It is a great pity that just now political conditions are completely estopping wild-life protection in Mexico; but it is true.  If the code of proposed laws that I drew up (by request) in 1908 and submitted to Minister Molina were adopted, it would have a good effect on the fauna of Mexico.

In Mexico there is little hoofed game to kill,—­deer of the white-tail groups, seven or eight species; the desert mule deer; the brocket; the prong-horned antelope, the mountain sheep and the peccary.  The deer will not so easily be exterminated, but the antelope and sheep will be utterly destroyed.  They will be the first to go; and I think they can not by any possibility last longer than ten years.  Is it not too bad that Mexico should permit her finest species of hoofed and horned game to be obliterated before she awakens to the desirability of conservation!  The Mexicans could protect their small stock of big game if they would; but in Lower California they are leasing huge tracts of land to cattle companies, and they permit the lessees to kill all the wild game they please on their leased lands, even with the aid of dogs.  This is a vicious and fatal system, and contrary to all the laws of nations.

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CHAPTER XVII

PRESENT AND FUTURE OF NORTH AMERICAN BIG GAME

(Concluded)

THE WHITE-TAILED DEER.—­Five hundred years hence, when the greed and rapacity of “civilized” man has completed the loot and ruin of the continent of North America, the white-tailed deer will be the last species of our big game to be exterminated.  Its mental traits, its size, its color and its habits all combine to render it the most persistent of our large animals, and the best fitted to survive.  It neither bawls nor bugles to attract its enemies, it can not be called to a sportsman, like the moose, and it sticks to its timber with rare and commendable closeness.  When it sees a strange living thing walking erect, it does not stop to stare and catch soft-nosed bullets, but dashes away in quest of solitude.

The worst shooting that I ever did or saw done at game was at running white-tailed deer, in the Montana river bottoms.

For the reasons given, the white-tail exists and persists in a hundred United States localities from which all other big game save the black bear have been exterminated.  For example, in our Adirondacks the moose were exterminated years and years ago, but the beloved wilderness called the “North Woods” still is populated by about 20,000 deer, and about 8,000 are killed annually.  The deer of Maine are sufficiently numerous that in 1909 a total of 15,879 were killed.  With some assistance from the thin sprinkling of moose and caribou, the deer of Maine annually draw into that state, for permanent dedication, a huge sum of money, variously estimated at from $1,000,000 to $2,000,000.  In spite of heavy slaughter, and vigorous attempts at extermination by over-shooting, the deer of northern Michigan obstinately refuse to be wiped out.