CHAPTER XIII
PRONGHORN OF THE PLAINS
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.