PAGE 40
February/March 2014
Mule Deer
Vs
Whitetails
By F.L. Waugh
I’ve hunted both for 30 years, and I can sum up the difference between
them in a few words; One’s a sharp operator, the other is a dope…
Jack Regan and I were hunting in
the Speerfish Canyon country of South
Dakota’s Black Hills. When we left
camp that morning we headed for a
timbered pocket near Dry Lake that
usually shelters a good buck or two.
It’s an easy place to hunt, walled in
by rimrock on both sides and funneling
into an open saddle at the upper end. One
man can drive it without even going into
the timber, by walking along the top and
rolling rocks down. If a deer is bedded
in the thickets below, it’s pretty sure to
vamoose. From a stand on the saddle the
second man can cover the whole show,
since there’s no other way for a deer to
go out.
We never know what we’ll jump here,
for the area has a mixed population of
mule deer and whitetails, but we usually
spook something and often as not it’s a
buck.
This time Jack drew the stand. I
gave him half an hour to get located,
then started up the rim, stopping
every minute or two to send a boulder
bouncing down into the timber. I got
When the whitetail with a freak
rack slammed for the cliff, I thought
I had him for sure. But I was wrong.
February/March 2014
results almost at once. A rock smashed into a
thick tangle below me, and a buck went out as if
prodded with a branding iron. I caught a glimpse
of a flag waving from side to side as he ran, so I
knew it was a whitetail. Then Regan’s rifle blast
rolled across the canyon, and I moved on to help
him dress his kill. But I found him zigzagging
across the saddle, searching for a telltale patch
of hair or drop of blood. “Never touched him,”
he confessed when I walked up.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. Guess he was going too fast,”
Jack said ruefully. “He was really burning the
ground. Don’t believe I ever saw a buck run like
that.”
“Good deer?” I asked.
“Five pointer,” Jack said, and I knew he was
measuring the Western way, counting the points
on one side only.
We went back to that same pocket the next
morning, though I’d warned him the buck
wouldn’t be there.
“He’ll keep clear of that place for a week,” I
predicted.
“Likely,” Jack agreed, “but maybe we can
find another good.”
He offered to drive but I sent him back to the
stand, figuring he deserved a second chance. I’d
covered half the pocket when I jumped a deer.
I heard it go out ahead of me, in no great hurry,
and it headed toward Regan. About 100 yards
below him the deer broke into the open, and I
had ringside seat for the show.
There was no flag this time. This was a mule
deer, a hefty four-pointer. It moved at a stifflegged trot on a course that would take it just in
front of my partner. If I ever saw a deer make
things easy for a hunter, this one did. He trotted
within 30 paces of Jack’s stand and stopped to
look back. Jack flattened him with a neck shot.
I’ve hunted deer for close to 30 years, and
those two bucks, the one Regan killed and the
one that got away, illustrate as well as any I’ve
seen the difference in character between mule
deer and whitetails. I can sum it up in a few
words: the whitetail is a sharp operator, the mule
PAGE 41
deer is a dope.
Together they’re the most numerous,
important, and popular trophy game in North
America. One or the other is found from Alaska
to Florida and from Maine to Mexico. In many
places in the West their range overlaps and
occasionally, in areas like the Black Hills where
terrain and cover suit both, they share the same
thickets. That’s not a common situation, however.
In many respects they’re alike. Both are
woodland animals, belong to the same family,
and look much alike. Venison from one tastes
about like venison from the other, taking age
and condition into account. But in ways that
count most with hunters, their behavior and their
personalities are as unlike as if they came from
different planets. If a deer can be compared with
a rabbit, then whitey is a cottontail grown big.
He has the same alert, nervous ways, the same
stealth, speed, and craft. By the same yardstick,
the mule deer is an oversize jack rabbit, with the
same lack of furtiveness and caution, and the
same simple ways.
Basically the whitetail is an animal of thickets
and heavy cover, though he’s as much at home
in farmlands as in forested regions, provided
there are swamps or woodlots for him to hide in.
The muley is a mountain deer, fond of arid hills,
brushy draws, and pockets, and preferring semiopen country to dense timber.
In the Boulder Valley of southwestern
Montana, for example, where mule deer are
native and whitetails have been introduced, the
whitetail herd is thriving, but only in willow
thickets along the Boulder River. They refuse to
spread back to the dry foothills on either side.
The muleys won’t go into the willows. You
can ride the hills for a week without putting a
whitetail out of the timbered washes, and you can
comb the tangles along the river, only a couple
of miles away, for another week and never see a
mule deer.
Because he hangs out in open places, and also
because he’s not too foxy, the muley is far more
likely to show himself than is the whitetail. In
good mule country, it isn’t unusual to see as
PAGE 42
many as 20 to 30 bucks, does, and fawns in a
morning. For me, the sight of that much game
adds a lot of excitement to the hunt, regardless
of whether I get a shot.
