A PRAIRIE GOAT COMPANION

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It's just as well for pronghorns that they are such timid creatures, for there are those who would have them for dinner, and others who would exterminate them as pests.

Foremost among the pronghorn's natural enemies is deep snow, which slows and can even halt the small-hooved animal's escape from predators, buries his food and generally makes life miserable. Parasites and disease also take their toll. Important predators historically included mountain lions and bobcats, bears, wolves, coyotes and golden eagles (baldies prefer angling to hunting). Today, coyotes—which know to run a prong horn in relays until the sly dogs tucker out their far swifter prey—still take the odd animal, and the golden eagle remains a threat to newborn kids. Wolves, bears and mountain lions, however, have fairly been extirpated across the pronghorn's vast arid range, much of the "wild" in the once-Wild West disappearing with them.

The pronghorn's primary enemies these days are you and I. Although unrestrained hunting was a significant contributing factor to the pronghorn's near-demise around the turn of the century, modern, well managed hunting is rarely a threat to any species of big-game animal in America. In fact, it's in large part the money raised through the sale of hunting licenses and special taxes on hunting-related gear that have made possible the successful management programs that have brought pronghorn (and other large ungulate species) back from the brink in recent decades.

No, it's not our hunting, but our real estate development and agricultural endeavors—our houses and cities and highways and parking lots and shopping malls and livestock and fences and plowed fields and overgrazed rangelands and sheer, unrestrained numbers—that threaten the future of this wild creature and others.

So take advantage of the plentitude while you can. If you've not seen pronghorns bounding with birdlike grace across plain, prairie or desert, try to, soon. Your three best bets are Teton and Yellow-stone national parks, both in northwestern Wyoming, and the National Bison Range in western Montana. The animals on these refuges, their natural timidity buffered by long and proximate association with unarmed humans, often will allow you to approach to within Instamatic range—a real bonus for those observers lacking SLR cameras and telephoto lenses but wanting something more to take home than photos that require you to explain, "See, Fred, it's them little dots a'way out there.

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