Watched by Wild Animals Part 13

The lion climbed upon a fallen tree and crept forward. He was screened by its large upturned root. At last he rushed out and seized a near-by deer and killed it, evidently after a short struggle. He had then pursued and killed a young deer that had fled off to the left where it was struggling in the heavy snows. Without returning to the first kill the lion fed off the second and returned to the den.

I followed the other deer. In a swamp they had fed for a time on the tops of tall weeds among the snow and willows. I came close to them in a thick growth of spruce. Here the snow was less deep. A goodly portion of the snow still clung to the trees.

These deer circled out of the spruce swamp and came into their trail made in entering it. Back along this trail they followed to where the lion had made the first kill. Leaping over this dead deer they climbed up on the rocky ridge off which so much snow had blown that they could travel speedily most of the time over the rocks with only now and then a stretch of deep snow.

Often during my winter trips I came upon a porcupine. Both winter and summer he seemed blindly content. There were ten thousand trees around, and winter or summer there were meals to last a life-time.

Always he had a dull, sleepy look and I doubt if he ever gets enthusiastic enough to play.

Birds that remain all winter in snowy lands enjoy themselves. Like the winter animals, usually they are well fed. But most species of birds with their airplane wings fly up and down the earth, go northward in the spring and southward in the autumn, and thus linger where summer lingers and move with it when it moves.

Around me the skunks hibernated about two months each year; some winters possibly not at all. Generally the entire skunk family, from two to eight, hole up together. One den which I looked into in mid-winter had a stack of eight sleepy skunks in it. A bank had caved off exposing them. I left them to sleep on, for had I wakened them they might not have liked it. And who wants to mix up with a skunk?

Another time a snowslide tore a big stump out by the roots and disclosed four skunks beneath. When I arrived, about half an hour after the tear-up, the skunks were blinking and squirming as though apparently too drowsy to decide whether to get up or to have another good sleep.

Many tales have been told about the terrible hunger and ferocity of wolves during the winter. This may sometimes be so. Wolves seem ever to have good, though not enormous, appet.i.tes. Sometimes, too, they go hungry for days without a full meal. But generally, if the winter is snowy, this snow makes it easier for them to make a big kill.

Deer, elk, and mountain sheep occasionally are caught in deep snow, or are struck by a snowslide. A number sometimes are s...o...b..und or killed at one time. Usually the prowling wolves or coyotes discover the kill and remain near as long as the feast holds out.

Once I knew of a number of wolves and two lions lingering for more than two weeks at the wreckage brought down by a snowslide. I was camping down below in the woods and each evening heard a hullabaloo, and when awake in the night I heard it. Occasionally I heard it in the daytime. Finally a grizzly made a discovery of this feeding ground. He may have scented it or he may have heard the uproars a mile or two away. For the wolves and the lions feasted, fought, and played by the hour. The row became so uproarious one night that I started up to see what it was all about. But the night was dark and I turned back to wait until morning. Things had then calmed down, and only the grizzly remained. After he ran off I found that from fifteen to twenty deer had been swept down by the slide and mixed with the tree wreckage.

The right kind of winter clothing is an important factor for winter life for both people and animals. The clothing problem perhaps is more important than the food question.

Winter in the Temperate Zone causes most birds and animals to change clothing--to put on a different suit. This usually is of winter weight and in many cases of a different colour than that of the summer suit.

Bears, beavers, wolves, and sheep put on a new, bright, heavy suit in autumn and by spring this is worn and faded. The weasel wears yellow-brown clothes during summer, but during winter is in pure-white fur--the tip of the tail only being jet black. The snowshoe rabbit has a new suit at the beginning of each winter. This is furry, warm, and pure white. His summer clothes are a trifle darker in colour than those of other rabbits. If there is no snow he eats with his feet on the earth or on a fallen log or rock pile, but if there is a deep snow he has snowshoes fastened on and is ever ready to go lightly over the softest surface.

In these ways--hibernating, eating stored food, or living as in summer time from hand to mouth--the animals of the Temperate Zone go contentedly through the winter with a change of habit and all with a change of clothing. The winter commonly is without hardship and there is time for pranks and play. Winter, so the animal Eskimos say, and so the life of the Temperate Zone shows, will bear acquaintance.

CHAPTER XIII

p.r.o.nGHORN OF THE PLAINS

I awakened one morning out on the Great Plains to find that in the dark I had camped near the nursery of a mother antelope and her two kids. It was breakfast time. Commonly both antelope children nurse at once, but this morning it was one at a time. Kneeling down, the suckling youngster went after the warm meal with a morale that never even considered Fletcherizing. Occasionally he gave a vigorous b.u.t.t to hasten milk delivery.

