Our American pronghorn "antelope" is the second of these intermediate animals, and is not far removed in its structure from our white mountain goat. It foreshadows the sheathed-horned ruminants, but differs from all of them in the fact that its horns bear a prong, and also in that they are periodically shed and renewed. This beautiful and graceful little animal, truly antelopelike in form and habit, stands about three feet high at the shoulder, has slender legs and feet, with no false hoofs, and is exceedingly swift in its bounding gait. It is now almost gone from the wide plains where only a few years ago it was to be seen in summer from the Saskatchewan to the Rio Grande and southward. In the autumn it would gather in the North into ever-increasing herds that swept southward to pass the winter in Texas and New Mexico, and then would return northward with the advance of spring. The extension of fenced ranching, but most of all the spanning of the plains by railroads, rapidly put an end to these migrations, and the wasteful killing of the pronghorns in sport, or as food, completed the virtual extermination of one of the most interesting and desirable animals of the New World.
[CHAPTER XXXII]
SOME SUPREMELY USEFUL ANIMALS
The fact that likeness of structure, which compels naturalists to group certain animals into a family in spite of possible unlikeness in size or form, is accompanied by resemblance in quality, is well illustrated by the family Bovidæ (Latin boves, "cattle") which includes goats, sheep, antelopes, and oxen; for all of these in flesh, products and disposition, are alike suited to the requirements of men, and especially of mankind in a social civilization. This family of animals furnishes us with nearly all of our milk, butter, and cheese; with flesh food, woolen clothing, leather goods, horn, gelatin, etc.: and gives us such servants as the ox and goat; while sportsmen find in it the most fascinating of their larger game.
The distinctive feature of this most useful of animal tribes is the possession of hollow horns, properly so called. Horn is a chitinous material developed from the skin, and not dissimilar to hair; indeed it would be no great stretch of facts to say that a cow's horn was composed of agglutinated hairs. These horns are sheaths that grow over cores of bone—outgrowths of the skull—increase in size until their wearers are mature, grow at the base as fast as worn at the tips, and are never shed. They may be borne by the males alone, or by both sexes; or the males may have horns far larger than those of the female, as in the sheep; and in a few cases both sexes are hornless. No family is more difficult to subdivide, for the various forms intergrade inextricably.
Our mountain goat, or "mazama," which dwells on the snowy heights of the Pacific Coast ranges, from southern British Columbia to farthest Alaska, is one of these intermediate ones, suggesting both goat and antelope in its make-up. It is about the size of an ordinary domestic goat, has small, sharp, black horns, and is clothed in long white hair with an undercoat of wool fitting it for the wintry cold in which its life is spent, for except in midwinter it never comes below timber line, and even then avoids the wooded places. In the rough mountains of Japan lives a similar goat antelope, woolly, but not white; and the lofty heights of western China is the home of a smaller one, the goral, and the Himalayas have the big serow. All these have short, sharp horns rising from the top of the skull. Their nearest western neighbor is the famous chamois of the Alps and Carpathians of Europe. The extraordinary agility of these mountaineers is possible because of the pads beneath their hoofs that give them the clinging surefootedness which is so remarkable.
Most closely allied to them, probably, are the goats, also denizens of mountain regions, the typical species being confined to the highlands between the Caucasus and northwestern India. This is the true goat from which the domestic goat is descended; but the long-haired "Angora" goat is derived from the markhor, a sheeplike animal of the Himalayas with tall, much twisted horns. One of the special characteristics of the goats (genus Capra) is the beard of the rams; and this feature belongs also to the ibexes, several similar species of which are found from the Pyrenees eastward along the mountain tops to northern China, each occupying a limited section of country, and one inhabiting the mountains about the head of the Red Sea. That of Spain is called "bouquetin," and that of the Alps "steinbok." All the rams possess great horns, sometimes fifty inches long, that rise from the occiput, curve backward, and show on their fronts a series of prominent cross ridges. One passes from these goats to their near relatives, the sheep, by way of the "bharal" (or "burrel") which combines the characteristics of the two sections so thoroughly that the proverbial "separating the sheep from the goats," easy enough on the farm, is practically impossible among wild flocks. In this crag-loving wanderer the horns of the rams are as long as those of an ibex, but roundish and wide spreading, instead of upright and cross-ridged. The "aoudad," whose home is in the mountains of Morocco and Algiers, and which is familiar in menageries, has such horns, but approaches nearer in other respects to the typical sheep, whose rams carry the great spiral horns at the side of the head, that are still the pride of our domestic merinos, and were the badge of the Theban god of gods, Ra Ammon. No better example of these magnificent mountaineers, which under one or another of several specific and local names, such as argali, oorial, etc., are, or were, to be found on rough highlands all the way from the Mediterranean to Bering Sea, can be shown than our own "bighorn" sheep of the Rocky Mountains, and of the mountains of Canada and Alaska.
Now we come to the great and beautiful section of the antelopes, in which naturalists recognize thirty-five genera and perhaps a hundred species. Antelopes were scattered in Pleistocene days all over continental Europe and Asia, but never were present in America, for our so-called "antelope" is a pronghorn, as has been explained. Two or three species now inhabit the plains of central Asia—among them the swiftest mammal known, the Mongolian "orongo." The ungainly "nilgai" and the little "black buck" are familiar in India, and the pretty dorcas gazelle races across the sands of Syria and Arabia; but the vast majority of antelopes belong to Africa. They range in size from the duikerboks, not much bigger than fox terriers, to the eland, which has almost the bulk of an ox, and should be domesticated, like beef cattle, for its excellent flesh. No handsomer mammals than antelopes exist, judged by either form or coloring. They inhabit all sorts of country, too, as in other lands do the deer, of which Africa has none. Deserts, such as the Sahara and the Kalahari, and the stony steppes of Somaliland, support not only the swift and agile gazelles, but several large kinds. The grassy plains of South Africa were formerly, and to some extent still are, the pastures of great herds of such antelopes, large and small, as blesboks, wildebeests (or "gnus"), hartebeests, steinboks, springboks, and many others. Springboks used to assemble at certain seasons, and migrate across the veldt in countless thousands, allowing nothing to stop the headlong rush of the host. The thick jungle is the refuge of the harnessed antelopes, and of several diminutive kinds rarely seen in the open; and along the watercourses, and in marshes, live the big red waterbucks, the shy sitatungas, whose feet are curiously modified to fit them to walk on boggy ground; while rocky hills are the chosen home of the klipspringers and duikerboks, agile pygmies that creep about among the brush like big rabbits, or leap from rock to rock like miniature goats. A score or more of the species of these beautiful creatures have been carelessly or wantonly exterminated, and many others have become rare, but protective laws are now in force in all the parts of Africa controlled by the Government of South Africa, or organized as British, French, or Belgian dependencies.
The quaint and complex musk ox, a lone relic of a past era now exiled to the remotest north, is a connecting link between the sheep and the cattle, the last and best of the ruminants. Here, as elsewhere, the style of the horns is characteristic of the group—slender, backward curved or twisted, and somewhat compressed or keeled, in most antelopes; heavy, cross-ridged, triangular in section and often spiral in the sheep and goats; rough and helmetlike in the musk ox and some buffaloes; and in the oxen round, smooth and always springing from the side of the skull. The cattle fall into three groups: buffaloes, bisons, and oxen.