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While riding through one of the numerous little valleys with which that range abounds, we saw at a little distance, a magnificent specimen of a black-tailed deer. Now I had always wanted to kill a black-tailed deer, and this was the first time I had ever seen one, so I begged Nat to let me shoot it. He said, with a laugh, "Shoot away!" and I took deliberate aim and fired.
Lower down were thick forests of firs and red cedars, growing out in many places from the very fissures of the rocks. The mountains were broken and precipitous, with huge bluffs protruding from among the forests. Their rocky recesses and beetling cliffs afforded retreats to innumerable flocks of the bighorn, while their woody summits and ravines abounded with bears and black-tailed deer.
I'll bet the gray Wyandotte pony against your mare that we start an elk or a black-tailed deer, or likely as not, a bighorn, before we are two miles out of camp. I'll take my squaw's old yellow horse; you can't whip her more than four miles an hour, but she is as good for the mountains as a mule." I mounted the black mule which Raymond usually rode.
In these rugged and elevated regions they began to see the black-tailed deer, a species larger than the ordinary kind, and chiefly found in rocky and mountainous countries. They had reached also a great buffalo range; Captain Bonneville ascended a high bluff, commanding an extensive view of the surrounding plains.
Two black-tailed deer bounded away among the rocks; Raymond shot at them from horseback; the sharp report of his rifle was answered by another equally sharp from the opposing cliffs, and then the echoes, leaping in rapid succession from side to side, died away rattling far amid the mountains.
He speedily discovered that the Indians were following him, and the interposing body of the black-tailed deer was a most effectual protection. More than his own bullets were buried in it ere he had gone a half-mile down stream. "If I entertained a small doubt that yez was killed, I couldn't howld it with them bullets rattlin' in your hide, me owld friend."
The summer before there had been plenty of buffalo upon that side of the Missouri, and our people had made many packs of dried buffalo meat and cached them in different places, so that they could get them in case of need. There were many black-tailed deer and elk along the river, and grizzlies were to be found in the open country.
Bill had a long and highly fanciful conversation with a little, black-tailed ermine that tried to run under his feet; he imitated to Virginia's delight, the spectacle of a large and stiff cow moose pulling herself through the mud; he repeated for her the demented cries of the loons that they had sometimes heard from the still waters of Gray Lake.
The black-tailed kind is more southern in its range. It is found in the Californias, and the valleys of the Rocky Mountains, as far south as Texas; while to the north it is met with in Oregon, and on the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains, as high as the fifty-fourth parallel.
Deer seldom cross the range in either direction. I have never yet observed a single specimen of the mule-deer of the Great Basin west of the summit, and rarely one of the black-tailed species on the eastern slope, notwithstanding many of the latter ascend the range nearly to the summit every summer, to feed in the wild gardens and bring forth their young.
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