262 
FRANK FORESTER’S FIELD SPORTS. 
ANTELOPE HUNTING. 
O be honest with you, gentle and dear 
reader, this, as yet, can scarcely be 
called a sport, and it is even doubtful 
whether it ever will be so; for so 
wild, so wary, and so ineffably fleet 
of foot is this beautiful little creature, 
that the speed of hounds and horses, 
the skill, the science, and the arras of 
man, are alike almost vain against it. 
Hitherto it has been pursued by none but the wild Indian 
warrior, and the scarcely less wild hunter or trapper of the 
prairies. Few are the civilized men who have chased it—a 
few amateurs, who have braved the long marches and precari¬ 
ous supplies, the perils and the terrors of the wilderness, with 
the officers of the gallant little frontier garrisons, the few scien¬ 
tific explorers of those far solitudes, and the yet fewer spirited 
and well-nurtured adventurers, whom the promotion of their 
fortunes, coupled to something perchance of a truant dispo¬ 
sition, has led overland to trade in the Spanish countries, or to 
explore the mineral regions—these are the only persons who 
have hitherto in America pursued the Prong-horn Antelope. 
Its speed is recounted to be such that, even when taken at 
advantage, so as to admit of being pursued by relays of horses, 
a fresh one started as fast as the last fell weary, it has been very 
rarely run down in the field. 
It is usually stalked by the white hunter, as the Elk or Deer; 
but its wary or timorous nature, its habits of feeding on the tops 
