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.

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But even so, he seemed particularly calm, almost mule deer-level calm, as he locked eyes with my lens. Unlike their whitetail cousins, mulies tend to take their time assessing the situation before wandering off and that’s how this guy was acting. After a couple of minutes he did turn and walk away but there was no rush about it.

It was a fairly warm day and heavy, wet snow had been falling as I left the city but by the time I got out into the hills it had stopped. Now, a thin grey mist hung over the valleys, clouds filled the sky and the flat light turned the new snow into a dull blanket that covered the grassy pastures and bent the branches on the trees.

A winter wonderland it was not. But it started to look a bit nicer the deeper I went into the foothills valleys.

I rolled through the hills and down toward Millarville hoping I might come across some elk. No luck with that but as I hit the flat valley full of wetlands and willows just north of the Millarville Racetrack, I decided to cut north a bit and hit Coalmine Road, a twisty trail that runs along Fish Creek.........

© Calgary Herald