150 AN AMERICAN HUNTER 



help of my glasses, to catch sight of the prongbucks be- 

 fore they saw me. I speedily found, by the way, that if 

 they were too plentiful this was almost impossible. The 

 more abundant deer are in a given locality the more apt 

 one is to run across them, and of course if the country is 

 sufficiently broken, the same is true of prongbucks; but 

 where it is very flat and there are many different bands in 

 sight at the same time, it is practically impossible to keep 

 out of sight of all of them, and as they are also all in 

 sight of one another, if one flees the others are certain 

 to ta,ke the alarm. Under such circumstances I have usu- 

 ally found that the only pronghorns I got were obtained 

 by accident, so to speak; that is, by some of them unex- 

 pectedly running my way, or by my happening to come 

 across them in some nook where I could not see them, or 

 they me. 



Prongbucks are very fast runners indeed, even faster 

 than deer. They vary greatly in speed, however, precise- 

 ly as is the case with deer; in fact, I think that the aver- 

 age hunter makes altogether too little account of this 

 individual variation among different animals of the same 

 kind. Under the same conditions different deer and ante- 

 lope vary in speed and wariness, exactly as bears and cou- 

 gars vary in cunning and ferocity. When in perfect con- 

 dition a full-grown buck antelope, from its strength and 

 size, is faster and more enduring than an old doe; but a 

 fat buck, before the rut has begun, will often be pulled 

 down by a couple of good greyhounds much more speed- 

 ily than a flying yearling or two-year-old doe. Under 

 favorable circumstances, when the antelope was jumped 



