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 the fur houses of Seattle, and the sight gave me much concern.

THE CARIBOU, GENERALLY.—­I think it is not very difficult to forecast the future of the Genus Rangifer in North America, from the logic of the conditions of to-day.  Thanks to the splendid mass of information that has been accumulated regarding this group, we are able to draw certain conclusions.  I think that the caribou of the Canadian Barren Grounds and northeastern Alaska will survive in great numbers for at least another century; that the caribou herds of Newfoundland will last nearly as long, and that in fifty years or less all the caribou of the great northwestern wilderness will be swept away.

The reasons for these conclusions are by no means obscure, or farfetched.

In the first place, the barren-ground caribou are to-day enormously numerous,—­undoubtedly running up into millions.  It can not be possible that they are being killed faster than they are breeding; and so they must be increasing.  Their food supply is unlimited.  They are protected by two redoubtable champions,—­Jack Frost and the Mosquito.  Their country never will contain a great human population.  The natives are so few in number, and so lazy, that even though they should become supplied with modern firearms, it is unlikely that they ever will make a serious impression on the caribou millions.  The only thing to fear for the barren-ground caribou throngs is disease,—­a factor that is beyond human prediction.

It is reasonably certain that the Barren Grounds never will be netted by railways,—­unless gold is discovered over a wide area.  The fierce cold and hunger, and the billions of mosquitoes of the Barren Grounds will protect the caribou from the wholesale slaughter that “civilized” man joyously would inflict—­if he had the chance.