ANTELOPES AND DEER in 



scientific world, and Audubon declared he had "proved to the 

 contrary." Although hunters had frequently asserted that the 

 animal shed its horns every year, it remained for some years a 

 matter of doubt until a specimen in confinement afforded actual 

 and visible proof of the peculiarity. 



It is worth noticing also that the white stern of the Prongbuck 

 acts as a sort of danger signal in the same way as the upturned 

 tail of the Rabbit. When it is necessary for this danger signal to 

 be increased in area, the animal "cocks" its tail and thus displays 

 the white under side. Thompson Seton has described it as "a 

 great double disk or chrysanthemum of white that shines afar like a 

 patch of snow." 



Mr. Ernest IngersoU gives a full account of this beast in his 

 Life of Mammals. He says that "the life of our Antelope is 

 very simple. It is the genius of the dry, gravelly, bunch-grass 

 plains, where it finds in the sun-cured nutritious herbage, relieved 

 each Spring by a juicy new growth, all the sustenance it craves. 

 Wooded spaces it naturally avoids, not only because it has no 

 appetite for leaves and twigs, but because thickets shelter Wolves 

 and Wild Cats ; 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 con- 

 ditions in its home, the Pronghorn seeks cover more than formerly. 

 It has no Goat-like 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; these fawns are not spotted, but plain dun miniatures 

 of the mother, and for the first few days lie motionless 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 defence of lowered horns (which are short, sharp and 

 unforked) and striking feet, to seize the tender youngling. I have 

 told at length elsewhere 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 



