In the fall
of 1949 I was a sophomore at Colorado A&M College. Along
with a few other Game Management majors and a bunch of State Game & Fish people, I got
to go on an antelope roundup one day. We drove east of Fort Collins
in about thirty cars and pickups to where thirty antelope had
previously been driven with airplanes into a fenced square mile
of prairie. Within this area, a "funnel" fence had
been built, narrowing space along one side until it ended in
a cul-de-sac, and there, more or less tallgrass-color-camouflaged,
sat a waiting truck. The 'lopes were going to be transported
to a region in southwestern Colorado from which they'd been exterminated,
re-establish a population.
Everything was planned. We arrived and entered quietly, lined up our vehicles and began sweeping the circle-in-the-square, in close order. We were going to drive them into the trap, then jump out and wrestle them down, put them in the truck.
The triumph of
Euclidean Geometry over
Chaos
There was a country road bordering one side of the square, and we'd forgotten to post a lookout. We had the thirty antelope running toward the funnel when into the picture chugged some farmer's Model A and spooked the herd. They wheeled as one and zipped back, right between our close-order vehicles, then milled around in the far corners of the square mile.
They were spooked for the day. We had to herd them time and time again, garnering a couple or a few each sweep. The 'lopes were totally panicked and would bolt unpredictable directions, hitting 60 mph, it seemed, within a few seconds. One pregnant doe was so distraught she ran and ripped herself to death on the barbwire fence. We students bent over her and got a quick anatomy lesson. The vivid beauty of her fresh-killed insides, including the fetus, rushes to my mind's eye even now.
like blood
to the face
of the lover
At last, there was one antelope left, a scrawny little female. At one point we had her trapped in a corner but, after shifting left and right, she zoomed between two of the men. One threw his arm out in a reflex action and got spun around like a top. We finally captured her, closed the truck and trooped back. I hope descendants of these animals are grazing and gracing the valleys of the San Juans today.
It was good, despite all, to move those antelope, to re-extend their range. It was not so good to have to, to throw effort like that, in a clumsy imitation of God, to buck up a decimated local biodiversity in 1949.
. . .At this point my language has angled up to the top of a certain epistemological cliff and seems ready to launch out, wings spread, in the form of a Speech, an ethical, big-picture Ecology Speech.
But let's look another direction:
pronghorn, or
literally
fork in the curve,
"not a true"antelope
not a true
"fabulous heraldic beast"(peel off the present
"antelope" and the word
gleams
in that emblematic fog)antelope, antelope
dig deeper in time
it passes through "savage"
into
"unknown quadruped"Fastest feet in the New World -
1949 we open paper sacks
near the gashed mama who can't elope
unless into the Great Bayou Salade in the sky,
eat peanutbutter sandwiches and melons
from Rocky Ford