Breakfast over, the mother had these youngsters lie low in the short gra.s.s of a little basin. She left them and began feeding away to the south. The largest objects within a quarter of a mile were a few stunted bunches of sagebrush. I moved my sleeping bag a short distance into an old buffalo wallow and watched her. She fed steadily up a moderate slope but was always in position where she could see the youngsters and the approach of anything in the un.o.bstructed opening round them. This mother was not eating the abundant buffalo gra.s.s celebrated for its nutrition, nor any of the blooming plants. She was eating, and plainly with relish, simply the gray-green bitter leaves of the shrubby scattered sage. On reaching the low summit of the prairie swell she paused for a little while on the skyline, then started on a run for a water-hole about two miles distant.

A few seconds later a fox-like head peeped over a little ridge a few hundred feet from the kids. Then a distant bunch of sagebrush transformed itself into another moving form, and two coyotes trotted into the scene. Evidently these coyotes knew that somewhere near two youngsters were hidden. They followed the mother's trail by scent and kept their eyes open, looking for the youngsters.

Old antelope have perhaps more numerous scent glands than other big wild animals, but evidently a young antelope gives off little or no scent. Its youthful colour blends so well with its surroundings when it lies down that it is difficult to see it. Once the young flatten out and freeze upon the gra.s.sy earth they offer but little that is revealing even to the keenest eyes and noses.

Both coyotes paused within a few feet of one of the kids without either seeing or scenting it. It was flattened out between two clumps of sagebrush. Finally, unable to find the youngsters, the coyotes trotted off along the mother's trail.

I went over to have a look at the children. Though I knew just about where they were I looked and circled for some time before my eyes detected them. They were grayish brown with the outlines of future colour scheme faintly showing. Within two feet of each I stood and watched them. A fly crawled over the eye and ear of one kid and an ant over the nose of the other, and yet neither made a move.

For about two weeks, while the legs of the young are developing liveliness, the mother keeps aloof from her kind. She often has a trying time with enemies.

As soon as the coyotes were out of sight I hastened to the highest near-by point hoping with gla.s.ses to see the mother antelope. She was just leaving the water-hole. Her movements evidently were a part of a strategic plan to deceive the watchful eyes and the cunning noses of enemies, chiefly coyotes. She fed a quarter of a mile south, then ran on for more than a mile still farther. She then galloped more than two miles northeast and later, with many doublings which involved her trail, worked back to the youngsters.

In following and watching the movements of the mother I stumbled over a lone antelope kid about half a mile from the other two. I returned later and found that it was entangled between the twisted low-lying limbs of a sagebrush. Not until I laid hold of the kid to drag it out did it make a move. Then it struggled and gave a low bleat.

Realizing that this might bring the mother like lightning I let go and rose up. There she was, coming like the wind, and only four or five hundred feet away, indifferent to the fact that man is the most dangerous of enemies. Just how close she might have come, just what might have happened had I not straightened up at that moment, is sheer guesswork. But the freed youngster b.u.t.ted me violently behind and then ran off to meet his mother.

During most of the year the great silent plains are at rest in tawny and gray brown. The dreamy, sunny distances show only moving cloud shadows. A brief barrage of dust storm sometimes sweeps across or a wild drive of tumbleweeds with a front from horizon to horizon goes bounding and rolling toward the rim, where they go over and vanish.

But these endless distances are palpitating with flowers and song when the young antelope are born.

One May morning a flock of blackbirds alighted upon a leafy cottonwood tree--a lone tuft in an empire of treeless distances. They sang all at once--a whirlwind of song. Two antelope herds were on separate skylines. The silvery, melodious peal of the yellow-breasted meadow lark rang out all over the wide wild prairie. Prairie dogs scampered, barked, and played; b.u.t.terflies circled and floated above the scattered and stunted sage; thousands of small birds were busy with nest and song, and countless ragged s.p.a.ces of brilliant wild flowers illuminated the gra.s.s-green surface to every horizon.

The antelope is known as the p.r.o.nghorn, because of a single small p.r.o.ng on each horn. This p.r.o.ng is more like a guard and serves as a hilt. In fighting an antelope often catches its opponent's thrust on this p.r.o.ng. The horn commonly is less than ten inches long. Many females do not have horns, and rarely are these fully developed on any female.

Deer and elk have deciduous horns--that is, horns that are shed annually. Goat and bighorn never shed their horns. But each year antelope sheds the outer part--the point and sheath--of the horn, retaining the stubs or stumps which grow new horns.

