w York have
caused a great migration of deer into those once-depopulated
regions,--in fact, right down to tide-water.

THE MULE DEER.--This will be the first member of the Deer Family to
become extinct in North America outside of the protected portions of its
haunts. Its fatal preference for open ground and its habit of pausing to
stare at the hunter have been, and to the end will be, its undoing.
Possibly there are now two of these deer in the United States and
British Columbia for every 98 that existed forty years ago, but no more.
It is a deer of the bad lands and foothills, and its curiosity is fatal.

The number of sportsmen who have hunted and killed this fine animal in
its own wild and picturesque bad-lands is indeed quite small. It has
been four-fifths exterminated by the resident hunter and ranchman, and
to-day is found in the Rocky Mountain region most sparingly. Ten years
ago it seemed right to hunt the so-called Rocky Mountain "black-tail" in
northwestern Montana, because so many deer were there it did not seem to
spell extermination. Now, conditions have changed. Since last winter's
great slaughter in northwestern Montana, of 11,000 hungry deer, the
species has been so reduced that it is no longer right to kill mule deer
anywhere in our country, and a universal close season for five years is
the duty of every state which contains that species.

THE REAL BLACK-TAILED DEER, of the Pacific coast, (_Odocoileus
columbianus_) is, to most sportsmen of the Rocky Mountains and the East
actually less known than the okapi! Not one out of every hundred of them
can recognize a mounted head of it at sight. It is a small,
delicately-formed, delicately-antlered understudy of the big mule deer,
and now painfully limited in its distribution. It is _the_ deer of
California and western Oregon, and it has been so ruthlessly slaughtered
that today it is going fast. As conditions stand to-day, and without a
radical change on the part of the people of the Pacific coast, this very
interesting species is bound to disappear. It will not be persistent,
like the white-tailed deer, but in the heavy forests, it will last much
longer than the mule deer.

My information regarding this deer is like the stock of specimens of it
in museum collections,--meager and unsatisfactory. We need to know in
detail how that species is faring to-day, and what its prospects are for
the immediate future. In 1900, I saw great piles of skins from it in th