Maybe it was all the fresh snow that was making the whitetails less skittish.

Usually when I come across whitetail deer they look up, their ears swivel, their tails flip and they’re headed for the hills. If I manage to get a picture at all, most of the time it’s that wide-eyed look of cartoon panic or a set of tan and cream butts receding into the distance.

But today, something was different.

The first whitetail I found was a handsome buck staring at me from a stand of aspens in the Cross Conservancy just southwest of the city. His reaction, I have to admit, wasn’t all that unusual. We’re at the tail end of the rut season so he likely had a lot of mating hormones still coursing through and they were making him bold.

But even so, he seemed particularly calm, almost mule deer-level calm,

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