A PRAIRIE GOAT COMPANION

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With "8-power"vision and 70 mph legs, the pronghorn is an American wonder.

By David Petersen

The pronghorn's comeback is among the most dramatic in history.

Hanging from the walls or resting on the mantel in the front room of my cabin are the antlers and horns of a variety of wild North American ungulates. Some are attached pairs, others individual beams. None are from animals I have killed myself. A few I picked up from the forest floor during backcountry hikes, others I bartered from friends who bagged them in such unromantic locales as flea markets and garage sales. Their origins don't matter so much to me; they aren't trophies; it's simply their forms I fancy.

There are some unusual and attractive specimens in my little collection, including a beautifully formed 4x5-point rack from a relatively rare Tule elk.But the most interesting piece of ungulate headgear I own is also the least impressive at first glance. Leaned up against the wall at the back of the mantel, its modest form fairly hidden behind a dusty potpourri of flint projectile points, elk teeth and the skulls of various rodents and birds, rests a small black horn from a male pronghorn antelope.

The interesting thing about this horn, and pronghorn horn in general, is its uniqueness: It's not antler, nor is it horn as we commonly know it, but it claims some of the characteristics of both.

Although the terms antler andhorn are frequently used interchangeably in casual conversation, each refers to a distinct type of ungulate headgear. Consider these four differences: While mature antler is solid, dead, bloodless bone, horn consists of an outer sheath composed of keratin (a hard epidermal tissue of the type that forms hooves, claws and fingernails in mammals) wrapped around a porous, living, blood-filled core. While antlers are deciduous (that is, they're cast off and regrown annually), horns are never shed, with the original-issue models remaining on the job for the life of their host. While mature antlers are always bifurcated, or branched, horns are almost always simple unforked shafts. While it's highly unusual for antlers to appear on females (except caribou), horns are commonly grown by both sexes.

And now we come to the unique horns of the pronghorn.

Unique pronghorn horn characteristic No. 1: The pronghorn is the only ungulate to grow headgear that's classified as horn but which is forked—sort of. A mature pronghorn buck will have horns a foot or more in length (up to a maximum of 20 inches or so), with the tips curled back (enabling rutsparring bucks to strike up into the vulnerable throats of their rivals) and each with a single flat prong, called the cutter, jutting forward from about midway up the shaft (and serving much like the hilt on a sword, to catch and stop the thrusting horn of a rival). Does of the species sometimes have much smaller horns.

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