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I have been a deer-watcher for most of my life, as I had demonstrated in the opening pages about ìWhere I liveî and the Deer of the Derwood Deerwoods. This is another species of the deer that are whitetail deer around where I live in the Eastern United States, whereas the more typical deer of the Rocky Mountain wilderness areas is the mule deer. There are subspecies in some places of the West such as Columbian Blacktail Deer or the Arizonan Coues Deer or the Alaskan Sitka deer, but the Mule Deer as seen here will be the prototypical deer of the Mountainous West, and here this buck is seen in the typical setting--the high mountain forest of Black Comb in British Columbia.
Michael and I had flown into Vancouver and driven a rental car up the ìSea to Sky Highwayî up to Whistlerís in British Columbia to attend the First World Congress of Wilderness Medicine. While learning about wilderness rescue attempt techniques and other subjects, we would try to sneak out into the real wilderness around us and hike through the spectacular setting of the largest ski resort in north America that had been a lumber camp only ten years before.
On this occasion, we had driven along a fireroad cut by one of the logging operations until the vehicle could go no further, and then had hiked up through a cold rain, unusual for the summer season, we were told. When we had reached the glaciers and snow fields of the higher altitudes, we returned, and paused to watch this mule deer buck, who had picked a very strategic platform from which to oversee the same scenery we were enjoying. I wondered how much of his pose was based in defensive strategy, and how much, like ours, was based in the pure aesthetics of the surroundings?