PRONGHORN DOES AND FAWNS 
cured nutritious herbage relieved each spring by a juicy new 
growth all the sustenance it craves. Wooded spaces it natu- 
rally avoids, not only because it has no appetite for 
leaves and twigs, but because thickets shelter wolves 
and wildcats; yet now and then a solitary buck will make a 
grove his hermitage, or a heavy doe retire to some bushy glade 
to be delivered of her fawn. Of late, however, under the 
changed conditions in its home, the pronghorn seeks cover 
more than formerly. It has no goatlike fondness for rocks, 
and rarely climbs the rough slopes of even the foothills. 
The young, usually two, are dropped in May or early June, 
when the mothers have stolen away separately to secret places, 
and the bucks are wandering alone or in small gay parties by 
themselves; and these fawns are not spotted, but plain dun 
miniatures of the mother, and for the first few days lie motion- 
less whatever happens, trusting to be overlooked; but soon 
they get upon their legs and begin to accompany the doe. From 
the start they show an instinctive intelligence in meeting the 
dangers that beset them, clinging, as if bound by a short tether, 
to the heels of the mother when, as so often happens, a coyote 
does its best to get past the valiant doe’s defense of lowered 
horns (which are short, sharp, and unforked) and striking feet, 
to seize the tender youngling. I have told at length else- 
where * of such a battle which I once witnessed on the Wyoming 
plains. Rattlesnakes are another ever present peril, but these 
the antelope, if not first fatally struck, cuts to pieces by stamp- 
ing upon them with quickly repeated bounds, all four hoofs 
alighting together on the reptile’s coils. A pronghorn’s javelin- 
like fore feet are its best weapon, though the bucks — furious 
in their rivalry when forming their harems — push one another 
about with their forked horns. Nowhere is to be read a more 
discerning, intimate, and delightful account of the prongbuck 
than in President Roosevelt’s chapter on it in “The Deer 
Family”; and on this point he notes: — 
U 289 
Habits. 
