As soon as the coyotes were out of sight I hastened to the highest
near-by point hoping with glasses to see the mother antelope. She was
just leaving the water-hole. Her movements evidently were a part of a
strategic plan to deceive the watchful eyes and the cunning noses of
enemies, chiefly coyotes. She fed a quarter of a mile south, then ran
on for more than a mile still farther. She then galloped more than two
miles northeast and later, with many doublings which involved her
trail, worked back to the youngsters.
In following and watching the movements of the mother I stumbled over
a lone antelope kid about half a mile from the other two. I returned
later and found that it was entangled between the twisted low-lying
limbs of a sagebrush. Not until I laid hold of the kid to drag it out
did it make a move. Then it struggled and gave a low bleat.
Realizing that this might bring the mother like lightning I let go and
rose up. There she was, coming like the wind, and only four or five
hundred feet away, indifferent to the fact that man is the most
dangerous of enemies. Just how close she might have come, just what
might have happened had I not straightened up at that moment, is sheer
guesswork. But the freed youngster butted me violently behind and then
ran off to meet his mother.
During most of the year the great silent plains are at rest in tawny
and gray brown. The dreamy, sunny distances show only moving cloud
shadows. A brief barrage of dust storm sometimes sweeps across or a
wild drive of tumbleweeds with a front from horizon to horizon goes
bounding and rolling toward the rim, where they go over and vanish.
But these endless distances are palpitating with flowers and song when
the young antelope are born.
One May morning a flock of blackbirds alighted upon a leafy cottonwood
tree--a lone tuft in an empire of treeless distances. They sang all at
once--a whirlwind of song. Two antelope herds were on separate
skylines. The silvery, melodious peal of the yellow-breasted meadow
lark rang out all over the wide wild prairie. Prairie dogs scampered,
barked, and played; butterflies circled and floated above the
scattered and stunted sage; thousands of small birds were busy with
nest and song, and countless ragged spaces of brilliant wild flowers
illuminated the grass-green surface to every horizon.
The antelope is known as the pronghorn, because of a single small
prong on each horn. This prong is more like a guard and serves as a
hilt. In fighting an antelope often catches its opponent’s thrust on
this prong. The horn commonly is less than ten inches long. Many
females do not have horns, and rarely are these fully developed on any
female.
Deer and elk have deciduous horns--that is, horns that are shed
annually. Goat and bighorn never shed their horns. But each year
antelope sheds the outer part--the point and sheath--of the horn,
retaining the stubs or stumps which grow new horns.