That sort of thing isn’t likely to happen while
hunting whitetails.
I said the two look alike, but that depends
on the view you get. Head-on and standing,
you can identify the muley about as far away
as you can see him by his enormous ears. On
a big buck they’ll measure a foot long by close
to five inches wide, and they actually make
him look like a mule. There’s a Colorado yarn
about an Eastern hunter, making his first trip
for mule deer, who knocked over a jug- head
from a rancher’s pack string and had it tagged
and dressed before he noticed it was wearing
iron shoes.
On a small two or three-pointer, as well as on
a spike, those big ears all but cover the antlers,
and more than one hunter operating under a
buck law has passed up a legal muley because he
couldn’t see horns for ears. “They’re all bald,”
a brother-in-law of mine used to complain.
Viewed from the rear, especially when they’re
in headlong flight, there’s also considerable
difference between the mule and the whitetail.
The hall-mark of the whitetail is his flag. When
he’s spooked, and unless he’s hit, he carries it
erect. Waving from side to side, it’s an alarm
signal that often looms plainly in the thickets
when not another hair of the animal can be seen.
In contrast, the muley has a spindling little
black-tipped tail, so small it’s comical, which
he never lifts when in flight. He wears an
identification badge all his own, however —
a yellowish-white rump patch not unlike that
of an elk, and he may switch his tail back and
forth across it as he runs.
Even the racks are different. A typical fourpoint mule deer head will have two forking
V’s on either side, rather than a main beam
with tines branching upward at right angles in
whitetail fashion. If a mule deer has brow tines,
they’re usually short and insignificant-looking.
Sportsmen
familiar
with
whitetails,
February/March 2014
encountering mule deer for the first time,
are likely to be amused at the latter’s gait.
The whitetail moves in long, graceful leaps,
pushing himself air-borne with his hind legs
and returning to earth on his front feet. The
mule bounces along stiff-legged, bunching all
four feet under him for each jump, and taking
off and landing like a four-legged pogo stick.
He can’t match the whitetail for speed, but in
rough, broken country his odd gait gives him
a marked advantage. In addition, he has an
ability to scale ledges and cliffs that is close to
goatlike. If he can get footholds, he’ll fight his
way up an almost vertical face of rock or clay.
The ground-thumping bounce of a frightened
mule deer serves another purpose, too. It’s
a danger signal to others of his kind. Run a
spooked muley within hearing of other muleys,
and the whole bunch lights out. When he runs
over frozen ground, his signal can be heard a
long way.
But the greatest difference between the two
shows up when they’re being hunted. The mule
deer is easier to get close to, more likely to
provide standing shots. Jumped, he picks no
certain route, has no definite destination, and is
in no hurry to get there. He runs helter-skelter,
uphill, downhill, or around hill, or he may not
run at all for several seconds. He never hesitates
to cross an opening. In fact he’ll often run out
in an exposed place and stop to look around.
Not so the whitetail. He rarely ventures out of
cover in daylight unless cornered and pushed
so hard he has no choice.
Spotted through the Black Hills are many
open, grassy areas, 200 to 300 yards across,
that completely surround ridges or hills and
so make islands out of timbered slopes. Jump
a mule deer in one of those islands, and he’ll
break leisurely into the nearest meadow and
skip across to the next ridge or valley. But
spook a whitetail in the same place, and he’ll
skulk and hide, circle you, or even jump over
you rather than show himself.
There’s such an island on the headwaters of
Rapid Creek that we used to drive regularly,
February/March 2014
with only one or two standers spotted in the
meadows around it. There were no mule deer
in that area. If a buck was jumped it would be
a whitetail, and we could count on the drivers
getting the shooting as it tried to cut back
through their line. Only if they put enough heat
on him to force his hand would the standers
ever get a chance, and even then there’d be
nothing haphazard about his performance. He’d
cross the meadow by the shortest route and on a
traveled runway.
My dad guided me into the mysteries of deer
hunting. He’d hunted bucks in the Black Hills
from the time he was old enough to lug a gun
until he died a few years back at 78. He and
his partner, George Coats of Hill City, roamed
that country together for 57 years, and what
they didn’t learn about deer hunting was hardly
worth knowing.
When I started hunting with them we camped
with big parties and took most of our deer by
organized drives. It was efficient — too much
so. Hunting out of Custer one fall, 32 men killed
32 whitetails in three days.
Dad and I drifted away from drives after
that and hunted by ourselves or with one or
two partners. For mule deer we relied chiefly
on still-hunting. If we were after whitetails,
we used a two-man drive system that worked
like a charm. We specialized in combing small
pockets and ridges, picking places we knew
well. Our drives were never more than 500
yards long, and if our spot was carefully chosen
and our teamwork good it rarely took more than
a 200-yard drive to put a deer on the meat pole.
