A whitetail runs. A mule deer does something stranger and better — it gathers all four legs and pogos straight up the rimrock like the slope owes it nothing.
By Elk Glade Editorial3 min read
The first time you watch a mule deer leave, you don't quite believe what you saw.
A whitetail, jumped, runs — flat out, tail up, flagging white, pouring over the ground. A mule deer does something else entirely. It gathers all four legs underneath it and bounces — stiff-legged, springing off the ground like it's mounted on pogo sticks, sailing up a slope of broken rimrock that would slow anything else to a scramble. Biologists call it stotting, and the first time you see a big buck do it across a boulder field, going up like the mountain owes him nothing, it stops you cold.
It looks inefficient and it isn't. That bounding gait is built for exactly the steep, rocky, broken country mule deer call home — it lets them change direction in midair, clear obstacles a running deer would have to go around, and put a slope between themselves and a mountain lion in a hurry. Some scientists think it also tells the predator something: I see you, and I'm too fit to bother chasing. On our country, the mule deer are quieter and more solitary than the elk, drifting the edges at first and last light, and you often see them before you hear a thing.
Watch one bounce off into the rimrock at dawn and you understand the animal in a way no field guide gives you. There's a guide to how they live if you want the details — but the bounce you have to see.
Some animals run from the country. The mule deer dances up it.
