He also impressed on us the importance of using a flashlight to check your pit for rattlers before entering it each morning. One notable morning I was getting settled into my pit just as the sun began to fire up the eastern horizon. I leaned back and was quickly entering a state of relaxed alertness when suddenly a flurry of sound and movement erupted in the shadows by my left boot. Snake, I thought as I sprang from my earthen blind. Luckily a glance assured me that my visitor was only a salamander, not a rattler.
Pronghorn are amazing animals to say the least.
The last representative of their species, they are the only animal to grow true horns made from fused hair, then discard them each year like antlers. Superbly adapted to life on the open sagebrush prairies, their eyes are located high on their head to locate danger from afar, and they are capable of running speeds of up to 70 miles per hour. It's hard to believe that in 1900 only a few thousand of these prehistoric remnants were left, but now there are over 750,000 of them roaming the western plains. Every day we would see hundreds of these magnificent animals as they fed, rutted, and wandered about the treeless landscape. The frustration was beginning to tell on us.