Dad killed his last buck that way. On the first
day of our hunt he sent me to a stand on the
far side of a little pocket and drove through to
me in heavy jackpine and juniper. He jumped
a nice five-point whitetail and pushed him into
me head-on. I walloped him at the base of an
antler and downed him, but he bounded up and
staggered all over the hillside before I got in a
neck shot on the fourth try.
Next morning dad took his turn on a stand
and I made the drive — a short one. I raised a
PAGE 43
three-point whitetail that barreled past dad 30
yards off in thick cover. It was really moving,
but dad rolled him with the customary one shot
from his Winchester .32 Special placed smack
in the point of the shoulder. Not bad for a man
two years short of 80.
We made those little drives pay off
consistently because whitetails are that kind of
deer. Now and then, stillhunting between drives
or while getting to a stand, we picked up a mule
buck as a bonus. The muley is a pushover for
that method. There in the Hills, for instance, if
you stillhunt properly — poking along quietly
and slowly by yourself, halting every few steps
for a careful look around, and concentrating on
early morning and late-afternoon hunting when
game is on the move — the odds are about 10 to
one you’ll fill your license with a mule.
One of the mule’s outstanding traits, as I said
a while back, is his fondness for stopping to
see what’s going on behind. Put him up from
his bed and he’s likely to bounce to his feet,
stand, and stare straight at you. Or he may run
50 yards, stop, and then look back, and eight
times out of 10 he looks long enough to give
you your chance. If you’re wise to his ways,
you can have a standing shot at a muley almost
any time you meet one.
Two falls ago, hunting in the White River
country of Colorado, where I live now, I
surprised a four-point mule buck in his bed. He
was lying behind a twisted juniper at the bottom
of a draw, and there was a tangled belt of sage,
100 feet wide and taller than a man’s head,
running up and down the draw for 400 yards.
Once a deer disappears into that stuff you don’t
even see the brush quiver as he sneaks through,
and this fellow had about two jumps to go. He
made one of them — then pulled up to look
back.
I’d come over the draw’s rim 30 yards above
him, moving quietly, but the whole country
was as dry as buffalo chips, and he heard me
and left his bed as if powered with trap springs.
He was halfway to the sage before I knew he
was there, and if he’d kept going I never would
PAGE 44
have got the .300 to my shoulder. But he wasn’t
sure what he’d heard and had to stop and find
out. He was still looking in my direction when I
rammed a 150-grain Bronze Point into his spine
just ahead of the shoulders.
If you’re a deer hunter I needn’t tell you
that you’d never catch a whitetail buck doing a
thing like that. Jump him, and he knows exactly
where he’s going and rarely stops until he gets
there. Most times he makes for a runway that
leads across a ridge, over a saddle, through a
swamp, or to some other safe place. Surprised
at close range, his best chance lies in flight
through the thickest cover available. He knows
it, and wastes no time looking back.
When he’s ready to bed down he picks his
spot carefully, maybe walks by it, doubles
back, then lies down a few yards off to one side
where he can watch his back track. If he sees,
smells, or hears a man at a distance, he’s likely
to rise quietly to his feet and sneak off, in which
case the man never catches a glimpse of him. If
he’s bedded near a log, thicket, or other heavy
cover, he may even stay where he is, head flat
to the ground, doggo as a nesting grouse, and
you have to step on him to jump him. If that
ruse works, once you’ve gone by he’ll move out
behind you, making about as much commotion
as a cat walking on a velvet rug.
I recall one big whitetail that lay in a clump
of juniper within 10 feet of a trail and let nine
men in our party of 11 walk by him single file
before he finally lost his nerve and spooked.
He’d have done better to stay put, for the hunter
bringing up the rear snapped a hip shot just as
he was disappearing in thick stuff and scored a
lucky hit behind an ear.
The whitetail is born to skulk, and by the
time he’s old enough to sport a desirable rack
he’s very good at it. The first one I ever killed
taught me that. I was in my teens at the time,
camped in the Black Hills with dad and a party
of his cronies. When we decided to drive a long
timbered ridge, they put me on a stand under a
sheer rimrock cliff. The drivers were to come
upslope along the ridge.
February/March 2014
I moved to the stand quietly and sat down
on a stump. Nothing happened for 45 minutes.
Then I heard one of the drivers coming, and I
flagged him down. We stood and talked until we
heard the signal for the drivers to move across
the ridge and start a fresh drive. My companion
was no more than out of sight when a big buck
slammed up from his bed 50 feet to my right.
He was a whitetail, wearing a high, freak rack
you’d never forget, seven points on one side,
eight on the other, a deer to make any hunter’s
mouth water.
