A PRAIRIE GOAT COMPANION

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Today, depending on where you live and travel, the pronghorn can be plentiful enough to be considered an agricultural pest and a hazard to nighttime motoring (near Casper, Wyoming, for example, it's common to see trophy-size bucks lying within yards of busy highways, insouciantly chewing cud while big diesel rigs scream by)—or can be an almost mythological creature whose name you may have heard in corny old cowboy songs but which you aren't likely to see outside a zoo. Pronghorn country is dry country, much of it desert.

Where surface water is available, pronghorns will troop in to drink deeply at least once a day. Where surface water is insufficient or nonexistent, the remarkable animals apparently can wring enough moisture to survive from cactus, which plants can account for more than 10% of their total diet, the rest consisting of grasses, forbs and browse. The pronghorn, as an old-line denizen of the treeless plains, prairies and deserts, has evolved to rely, not on the natural camouflage and stealth employed by deer and elk to keep themselves out of harm's way, but rather on its exceptional speed and vision. On September 17,1804, on the westbound leg of his long trek to the Pacific with William Clark, while traveling through what today is South Dakota, Captain Meriwether Lewis recorded in his journal the following observations (the creative spelling, punctuation and capitalization are his):

"I had this day an opportunity of witnessing the agility and the superior fleetness of [the antelope] .... I had pursued and twice surprised a small herd of seven . . . [and] got within about 200 paces of them when they smelt me and fled; I gained the top of the eminence on which they stood, as soon as possible from whence I had an extensive view of the country.. . the antelopes which had disappeared in a steep reveene now appeared at the distance of about three miles on the side of a ridge .... so soon had these antelopes gained the distance at which they had again appeared to my view I doubted at ferst that they were the same that I had just surprised, but my doubts soon vanished when I beheld the rapidity of their flight along the ridge before me . . . it appeared reather the rappid flight of birds than the motion of quadrupeds. I think I can safely venture the asscertion that the speed of this animal is equal if not superior to that of the finest blooded courser."

Well, yes, Cap'n, at the least: A prime buck pronghorn was clocked in the 1940s by a researcher—an unquestionably credible reporter who paced the animal in an automobile—at more than 61 miles per hour. That is, the car was doing 61 per when the pronghorn passed it. More recent clockings have exceeded even this, with one report claiming 70 miles per hour. Such speeds, of course, were attained in brief sprints; in the long run, a pronghorn can maintain more or less 40 miles per hour, mile after mile, hour after hour. The best racehorses can approach that speed but, lacking the pronghorn's stamina, will blow gut early on. In short, the pronghorn is the swiftest mammal native to North America, the swiftest mammal in the Northern Hemisphere and the second-swiftest mammal in the world, following close on the heels of the cheetah (which it will overtake and pass after the cat's limited endurance plays out).

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