Fair
Reinforcing the North American
wildlife conservation model one
antelope kill at a time
F or me, October is the squinting season, a time to throw
my eyes as far as I can, to find little white speckles on a vast
sagebrush prairie, track them down and make meat of them.
In the process, I’ll become mudded and blooded, dehy-
drated, scraped up, and wind chapped. It’s something I look
forward to every year, right up there with Christmas and the
first raft trip of the summer. By the time the nights cool off in
August, I’m planning strategy and contacting distant friends.
Will they make it this year?
By the time the first frost hits in September, the urge
becomes an almost palpable itch. I yearn for prairie wind, the
smell of sage, the squish of gumbo under my boots, even the
perverse satisfaction of prickly pear spines in my elbows and
knees.
I’m talking about antelope hunting, of course, the pursuit
of the pronghorn, perhaps the most ancient beast still living
128
By Scott McMillion
in North America and certainly the fastest. These are incred-
ibly interesting animals, and I’m always learning new things
about them.
They’re tasty, too.
Hunting is primeval, a blood sport. And let’s be honest:
it’s sport. While everybody I hunt with eats what they kill, I
don’t know anybody who must kill to eat. We are not obligate
predators, like red tail hawks. We can scavenge food in a clam
bed or a berry patch, but usually we go to the grocery store;
we can cultivate and harvest whatever the climate and our
energies allow; we can barter our labor or skills, which we
convert to cash to spend in restaurants; or we can hunt in
stream or field.
Of those options, hunting is the least efficient and prob-
don jones
ably the most expensive means of gathering calories, except
for maybe the restaurants. But it’s worth it. The hunt is about
more than making meat. It’s about making stories.
If I was just after meat, I could hunt antelope close to my
home in Livingston, Mont., rise from my own bed and prob-
ably be home by noon with blood on my hands.
But every year, I drive past hundreds of antelope, some-
times thousands of them, to return to ground I’ve made
familiar through long association, to rekindle stories and
make new ones.
For the last 20 years, I’ve hunted antelope in central
Montana, south of the Missouri River, in big empty country
that’s still built like the sea that once covered it: flat, until you
look closely. Do so and you’ll find that, like any ocean—even
one made of grass and prickly pear—the prairie has waves,
hidden canyons and reefs, and islands with trees on them.
Like any ocean, it can stupefy you at sunset. Then all those
stars come out and if you’re lucky, the aurora. And there’s all
kinds of life out there. Not so diverse as a jungle, of course, for
the prairie is harsh, but if you know where and how to look,
there’s always something going on, usually something eating
something else.
I’ve made a little niche for myself out there. I know I’m
just a visitor, but I always feel a sense of homecoming when I
gas up at Bohemian Corners, tuck into a patty melt at the cafe
in Grass Range, or stick my hand in the Missouri, smell the
long, slow-moving rot that is the odor of life reshaping itself.
Only once in 20 years, sentenced by poverty to a long term in
New York, have I missed our annual antelope hunt.
A wide circle of friends gathers there every year. Coming
from Florida and Missoula, from Oregon and North Carolina,
we split up during the day, then gather round a fire at night
where we swap tales of the day and memories of last year and
Big Sky Journal 129
Lester Kish
 By 1900 the only wild herd
in the country was holed
up in Yellowstone National
Park, just a couple dozen
animals, and if not for the
good work of the U.S.
Army troops stationed
there, poachers would have
taken them all.

camp we call Dogtown, I built on

the tailgate a sandwich of onions
and sardines packed in mustard.
Three bites into it, I spotted about
50 antelope grazing a half-mile
away. So I moved slowly off the
ridge, down into the timber and
counted my paces, walking north
and hoping to put an easy sneak
on these animals. My goal was
to get downwind of them, crawl
out of the coulee on my belly, and
shoot one. But I counted wrong, or
don jones

I misjudged the distance, because

the years before. If somebody has hunted well or been lucky,
we fry with onions and garlic the fresh liver of an antelope.
Somebody might open a can of spuds.
We don’t wash much because we have to pack all our
own water from home. We brag and tell marvelous lies. We
often drink too much. We stink and don’t care. And though
we’d certainly welcome them, the women we love usually
find a reason to be someplace else.
Here’s a story I tell every year:
I’d been hunting elk alone all morning in the Missouri
Breaks, working hard on a hot day in steep country, and when
I puffed and sweated back to the pickup on a high ridge at a
while I was still on the edge of the
trees, I heard a sneeze, the distinc-
tive sound an antelope doe makes
when she senses danger.
I froze. Then I dropped to a crouch. I waddled forward,
like a duck with a gun, and suddenly the antelope were there,
all around me. Some looked at me, close enough that I could
see them blinking, but most kept on grazing in the tall grass
and shrubs. Everything but me was calm. I’d never been so
close to so many antelope, animals that normally step on the
gas if they see you a mile away. I think that, because I was so
close, they somehow perceived me as a creature of no menace.
I’d come in, by pure luck, under the radar, and was parked
on their runway. An enemy plane in the air is a threat. On the
ground, it’s just a curiosity.

