Between Grass And Sky: Where I Live And Work

Running with the Antelope

R U N N I N G W I T H T H E A N T E L O P E 9 3 Yesterday, I drove my favorite plains road between my ranch in South Dakota and my home in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The narrow two-lane winds ninety miles through broad desert and beside narrow creek bottoms, among rolling hills and tree-covered mountains. Every time I make the trip, I know antelope will materialize on a certain stretch, testing my eyes and reflexes by sprinting in front of me. Yesterday, I didn’t see a single one, and I was puzzled until I remembered that it’s hunting season. They move away from roads, where every other pickup has a rifle sticking out the window. I relaxed, pushed the accelerator up to seventy-five. Two miles down the road, when my car popped over a knoll, a big pronghorn buck lay in the borrow ditch on my right, head up. I touched the brakes while deciding he wouldn’t bother to get up. Thinking about antelope behavior , I braked again. The antelope leapt toward the right fence, then in one motion whirled and charged across the highway. Neither of us died. I needed new tires anyway. h Today, after Jerry got home from work, two of his friends deposited antelope bucks at the back door. One likes to hunt but doesn’t like the meat. “Have you ever tasted it?” I asked. ••• Hasselstrom/67-112 6/13/02 10:49 AM Page 93 9 4 • b e t w e e n g r a s s a n d s k y “Well, once.” Turns out he sampled a buck that had been shot from a pickup after running a couple miles on a hot fall day. When the animal’s tissues are gorged with blood and fear, the meat will always taste of terror. The other man loves the meat; he stalks his prey so well the antelope seldom realizes he’s around until the bullet strikes. But his wife doesn’t like to cook antelope. In our suburban backyard, both men sawed off the horns to keep, leaving the rest for us. We’ll deliver neatly packaged steaks to the quiet hunter, who will save them to cook on his solitary hunting trips. All afternoon Jerry sawed bones and cut meat in the basement while my terrier, Frodo, lay under the table catching scraps. Upstairs, I counted steaks and chops, slapping them on the slick side of white paper. I folded, turned, wrapped, and taped, scrawling messages about winter meals of stew and chops across the packages before stacking them in the freezer. I tossed bones and odd scraps of maroon flesh into an enormous pot, and added onions, garlic, thyme, a chile pepper, and a pinch of sage, along with the peelings from all the vegetables we’d eaten this week. The long leg bones are heavy as stone, much thicker than the bones of a deer. The pronghorn’s predators and prairie habitat designed these legs over millennia for speed straight ahead, and for strength when the animal pivots on the padded front hooves. During the twenty-five million years the pronghorn has spent on prairie ground, its trachea, lungs, and heart enlarged and evolved to take in and use oxygen at triple the rate of other animals the same size. I’ve read that pronghorn can cruise comfortably at more than forty miles an hour for miles. When racehorses run thirty-eight miles an hour, their lungs sometimes bleed. All day and all night, bones shaped by plains water and sagebrush dance to the rhythm of heat. Golden fat made of prairie grasses rises in the kettle like cream. The scent permeates the house, forecasting winter’s thick soups, a benediction for plains flesh made grass made meat. h At 2 a.m., I pushed the dog off my pillow and tiptoed downstairs. By the dim stove light, I watched shining bones bounce in the kettle of antelope stock and remembered something I’d rather forget. The whole thing started in the community hall at the fairgrounds. I put down my plate of cold turkey slices and looked around. My husband, David, Hasselstrom/67-112 6/13/02 10:49 AM Page 94 sat alone, eating a piece of chocolate cake. I’d started toward him through the...