One early summer day in 2018, in the southern end of the Wyoming Range, a mule deer doe told her 1-year-old fawn to scram.

The young one did. But she didn’t linger around the mountain meadows where she had been born, like other yearlings kicked to the metaphorical curb by their birthing mothers. Perhaps out of a wandering spirit, or teenage petulance, F210, as she is known, went out on her own.

Far out.

In fact, she spent a month making a 120-mile trek out and back over mountains and through foothills in country she’d never seen. Maybe she was one of those deer paving a new migratory route, researchers thought. Or she was looking for somewhere better than where her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother trekked.

Or maybe she was just in a mood.

Because by mid-summer, F210 return

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