294 AN AMERICAN HUNTER 



had we left the little town of Gardiner and gotten within 

 the limits of the Park before we saw prongbuck. There 

 was a band of at least a hundred feeding some distance 

 from the road. We rode leisurely toward them. They 

 were tame compared to their kindred in unprotected 

 places; that is, it was easy to ride within fair rifle range 

 of them ; and though they were not familiar in the sense 

 that we afterwards found the bighorn and the deer to 

 be familiar, it was extraordinary to find them showing 

 such familiarity almost literally in the streets of a fron- 

 tier town. It spoke volumes for the good sense and 

 law-abiding spirit of the people of the town. During 

 the two hours following my entry into the Park we rode 

 around the plains and lower slopes of the foothills in 

 the neighborhood of the mouth of the Gardiner and 

 we saw several hundred probably a thousand all told 

 of these antelopes. Major Pitcher informed me that 

 all the pronghorns in the Park wintered in this neigh- 

 borhood. Toward the end of April or the first of May 

 they migrate back to their summering homes in the 

 open valleys along the Yellowstone and in the plains 

 south of the Golden Gate. While migrating they go 

 over the mountains and through forests if occasion de- 

 mands. Although there are plenty of coyotes in the Park, 

 there are no big wolves, and save for very infrequent 

 poachers the only enemy of the antelope, as indeed the 

 only enemy of all the game, is the cougar. 



Cougars, known in the Park, as elsewhere through the 

 West, as "mountain lions," are plentiful, having increased 

 in numbers of recent years. Except in the neighborhood 



