As to hunting this beast, Mr. Pike says in his ‘Barren Ground of Northern Canada,’ ‘It is no hard matter to kill caribou in the open country, for the rolling hills usually give ample cover for a stalk, and even on flat ground they are easily approached at a run, as they will almost invariably circle head to wind and give the hunter a chance to cut them off.’
(5) Mule Deer (C. macrotis)
Typical mule deer (C. macrotis)
To my mind the best deer we have in North America for sport is the beast whose head is here represented, C. macrotis, the mule deer of British Columbia and the naturalists, and the Black-tail of Colorado and elsewhere in the States. More than any other of his kin in this country, C. macrotis haunts the open uplands, the largest bucks being found oftener than not right up by the little snow patches, in and on the edge of the sheep land, or if not there, then in the small patches of starved and moss-grown forest at the top of the timber range. Thanks to his predilection for high places and the open, it is often possible to stalk C. macrotis in ‘old country’ fashion, instead of crawling about after him in choking timber as a man must after C. columbianus or almost any other American deer; but to get mule deer a man should rise early in order to see them moving up to their beds for the day.
The mule deer ruts about the middle of October, his horns being clean as a rule about a fortnight earlier, although I have seen a big buck very high up (10,000 ft.) in Colorado who had not begun to rub in the third week of September.
One of the writers in a recent book on American big game speaks of the whistling of this deer during the rutting season; but though I have spent many seasons amongst mule deer, in British Columbia and elsewhere, I have never yet heard them whistle, nor heard any mention of this habit from the natives or white hunters. However, I am not prepared to say that they do not whistle.
Abnormal head of mule deer