One of my dreams is hunt mule deer in the West. I don’t care where in the West. I just want to go out on into that big country, wander around the rocks and cliffs and sage brush, climb out onto a high vista, and glass the scenery for antlers.
I am from the land of white-tails. White-tails are the ultimate habitat generalists, and in “settling” and “civilizing” these Eastern lands, we have create a paradise for them. They can wander the forest devouring acorn after acorn, and they can grow fat and glossy in the fields of soybeans and corn.
The mule deer is a different animal. It migrates from higher elevations to lower ones. It likes much more open forests and grasslands and sagebrush steppes.
Current taxonomy says that the various forms of mule deer and the two subspecies of black-tailed deer represent a single species, but the black-tails are creatures of the Pacific Coast forests. They are different entity in my mind, though I’m sure the deer exchange genes where one form’s range runs into another without any consideration of human classification.
These arid and semi-arid land mule deer, though, are what has me fascinated. The mature bucks are rather large and impressive, more so than the equivalent white-tails. But I do not think of them so highly because they are larger. I think of them so highly because they have a Western mystique. They are not such habitat generalists in the way white-tails are.
They are beings of a more specific landscape, a landscape that is under threat in part because oil and gas development, housing speculation, and overgrazing by livestock are taking their toll. The spread of cheatgrass, which grows into lovely fire tinder, is also to blame. The fires that spread from its stalks wipe out the sagebrush, which the mule deer rely upon to feed them through the winter.
So the white-tail basks in the glory that is our civilization, as the mule deer continues to retreat and withdraw from it. And in this, I find their true appeal.
I hope that when I will get a chance go West on a mule deer hunt before it is too late. I can see a time when the deer will become so hard-pressed that hunting opportunities will be curtailed, even abolished. I hope that we will be wise in our understanding what is happening to these deer before they lose the range and forage on which they so clearly depend.
To hunt mule deer is to go nearer to the wilderness, perhaps even into it. It is an odd little romantic dream of mine at which I’m sure some Westerners will laugh.
But these deer still exist in the sage and rocks and grasses. They are the setting sun, casting away beyond the Western horizon, beckoning me across the continent to cross the prairies and the mountains.
And someday, I hope to. Before it’s too late.
