Watched by Wild Animals — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Watched by Wild Animals
John Stuart Mill · en
I awakened one morning out on the Great Plains to find that in the
dark I had camped near the nursery of a mother antelope and her two
kids. It was breakfast time. Commonly both antelope children nurse at
once, but this morning it was one at a time. Kneeling down, the
suckling youngster went after the warm meal with a morale that never
even considered Fletcherizing. Occasionally he gave a vigorous butt to
hasten milk delivery.
Breakfast over, the mother had these youngsters lie low in the short
grass of a little basin. She left them and began feeding away to the
south. The largest objects within a quarter of a mile were a few
stunted bunches of sagebrush. I moved my sleeping bag a short distance
into an old buffalo wallow and watched her. She fed steadily up a
moderate slope but was always in position where she could see the
youngsters and the approach of anything in the unobstructed opening
round them. This mother was not eating the abundant buffalo grass
celebrated for its nutrition, nor any of the blooming plants. She was
eating, and plainly with relish, simply the gray-green bitter leaves
of the shrubby scattered sage. On reaching the low summit of the
prairie swell she paused for a little while on the skyline, then
started on a run for a water-hole about two miles distant.
A few seconds later a fox-like head peeped over a little ridge a few
hundred feet from the kids. Then a distant bunch of sagebrush
transformed itself into another moving form, and two coyotes trotted
into the scene. Evidently these coyotes knew that somewhere near two
youngsters were hidden. They followed the mother’s trail by scent and
kept their eyes open, looking for the youngsters.
Old antelope have perhaps more numerous scent glands than other big
wild animals, but evidently a young antelope gives off little or no
scent. Its youthful colour blends so well with its surroundings when
it lies down that it is difficult to see it. Once the young flatten
out and freeze upon the grassy earth they offer but little that is
revealing even to the keenest eyes and noses.
Both coyotes paused within a few feet of one of the kids without
either seeing or scenting it. It was flattened out between two clumps
of sagebrush. Finally, unable to find the youngsters, the coyotes
trotted off along the mother’s trail.
I went over to have a look at the children. Though I knew just about
where they were I looked and circled for some time before my eyes
detected them. They were grayish brown with the outlines of future
colour scheme faintly showing. Within two feet of each I stood and
watched them. A fly crawled over the eye and ear of one kid and an ant
over the nose of the other, and yet neither made a move.
For about two weeks, while the legs of the young are developing
liveliness, the mother keeps aloof from her kind. She often has a
trying time with enemies.