In Praise of Pronghorn
One of the privileges of my work is that it often takes me to the wildest portion of our country, the Rocky Mountain West. Even if it’s to report a story on natural gas rigs or coal mines, and the foreground view is ugly, wild creatures are always present in one’s peripheral vision. Like anyone else, I have my personal hierarchy. There are wolf lovers, grizzly lovers, elk fanatics (even, or perhaps especially, among those who shoot them for recreation). For me, it’s the pronghorn, Antilocapra americana, although it took me a few years before I understood the full range of reasons for the feelings they provoke.
My first encounter with the wild quadrupeds of the West was with a mule deer. I was mightily unimpressed. The outsize, floppy ears that give the animal its name definitely place it in the category of ugly-cute, and an easterner accustomed to flattened heaps of deerburger on the roads has a hard time seeing any deer as exotic.
Next came bighorn sheep. If I needed any proof of their weirdness, it came in a jaw-dropping set of photographs that a friend in Wyoming sent me. These showed a dozen bighorns clambering around on the almost-sheer face of the Buffalo Bill dam on the Shoshone River, which looks a bit like the one Harrison Ford jumped off in The Fugitive. But then I met my first flock close-up. They had only one set of horns between them, and even those were stumpy and unimpressive. So were they exotic or banal? I was confused.
Elk provoked a similar reaction. The first one I ever saw was in Yellowstone, a magnificent bull with a 14-point rack that looked like an outsize candelabra. Later I heard for the first time the other-worldly screech of a bugling male during the fall rut. But then I checked into a motel in the town of Gardiner, at the north entrance to the park, and found a large group of elk lazing around on the lawn and nibbling at the bushes. So more mixed feelings there, and that goes for buffalo, too.
Admittedly, I still feel a frisson when I see the huge herd spread out around the cottonwoods in Yellowstone’s beautiful Lamar Valley. But ten minutes later I’m stuck in a traffic jam as the tourists spot their first Bison bison and begin clicking away on their cell phone cameras. My fingers start drumming on the steering wheel. Get moving; don’t you realize you’re going to see a zillion of them?
As for grizzlies, I have to make an embarrassing confession. I truly hope they thrive and prosper out there in the wild, but they scare the bejesus out of me. The first one I ever saw was a colossal humped male, hunkered down in the middle of the Lamar river, gnawing on the carcass of a bison, perhaps a casualty of the fights that break out among bulls during the summer mating season. Since then, not even bells and bear spray are enough to tempt me far from the beaten path.
But then came my first pronghorn. I had turned off I-90 between Billings and Bozeman one day, looking for a place called Hunter’s Hot Springs, an abandoned 19th century spa that has a minor role in the book I’ve just finished on the history of Yellowstone. The hot springs weren’t much to look at, just a small stream that was warm to the touch, surrounded by open fields. When I turned around, a pronghorn buck was standing 20 yards away, motionless, staring at me. My first reaction was to its sheer beauty: the slender, curved, spiked horns themselves, the tan and white striping on the neck, the sleek musculature. We stared at each other for a few moments. Then I took a step forward; its nostrils quivered, and it bolted.
Never having seen antelope during my one trip to Africa, I was unprepared for the animal’s sheer speed and grace, and later, as I saw more and more pronghorn, I realized that this was the key to their magic. Bighorns, elk, bison, and bears all provoked feelings of ambivalence. Pronghorns felt pure. There was nothing even semi-domesticated about them. They’re not true antelope, although that is often what people call them. But they look like antelope, and evolution has equipped them with the same capacities. They are the fastest animals in the Western hemisphere, capable of reaching sustained speeds of 50 miles an hour or more, enough to outrun their historic predator, the American cheetah. But the cheetah are long gone from North America now, vanishing during the Pleistocene. The pronghorn remains, uncatchable.
Uncatchable, but not invulnerable, and that’s where we heavy-footed humans enter the picture. It’s hard not to be moved when you see a solitary pronghorn browsing next to the fences that surround the natural gas wells in Sublette County, Wyoming. The gas companies boast about this; they say it proves that their activities have no ill effects on wildlife. But the reality is that the fences and the drill pads are steadily turning the vast open spaces that pronghorn need to thrive into industrial subdivisions.
The last time I saw pronghorn was in June, in the coalfields of the Powder River Basin. There were three of them, a mother and two month-old fawns. She was nosing along the triple strand of barbed wire around one of the mines, trying to figure out a way through. I don’t think it’s anthropomorphic to say that she looked anxious, disoriented, confused. Our insatiable hunger for fossil fuels is penning in the pronghorn, compromising its wildness. And perhaps that’s what completes the spectrum of feelings, from awe to anger, that accounts for the specialness of pronghorn, at least for this one passionate admirer.
