The third deer I saw on Saturday morning was a buck. A small three-point, standing broadside at less than a hundred meters.

A perfect opportunity for someone to harvest their deer, but since all the puddles in the road still had skeins of ice covering them, we were apparently the first ones down that road that day. So the buck trotted off into a draw, and we moved on to try to find more hunters, on this the last weekend of the deer season.

Second buck of the day was dead, laying in the back of a pickup truck. The hunter and his grandson parked inside, finishing up lunch as they waited for the son/father to come out of the hills from his hike. They found this buck not ten minutes after we parted company early in the morning. Got the lymph nodes for CWD testing, and, as with several others this year, the hunter was able to give me the exact coordinates of his kill from his GPS.

About an hour or so later, I found myself driving past the overlook, for the third time that day, and again wondering why you never see deer on the steep white cliffs off to the right. I mean, the masked heeler and I had just spent five to ten minutes watching a couple does and two fawns cross the road and sip from a puddle right in front of us. Then bail over the cattleguard to drop down a slope too steep for me to even consider following with the camera.

So, if they can traverse that sage and pine covered slope, why not the white cliffs?

And there, standing on the white cliffs for the first time that I can remember, was a deer. Another young buck.

As we sat and watched, he slowly worked his way out onto the cliffs, lingering briefly under trees to see if we had noticed him. Until he finally ended up where he didn't want to go any further.

Slowly he worked his way back where he started, towards us. By then, one of the does and her twins had reached the base of the white cliffs, and were meandering up to feed. The rut has obviously started, at least as far as the bucks are concerned, for the buck was soon trying to put his nose up her tail.

Something she had absolutely no interest in, coyly jumping away each time, trying to keep a decent distance between the two of them. The fawns were left behind as the doe led the young buck back onto the cliffs, right to the spot where he had turned back earlier.

You can see the wary hesitation in his face as he stares down the white face, but she barely slowed down where he had turned back, and leapt off onto another ledge. Now, it says something about the strength of reproductive urges, or maybe just the size of the brain that males think with, but where he turned back not ten minutes before, the buck was now perfectly willing to go, provided there was a female there ahead of him.

And back and forth they went, zig-zagging down the cliff from ledge to ledge, the buck never more than a few leaps behind the doe, until they disappeared in the canyon and trees below.

The fawns left side-by-side high on the cliff, until their mother can shake her suitor and circle back to them.

In the rest of the afternoon, we managed to check one elk hunter, one other deer (the father/son's of the three-generation hunting party), inspect the beaver damage to cottonwoods along the river (quite extensive, we'll soon have nothing but pines and junipers for the bald eagles to roost in during winter) and redig the waterbars I put in and have been maintaining on one of the back country roads.

The three-generation hunting party reported spotting one of our bighorn rams, so we managed a brief detour up a steep switchback road to check him out. And there we found him, peaceably wiling the afternoon away.

Oh, and we surprised six cow and calf elk crossing the main road. The season is still open for these animals, too, and I have a perfectly valid license in my pocket.

So, what did I frantically grab for as they trotted across not 75 meters in front of us?

The camera, of course. And I was too slow with that, too.

I had promised the wife I would be home early, so we found ourselves headed home a good hour before sunset. But since we found only three hunters all day, and checked two of them four times, I don't think I missed much hunting activity.

Did manage to surprise one more buck on the drive home, sneaking across the road to the river in the dim light in the canyon.

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