THE RANCHMAN'S RIFLE ON CRAG AND PRAIRIE 



^33 



rifle, exactly as still more exceptional individuals perform marvelous feats 

 with the revolver ; but even these men, when they have to guess their 

 distances, miss very often when firing at game three hundred yards, or 

 thereabouts, distant. 



As in all other kinds of big-game shooting, success in hunting ante- 

 lope often depends upon sheer, downright luck. A man may make a 

 week's trip over good ground and get nothing; and then again he may 

 go to the same place and in two days kill a wagon-load of venison. 



In the fall the prairie fires ravage the land, for at the close of sum- 

 mer the matted, sun-dried grass burns like tinder, and the fires are some- 

 times so numerous as to cover whole counties beneath a pall of smoke, 

 while at night they look very grand, burning in curved lines of wavering 

 flame, now advancing fastest at one point, now at another, as if great red 

 snakes were writhing sideways across the prairie. The land across which 

 they have run remains a blackened, charred waste until the young grass 

 begins to sprout in the spring. The short, tender blades at once change 

 the cinder-colored desert into a bright emerald plain, and are so much 

 more toothsome than the dry, withered winter grass that both stock and 

 game forsake the latter and travel out to the tracts of burned land. The 

 feed on these places is too sparse to support, of itself, horses or cattle, 

 who accordingly do not penetrate far beyond the edges; but antelope are 

 like sheep, and prefer scanty, short herbage, and in consequence at this 

 time fairly swarm in the burned districts. Indeed, they are sometimes so 

 numerous that they can hardly be stalked, as it is impossible to approach 

 any animal without being seen by some of its countless comrades, which 

 at once run off and give the alarm. 



While on these early spring trips we sometimes vary the sport, and 

 our fare as well, by trying our rifles on the mallards in the reedy sloughs, 

 or on the jack rabbits as they sit up on their haunches to look at us, 

 eighty or a hundred yards off Now and then we creep up to and kill the 

 cock prairie fowl, when they have gathered into their dancing rings to 

 posture with outstretched neck and outspread wings as they shuffle 

 round each other, keeping up a curious clucking and booming that accord 

 well with their grotesque attitudes. 



Late in the season any one of us can usually get antelope in a day's 

 hunt from the ranch by merely riding off alone, with a good hunting 

 horse, to a great tract of broken, mound-dotted prairie some fifteen miles 

 off, where the prong-horns are generall}^ abundant. 



On such a trip I leave the ranch house by dawn, the rifle across my 

 saddle-bow, and some strips of smoked venison in the saddle-pockets. In 



