A PRAIRIE GOAT COMPANION

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The most colorful description I've seen of the pronghorn's visual acuity was reported in 1890 by Arthur W. DuBray and retold in Animals of the World (1917):

"`Liver-eating Johnson,' guide, scout, hunter and trapper, prairie-man, Indian fighter, thoroughly educated and equipped frontiersman at every point, graduate at the head of his class in prairie lore—withal, a long-headed, cool, and calculating man—once said to me while hunting: `What a live Antelope don't see between dawn and dark, isn't visible from his standpoint; and while you're a-gawkin' at him through that 'ere glass to make out whether he's a rock or a Goat, he's acountin' your cartridges and fixin's, and makin' up his mind which way he'll scoot when you disappear in the draw for to sneak up on 'im—and don't you ferget it.' "

Tolling, also called flagging, will sometimes lure in a wary buck.

In less colorful but more precise words, the pronghorn's big, black, long-lashed, protuberant eyes give it almost complete wraparound vision and a magnification long hailed as equal or superior to what you and I can see with the aid of 8X binoculars. (Although I'm not sure how this determination was arrived at.)

Given such amazing vision and speed, plus miles and miles of miles across which to see and flee, the pronghorn's security would seem almost invincible. But both Meriwether Lewis and Liver-Eating Johnson (who, incidentally, was the flesh-and-blood mountain man on whose life and considerable legend the Robert Redford movie Jeremi ah Johnson was based; the livers he purportedly ate were those of his slain enemies) knew that the pronghorn had one fatal flaw in its defenses: curiosity. Noting this, early white hunters borrowed from the Indians a technique for using the pronghorn's unbounded curiosity to lure it to within rifle range. Lewis called the trick "tolling," while the liver-eater knew it as "flagging.

" By either name, the caper required the hunter, after spotting the distant white specks that mean pronghorn on the prairie, to secrete himself in good cover, most often a ravine or a clump of sagebrush. He would then attach a brightly colored scarf to a long pole or the muzzle of his rifle and wave it furiously overhead—or simply lie on his back and kick his feet in the air. Spotting the movement from a great distance, the fatally curious animals would ease ever closer to the wondrous enticement. Whatever could this odd dancing thing be? When the animals were within range, the hunter took up his rifle and, if his aim was true, had meat for the camp pot. (Which meat, by the way, is—if the animal is killed cleanly and quickly cooled—tender and delicious, tasting to me like a cross between lamb and elk.) Savvy wildlife photographers today use the same trick to entice shy 'lopes into camera range.

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