On April 8, 1903, John Burroughs and I reached the Yellowstone Park and were met by Major John Pitcher of the Regular Army, the Superintendent of the Park.  The Major and I forthwith took horses; he telling me that he could show me a good deal of game while riding up to his house at the Mammoth Hot Springs.  Hardly had we left the little town of Gardiner and gotten within the limits of the Park before we saw prong-buck.  There was a band of at least a hundred feeding some distance from the road.  We rode leisurely toward them.  They were tame compared to their kindred in unprotected places; that is, it was easy to ride within fair rifle range of them; but they were not familiar in the sense that we afterwords found the bighorn and the deer to be familiar.  During the two hours following my entry into the Park we rode around the plains and lower slopes of the foothills in the neighborhood of the mouth of the Gardiner and we saw several hundred—­probably a thousand all told—­of these antelope.  Major Pitcher informed me that all the prong-horns in the Park wintered in this neighborhood.  Toward the end of April or the first of May they migrate back to their summering homes in the open valleys along the Yellowstone and in the plains south of the Golden Gate.  While migrating they go over the mountains and through forests if occasion demands.  Although there are plenty of coyotes in the Park there are no big wolves, and save for very infrequent poachers the only enemy of the antelope, as indeed the only enemy of all the game, is the cougar.

Cougars, known in the Park as elsewhere through the West as “mountain lions,” are plentiful, having increased in numbers of recent years.  Except in the neighborhood of the Gardiner River, that is within a few miles of Mammoth Hot Springs, I found them feeding on elk, which in the Park far outnumber all other game put together, being so numerous that the ravages of the cougars are of no real damage to the herds.  But in the neighborhood of the Mammoth Hot Springs the cougars are noxious because of the antelope, mountain sheep and deer which they kill; and the Superintendent has imported some hounds with which to hunt them.  These hounds are managed by Buffalo Jones, a famous old plainsman, who is now in the Park taking care of the buffalo.  On this first day of my visit to the Park I came across the carcasses of a deer and of an antelope which the cougars had killed.  On the great plains cougars rarely get antelope, but here the country is broken so that the big cats can make their stalks under favorable circumstances.  To deer and mountain sheep the cougar is a most dangerous enemy—­much more so than the wolf.

[Illustration:  Prongbucks]

The antelope we saw were usually in bands of from twenty to one hundred and fifty, and they traveled strung out almost in single file, though those in the rear would sometimes bunch up.  I did not try to stalk them, but got as near them as I could on horseback.  The closest approach I was able to make was to within about eighty yards on two which were by themselves—­I think a doe and a last year’s fawn.  As I was riding up to them, although they looked suspiciously at me, one actually lay down.  When I was passing them at about eighty yards distance the big one became nervous, gave a sudden jump, and away the two went at full speed.