At Sand Creek Ranch, mule deer filter into the hills above the Duchesne River during late November, after the general deer season.

Surely we didn't have to pull the scopes off the day before the opener! "Sorry, that's how the regulations read," said the Utah wildlife officer. "But this is an any-weapon season," I pointed out. "Limiting muzzleloaders to iron sights or 1X scopes is nonsense if you can also hunt with a .30 magnum and a high-power variable."

"Point taken," came the reply over the phone. "We implemented the 1X rule to discourage hunters from taking unreasonably long shots with muzzleloaders. It should reduce crippling. Anyway, regulations stipulate any legal weapon for this hunt. In Utah, a muzzleloader with a 3-9X scope is not a legal weapon."

The rule was clear. We had twenty minutes to zero four muzzleloaders with irons.

"When I was growing up here, a lot of people shot more than one deer," said Tom Giles, stuffing a sabot charge into a Knight rifle. Tom now manages Sand Creek Ranch for the Adams brothers, who own the place and visit periodically from their Atlanta digs.

"It was hard to imagine running out of deer." But beginning in the late 1960s, mule deer numbers across the West began an inexorable slide. "We'd all like to see good hunting return. Limiting take is one way to do that," he said.

A mix of cover types and terrain appeal to big game year-round. Sand Creek, on the skirts of the Uintas, in Utah, holds deer and elk in aspen forests and rimrock conifers. Shiras moose also winter here.

No one can point to a single cause for the plight of mule deer over much of their native range. It's clear to most biologists that several factors came into play. The halcyon days of deer hunting in the West--those two decades following World War II--were marked by conditions unlikely to return. Easy winters still come along often enough; but we don't allow aggressive predator control, including poisons and aerial gunning--common practice back then.

Water development is a high priority on the Sand Creek Ranch--for deer and elk as well as cattle.

Changes in range management played a part, too. Domestic sheep nibble some of the same bushes deer eat, so heavily trafficked sheep range cannot support large deer herds. On the other hand, brush eradication by ranchers expanding grassland for cattle doesn't benefit deer either.

Light grazing by sheep can stimulate shrubs to produce new growth that nourish and provide cover for mule deer. As cattle replaced sheep on many ranges, brush became rank and unpalatable. Grazing stimulated grasses the same way browsing enhanced the value of shrubs. Elk followed the cattle and prospered. While the popular theories that elk and whitetails "drive mule deer out of the country" are suspect, there's little doubt that subtle changes in habitat favoring elk and whitetails have proven detrimental to mulies.

Then there's hunting. Sportsmen often dismiss their impact on game, pointing out that were it not for hunters, there'd be less wildlife of any kind. Hunters do fund almost all wildlife management and are solely responsible for the twentieth-century revival of most native game species. But some animals do not fare well under the hunting pressure we allow today.

Mule deer are, for the most part, open-country animals--hard to nail with an arrow or a patched roundball. Scoped rifles hurling spitzer bullets at 3,000 fps, however, kill at much greater range. Powerful scopes that make distant deer appear easy to hit prompt long shooting that cripples bucks. Should hunting regulations ever limit deer hunters to the artillery in common use even fifty years ago, bigger antlers would probably result.