[Illustration: "OOM JOHN."]

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