When he headed for the rimrock cliff behind
me I knew I had him, for it was 30 feet and
straight up. He couldn’t get over it, there was
no way through and, rattled as I was, I recall
wondering why he ran that way. I soon found
out.
He was going, and I didn’t get hair in my
sights until he was right up under the cliff.
Then, just as I squeezed off, he vanished into
the face of the rock! There was a narrow, steep
crevice there that I couldn’t see from where
I stood. It angled all the way to the top, and
tracks showed the buck used it often. He had
the wits and guts to lie quiet while the driver
walked up to me, while we talked, and while
the second man moved off. He probably never
knew I was in the neighborhood, since I hadn’t
made any disturbance getting to my stand.
I missed him, naturally, and that was the end
of it for that day. But we drove the ridge’s other
slope the next morning, and I picked a stand
just off a runway that led to that hidden slot in
the rimrock.
I hadn’t waited five minutes when I saw him
coming. There was no mistaking that head. The
drivers had jumped him and he was following
his private runway across the ridge. He wasn’t
running. He had time to sneak and he was doing
a neat job of it, slipping along like a shadow,
stopping now and then to listen and look back.
But he pulled a boner. He forgot to take ambush
into account. By the time he passed in front of
me, only five yards away, I was shaking like a
pup with the ague, but I managed to hold steady
February/March 2014
long enough to whop a slug into his shoulder
and he was mine—freak rack and all.
Dunce that he is about some things, the mule
deer has one shrewd trait. That’s his habit of
choosing bed grounds on an elevation where
he has a clear view around him. Like all deer,
he relies on smell and hearing far more than
on sight. His nose is good, and experienced
hunters say he has the best ears of any game
animal in this country. They should be, if size
means anything. But his eyes are only fair.
Like the whitetail, he sees movement fast
enough but takes little notice of things that don’t
move. Even a hunter dressed in bright colors
isn’t likely to catch his attention so long as he
keeps still. But let a heel scuff, a twig break, a
pebble roll, or the wind carry the faintest scent
of man, and he takes notice pronto. Since the
location of his bed gives him a chance to hear,
smell, and see at the same time, it’s all in his
favor. Even so, the stillhunter who watches the
wind and takes it slow and easy, moving a little
and looking a lot, has a good chance of catching
him off guard.
There’s one time when the mule buck is
smarter than the whitetail— when there’s a
doe involved. In those circumstances, even the
craftiest whitetail can be counted on to tag along
after the doe. He’ll bring up the rear, letting his
lady take all the risks, but nine times out of 10
he’ll come through on the runway behind her
sooner or later.
Not so the mule deer. Surprised with a doe,
he figures the whole neighborhood is unhealthy.
While mama bounces off in headlong flight,
attracting everybody’s attention, he quietly
slips out the back door and sneaks away in
another direction.
Hunters familiar with that trick can take
advantage of it, of course. Take the case of the
five-point buck (a 10-pointer to the Easterners)
that dad and I surprised in the Black Hills early
one November morning. We were driving from
camp when the buck walked across an old
fire trail 200 yards ahead. He lammed before
we could get out of the car. He wasn’t badly
PAGE 45
spooked and, since there was fresh snow on the
ground, dad proposed taking his track.
“We’ll have him hanging in a tree in an hour
or two,” he predicted.
I was dubious, for we’d tried that on a
whitetail the year before and drawn a blank.
That one found out we were trailing him,
doubled back, waited until we came along,
and showed us one flick of his flag as he left
the country. Dad reminded me that mule deer
don’t have that kind of savvy, so we started off,
one following the track, the other pussyfooting
along 20 yards to one side.
The rut was at its peak, which was in our
favor, for this buck was more concerned with
finding a receptive lady than with what might
be coming on his trail. Before he’d gone far we
found where two other deer, apparently a doe
and fawn, had left their beds as he strolled up.
The three sets of tracks led down into a brushy
pocket on the hill below, hinting at a cozy tryst.
Dad and I stopped beside the beds and tried
to figure the best way to push them out so as to
get a crack at the buck. We were still standing
there when we heard a clatter in the brush. The
doe and the fawn broke out on the far side and
bounced downhill away from us.
If the buck knew what the hubbub was about
he hadn’t located the cause of it, and he fell
back on the basic safety rule of his kind, “If she
runs one way I’ll run the other.” He pounded
out of the pocket broadside to us, coming uphill
not 30 feet away.
Dad and I had an agreement never to wait for
each other under such circumstances. We fired
so close together that neither heard the other’s
shot. The buck piled up like a wet rag, two
bullet holes in his shoulder an inch apart.
Yes, in many ways the muley’s a dope. But
he’s a still-hunter’s dream deer and, man, how
I love him.
Outdoor Life October 1956
THE END