i 3 4 AN AMERICAN HUNTER 



and often stand looking at the hunter just barely within 

 very long rifle-range, they are always tempting their pur- 

 suer to the expenditure of cartridges. More shots are 

 wasted at antelope than at any other game. They would 

 be even harder to secure were it not that they are subject 

 to fits of panic folly, or excessive curiosity, which occa- 

 sionally put them fairly at the mercy of the rifle-bearing 

 hunter. 



In the old days the prongbuck was found as soon as 

 the westward-moving traveller left the green bottom- 

 lands of the Mississippi, and from thence across to the 

 dry, open valleys of California, and northward to Canada 

 and southward into Mexico. It has everywhere been 

 gradually thinned out, and has vanished altogether from 

 what were formerly the extreme easterly and westerly 

 limits of its range. The rates of extermination of the dif- 

 ferent kinds of big game have been very unequal in 

 different localities. Each kind of big game has had its 

 own peculiar habitat in which it throve best, and each 

 has also been found more or less plentifully in other re- 

 gions where the circumstances were less favorable; and in 

 these comparatively unfavorable regions it early tends 

 to disappear before the advance of man. In consequence, 

 where the ranges of the different game animals overlap 

 and are intertwined, one will disappear first in one local- 

 ity, and another will disappear first where the conditions 

 are different. Thus the whitetail deer had thrust for- 

 ward along the very narrow river bottoms into the do- 

 main of the mule-deer and the prongbuck among the foot- 

 hills of the Rocky Mountains, and in these places it was 



