haven't the least idea. There was a great many.
Up with the dawn day after day, in saddle long hours, scouting the divides and ridges, stalking antelope and black-tail deer, chasing buffalo, he lived a life that hardened every muscle, bronzed the skin, cleared the eye and brain, and gave to even monotonous existence a "verve" and zest the dawdlers in those old-time garrisons never knew.
There were quite a number of black-tail in the valley, which were tame and unsuspicious, although not nearly as much so as those in the immediate neighborhood of the Mammoth Hot Springs. One mid-afternoon three of them swam across the river a hundred yards above our camp. But the characteristic animals of the region were the elk the wapiti.
There are large gaps between some of the buildings, and Major Pitcher informed me that throughout the winter he had been leaving alfalfa on the parade grounds, and that numbers of black-tail deer had been in the habit of visiting it every day, sometimes as many as seventy being on the parade ground at once. As springtime came on the numbers diminished.
This, thort I, 'll do for campin'-ground; so I got down, pulled the saddle off o' my ole mar, an' staked the critter upon the best patch o' grass that wur near, intendin' she shed hev her gut-full afore the camp cattle kim up to bother her. "I hed shot a black-tail buck, an' after kindlin' a fire, I roasted a griskin' o' him, an' ate it.
Add to the danger of sheer rock declivity, an almost desert-forest growth dwarf juniper and cedar and giant cactus interwoven in a snarl, armed with spikes to keep off intruders and you can understand why some of the most magnificent specimens of black-tail in the world roam the peaks and mesas here undisturbed by the hunter.
After I had looked at the sheep to my heart's content, I walked back to my horse, my departure arousing as little interest as my advent. Soon after leaving them we began to come across black-tail deer, singly, in twos and threes, and in small bunches of a dozen or so. They were almost as tame as the mountain sheep, but not quite.
The original stock of buffalo in the Park have now been reduced to fifteen or twenty individuals, and the intention is to try to mix them with the score of buffalo which have been purchased out of the Flat Head Lake and Texas Panhandle herds. The buffalo were put within a wire fence, which, when it was built, was found to have included both black-tail and white-tail deer.
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