More than any other American deer with which I am acquainted, C. macrotis migrates with the seasons, passing in large numbers from his summer feeding grounds on the uplands to the green timber districts of the lower country. This migration seems to begin with the first heavy snows, but it is not an invariable rule, for I have seen big bucks in the Chilcotin country, nearly as high up as they could climb, at the beginning of December, with snow a foot deep and the thermometer 10° below zero. There is no deer in the country, I fancy, whose antlers are subject to such great variation as those of C. macrotis. The pair figured on p. 419 is typical, although distinctly above the average in size (25½-in. span); another pair (obtained by Mr. H. A. James in Colorado) had 41-in. span, but the abnormal head figured on p. 420 is that of a mule deer, and it has no fewer than 59 points in place of the ordinary 10 points. This stag was killed in British Columbia. I have also seen another pair, old and thick and covered with well-marked pearls, with no tines at all except at the top. The average weight of a male mule deer is about 200 lbs., though they sometimes run much larger, individuals having been killed weighing as much as 250 and 300 lbs.
Some idea of the number of these deer in British Columbia may be gathered from the fact that in one district I have had a chance of killing seventeen separate stags in an hour’s still hunt, whilst one settler in the Similkameen country fed his hogs on deer-meat through a whole winter.
(6) The White-Tail (C. virginianus)
Of the White-tail or Virginian deer I have very little to say. Every quality which a deer ought not to possess from a sporting point of view this exasperating little beast possesses in the most highly developed form. He lives very often in close proximity to men, and seems to have caught some of their cunning. His habitat is from the Atlantic to the Pacific, his haunts are in river bottoms, in choking, blinding brush, and his habits are beastly. No one need ever expect to stalk a white-tail. If you want to get one, you must crawl about in places where the big boughs swing back and lash you across the eyes, where the rampikes catch in your clothes or rise up under your feet and trip you more cleverly than a professional wrestler, where hidden logs break your shins, and every other device of inanimate Nature is found to obstruct and annoy you with what seems almost live personal malice. After a long course of such sport as this, after having become dumb because you have no more ‘swear words’ left to say, after having grown sick of hearing that abominable ‘thump, thump,’ which means that you have jumped another buck without seeing him, you may catch a glimpse of a waving white tail going over the logs, and if you are a good wing-shot with a rifle you may get the beast which wears it, but the betting is you won’t; or you may some day be astounded by the sight of a creature, apparently about as big as a good-sized jack rabbit, close to you, sneaking along under the brush, with its head craned forward, intent on escaping observation. If you move to fire, that sneaking beast will at once convert itself into the white-tailed timber jumper you have seen once or twice before.
The White-tail’s haunt
Let me be honest to the little beast. On nearly every occasion C. virginianus has got the best of me (I never hunted him with dogs or torches, or any other such abomination, and never mean to), but once on a red-letter day I caught a big buck of his kind dreaming on a hardwood hill. He was two hundred yards off, and though the bullet from my Express broke his foreleg, he jumped ‘at a stand’ a log by his side over which I could not look, though I stand nearly six feet in my boots, and gave me an hour’s excessively hard work before I killed him. I should think that about 150 lbs. would be the extreme weight of the largest bucks of this variety when cleaned, but there are stories of exceptionally large white-tail bucks in the Okanagau district of British Columbia, and the heads which come from that country are certainly very fine. Mr. Rowland Ward gives 27⅛ ins. as the length and 19 ins. as the span of the best head of this deer known to him.
(7) The Black-Tail (C. columbianus)
Although not quite so exasperating an animal as C. virginianus, this, the common deer of Vancouver Island, of the islands all along the Pacific coast from Victoria to Alaska, and of the Pacific slope generally, is desperately fond of thick timber and the deep jungles of noisy sal lal bush. In size C. columbianus is considerably smaller than the mule deer: a buck which would weigh 175 lbs. would be a big buck for Vancouver Island, and I am not aware that the deer of this island are smaller than those of the mainland. But if C. columbianus is small, he is at least abundant. A week from the date of writing this, a friend of mine and myself saw fourteen deer in two days’ still hunting within a drive of Victoria, and a grateful memory of my dinner reminds me that the venison of a yearling buck hung for one week is as good meat as any Esau ever brought home to Isaac. In 1892 a couple of half-breeds sold over eighty bucks in Victoria in two months, and in 1893 the same two (excellent shots and woodsmen) are reported to have killed twenty-two deer in one day. But to hunt deer or anything else upon Vancouver Island a man must be a born woodsman. Where the deer are thickest the woods fairly swallow a man up: every rolling hill is exactly like its neighbour, high peaks are scarce and landmarks very few.
Fortunately the island deer are not as wary as the white-tail, and will generally stand to gaze for a moment after having jumped from their lair amongst the sal lal. Early in the season the neighbourhood of swamps is the likeliest place to find deer, but during the rutting season (middle of October) the old bucks seem to keep to the higher grounds. Like other deer, the black-tail browses on all manner of shrubs and deciduous trees, and, unfortunately for farmers, has a decided weakness for growing crops.