Big Sky Journal 131

 in newspapers about some
fool arrested for killing six
elk. But antelope rarely do
this. Rather, they all take off
in the same direction, at the
same instant, a talent that
mystifies me. Then they
synchronize their motions
like a flock of birds or a
school of fish, running and
turning almost as one crea-
ture, each animal repeating
every subtle motion, fol-
lowing the contours of the
land to elude a treacher-
ous predator, which in this
case was me.
While this is always
an amazing thing to see, I

I looked around, found the largest buck in the herd, raised
the rifle I’ve carried since I was 12, and squeezed the trigger,
which put the tranquility to an end. Elk or deer in such a
situation will run in circles or bolt in every direction, regroup-
ing later. It’s mayhem, and that’s why you sometimes read
Dušan Smetana
was a little sore at myself
because among the herd
ran the buck that had just
been in my crosshairs.
How could I have
missed such an easy shot?
Then, as the herd crossed a tiny rise, I saw one animal
tumble head over heels. When I got to him, 200 yards away,
my buck lay dead. When I opened him up, I found my bul-
let had exploded his heart. Already dead, he had run for 200
yards, matching the herd step for step.
I tell this story every year at antelope camp and nobody’s
told me to shut up about it, so far. That’s partly because my
friends are tolerant, but it’s also because we’re all so impressed
with antelope. And we aren’t the first.
On Sept. 17, 1804, Meriwether Lewis had his eyes
opened, too.
“I had this day an opportunity of witnessing the agility
and the superior fleetness of this anamal [sic], which was to
me really astonishing,” he wrote in his journal. “I beheld the
rapidity of their flight along the ridge before me it appeared
reather [sic] the flight of birds than the motion of quadru-
peds.”
jason savage

Like me, Lewis wanted to shoot one that day, but he

wasn’t as lucky. Unlike me, Lewis and Clark did need to kill
things if they wanted to eat.

132
 Though Lewis didn’t add to the larder, he couldn’t help
but marvel at the agility, the beauty and speed of his prey.
There is some dispute over just how fast the ante-
lope is. Some sources maintain they’ve been clocked at 70
mph, though they don’t say who clocked them. Most other
sources—fish and game agencies and universities—agree that
somewhere around 60 mph is probably top end.
I’ll let other people split those hairs, but the point is
antelope are quick enough to break the speed limit on a lot
of highways. They can go from right here to way over there
in nothing flat. They can maintain top speed for 15 minutes,
then keep up a 30 mph lope for a long time after that. Their
big lungs and hearts, teamed with an oversized esophagus,
let them suck in and process huge amounts of oxygen. The
cells of their flesh contain extra doses of mitochondria, little
structures that let them burn all that oxygen. Their blood is an
incredible vivid red.
Like a camel, they can go for days without water.
Sagebrush gets them through the winter and they can survive
for a time on the bitter meat of prickly pear. Sometimes, it
seems they live on wind alone.
Plus, they’ve got incredible vision, with orbs set way
back in their head, a trait that lets them eyeball the terrain for
miles around even while they’re nose down, nibbling sage or
somebody’s winter wheat sprouts.
This combination of eyes and lungs means they can see
to forever, then run right past it, skills they evolved to cope
with long legged predators like the dire wolf, the short-faced
bear and a prehistoric North American cheetah, animals that,
unlike the antelope, didn’t survive.
Antelope, too, had a brush with extinction. Some sci-
entists estimate the pre-Columbian population as high as
70 million, in herds that stretched from Manitoba to Mexico
City, from California to Kansas, from sea level to 10,000 feet.
Like buffalo and passenger pigeons, their numbers seemed
without limit.
That, of course, made people greedy.
Market hunters filled wagons with their meat to feed
mining and railroad camps, and, like the prairie that succors
them, antelope suffered under the plow and all that comes
with it. Homesteaders churned up and burned the sage the
antelope must have to survive winter, while equally hungry
honyockers put a bullet in anything big enough to eat.
Antelope have been evolving in North America for
millions of years, outlasting all their kin, outrunning all
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Big Sky Journal 831.indd 1 Big Sky

8/30/2007 1:09:38133
Journal PM
 While the primary goal is to produce lots of game animals for hunters, who pay the bills,
everything from earthworms to bald eagles shares the bounty of more and better habitat.
predators but mechanized man. By 1900, there were maybe
10,000 of them left on the entire continent.
And antelope were not alone in this situation. Deer, elk
and bighorn sheep suffered similar fates, and buffalo were
even shakier. The only wild herd in the country was holed up
in Yellowstone National Park, just a couple dozen animals,
and if not for the good work of the U.S. Army troops sta-
tioned there, poachers would have taken them all.
This situation alarmed a lot of people, and it led to what
we now call the North American model of wildlife conserva-
tion. It’s based on hunters and anglers buying licenses and
paying special taxes on their equipment and ammunition,
providing money that hires wardens to enforce limits and
biologists to figure out habitat requirements. While the pri-
mary goal is to produce lots of game animals for hunters,
who pay the bills, everything from earthworms to bald eagles
shares the bounty of more and better habitat.
The system isn’t perfect, but it works, mostly. For ante-
lope, elk and deer, the success has been spectacular.
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Today, roughly a million pronghorns race across the
prairies, mostly in Montana and Wyoming, mostly because
of hunters, like me, who buy licenses and pay excise taxes for
the privilege of shooting and eating them.
I know that some people object to any hunting, finding
it barbarous. And if these people ever found their way to our
antelope camp, observed the blood and grime, listened to the
low humor and endured the smells, I’m sure they’d go away
feeling smug and superior.
Back in camp, we’d mutter. We’d talk about the petro-
leum based microfiber clothing our guests had worn, the
decimated deltas of Nigeria, the moonscapes of Kuwait
and the horrors of Iraq, all for the sake of the oil that makes
those cool new fabrics, those Vibram soles, the plastics in the
hybrid cars.
We’re all killers, we’d argue, even the vegans among us.
And then we’d probably go hunt some more.
It’s why we’re here.
We waited all year for it. BSJ
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