Some deer have far too much curiosity, too much desire to know "What is that?" and "What is it all about?" The startled mule deer leaps out, jumps a hundred feet or more at a great pace, then foolishly stops and looks back, to gratify his curiosity. That is the hunter's chance; and that fatal desire for accurate information has been an important contributory cause to the extermination of the mule deer, or Rocky Mountain "black-tail," throughout large areas. In the Yellowstone Park the once-wild herds of mule deer have grown so tame under thirty years of protection that they completely overrun the parade ground, the officers' quarters, and even enter porches and kitchens for food. Several authors have remarked upon the habits of the elephant, llama and guanaco in returning to the same spot; and this reminds me of a coincidence in my experience that few persons will believe when I relate it. In the wild and weird bad-lands of Hell Creek, Montana, I once went out deer hunting in company with the original old hermit wolf-hunter of that region, named Max Sieber. With deep feeling Max told me of a remarkable miss that he had made the previous year in firing at a fine mule deer buck from the top of a small butte; for which I gave him my sympathy. In the course of our morning's tramp through the very bad-lands that were once the ancestral home of the giant carnivorous dinosaur, yclept _Tyrannosaurus rex,_ we won our way to the foot of a long naked butte. Then Sieber said, very kindly: "If you will climb with me up to the top of this butte I will show you where I missed that big buck." It was not an alluring proposition, and I thought things that I did not speak. However, being an Easy Mark, I said cheerfully, "All right, Max. Go ahead and show me." We toiled up to a much-too-distant point on the rounded summit, and as Max slowed up and peered down the farther side, he pointed and began to speak. "He was standing right down there on that little patch of bare-- why!" he exclaimed. "_There's a dee-er there now!_ But it's a doe! Get down! Get down!" and he crouched. Then I woke up and became interested. "It is _not_ a doe, Max. I see horns!"--Bang! And in another five seconds a fine buck lay dead on the very spot where Sieber's loved and lost buck had stood one year previously. But that was only an unbelievable coincidence,--unbelievable to all save old Max. The natural impulse of the mule deer of those bad-lands when flushed by a hunter is to _run over a ridge,_ and escape over the top; but that is bad judgement and often proves fatal. It would be wiser for them to run _down,_ to the bottoms of those gashed and tortuous gullies, and escape by zig-zagging along the dry stream beds. The White-Tailed, or Virginia Deer is the wisest member of the Deer Family in North America, and it will be our last big-game species to become extinct. It has reduced self-preservation to an exact science.