The antelope has a number of marked characteristics and some of these are unique. It is without dew claws; the hair is hollow and filled with pitch; teeth are of peculiar pattern; it eats mostly bitter or pungent food; has large, long-range eyes of almost telescopic power; has numerous and scattered scent glands; is without colour camouflage--in fact, its colour is in part revealing, for the bristling of its white b.u.t.tocks serves to give signal flashes. The antelope is the plains' graceful racing model of long and successful development. It is either the least--the smallest--or near the smallest of our hoofed wild animals.

The antelope is specialized in speed. If there were to be a free-for-all race on the plains, with deer, antelope, elk, sheep, bear, lion, coyote, fox, dog, horse, and even the rabbit as starters, the antelope generally would be the winner, whether the race was for one mile or ten. Perhaps the blooded race horse and the greyhound would outstrip him, but among wild animals the antelope is the speedy one.

Wolves and coyotes pursue the p.r.o.nghorn in relays or capture it strategically through various kinds of mutual aid. Now and then an antelope will turn upon its pursuers and fight them fiercely, occasionally triumphantly.

On the Great Plains in western Nebraska I saw two speeding objects stirring dust on the horizon. It was an antelope cut off from the flock and pursued by a wolf. They plunged for a moment or two in a dip of the plains, then reappeared. With gla.s.ses on them I saw the pursuing wolf drop out and another wolf leap from concealment to relieve him. Following them through gla.s.ses as they raced on skyline against a cloud, dropped below eyeline, dashed behind a b.u.t.te, swiftly the great circle followed brought them within half a mile. In plain view another wolf leaped into the race. The antelope was nearly exhausted. The wolves were leaping at her throat as she disappeared over a ridge. Little puffs of dust showed the advance of pursuer and pursued. These grew dim and I watched for the runners to come up on the skyline. But they never appeared.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Photo. by Enos A. Mills_ _A Wild Life Trail Centre_]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Photo. by Enos A. Mills_ _My Departing Caller_]

I watched a coyote walk back and forth close to a mother antelope with two young kids. She paid no apparent attention to him. But she was besieged. After two or three hours he was relieved by another coyote.

This was a new and rather leisurely way of relaying. Evidently the devilish plan was to wear the antelope out or stay until she was forced to go for water and then seize the youngsters.

It was more than fifteen miles to the next water-hole. This may have been the second or even the third day that the coyotes had been worrying her. I frightened them away, but had not gone half a mile when I saw them circling back again. I do not know the end of the story, but as I walked on I wished that this mother antelope might have possessed the special development of the p.r.o.nghorn in the desert regions--the ability to do without water for days at a time.

The food of the p.r.o.nghorn is sage, greasewood, sometimes cactus, and, on the desert, broomrape. I do not recall ever seeing him eat gra.s.s.

In the extremely arid regions of the Southwest the local flocks, in common with mountain sheep and other animals of the desert, have developed the habit of doing without water for days--sometimes for a period of two weeks or longer have no other moisture than that furnished by the plants eaten.

When the young antelope are about three weeks old they appear to have full use of their legs and usually follow the mother in feedings and fights. At this time numbers of mothers and youngsters collect and run together. They are thus enabled to give mutual aid and to withstand coyotes and other enemies better. Sometimes under dangerous conditions the young are left behind while some of the mothers go for water, and on their return the remaining ones go. Just why this mutual aid is not practised while the young are almost helpless is not clear.

In early autumn all ages and s.e.xes unite and commonly run together, often in large flocks, throughout the winter. The youngsters often play together. Frequently one of the males is the lively leader of twenty or thirty. At other times the old antelopes play, go through a series of marches and countermarches. They race back and forth and over short circles. When thus engaged they commonly have sentinels posted on the outskirts.

Most other animals appear to forget possible enemies while playing, but the nervous antelope, with big open s.p.a.ces round it, appears never to be quite in repose.

Depending upon speed rather than upon stealth, fighting ability, or concealment, as a means of escaping enemies, and living in the plains with a magnificence of un.o.bstructed distances, it has learned to be watchful, to use sentinels, and to flee even when danger is afar.

Usually when the antelope lies down it selects a spot well away from any ravine, bluff, willow clump, or sagebrush thicket that could conceal an enemy or that would enable an enemy to approach it closely unseen.

Under most conditions the female appears to be the acknowledged leader. In the majority of instances in which I have watched moving flocks of antelope--fleeing small numbers or a number of alarmed antelope preparing to move--it was under female leadership.

The p.r.o.nghorn lives in a home territory. This I think is rarely more than six or eight miles in diameter. If pursued by man, dogs, or wolves it is likely to run in great circles, keeping within the bounds of home territory. Most antelope are not migratory, but in a few localities the flocks make a short migration. For winter they may travel to a more broken locality, one that gives some shelter from the wind and contains s.p.a.ces off which the wind sweeps the snow.