The Model 30 Virginian from Heym, a straight-pull German rifle, is a real shooter, turning in groups smaller than two inches at 200 yards. It's one of two straight pulls on the market.

Read any description of pronghorn and you'll find the creature called antelope characterized as an animal of the prairie. That information is only partially true and depends on what the writer means by "prairie." The greatest numbers of antelope roam the vast short-grass prairies that lie as a beachfront between the sea of cornfields in the Midwest and the Rocky Mountains. That's not the only place you'll find a pronghorn though. Populations of this adaptable antelope also grace lofty mountain valleys and sagebrush slopes at elevations more commonly associated with mule deer and elk.

Like all animals that inhabit environments uncommon to their species, "mountain" antelope possess some different and fascinating characteristics. While antelope of the plains rarely use vegetation for comfort or concealment, pronghorn dwelling at high elevations bed among junipers, pine or open stands of aspens. Here they find shade and cover and maintain a field of vision that utilizes their keen eyesight.

Mountain dwelling antelope are highly migratory as well. Pronghorn fawns that dance on the flats of the Jackson Hole valley in Wyoming during the summer trek over the Absaroka Mountains each autumn to winter on the Red Desert, some 300 miles away. Antelope that summer in small meadows along the famed Henry's Fork of the Snake River in Idaho cross the Continental Divide at Raynolds Pass to weather lean months along the Madison River south of Ennis, Montana. For hunters accustomed to pursuing pronghorns on the prairie, high country antelope offer an intriguing change. On a torrid afternoon in mid-August, my ten-year-old son and I took our leave from Billings, Montana, pointing the pickup into the shimmering heat waves that danced over the blacktop enroute to Lander, Wyoming. From Lander we climbed steadily to the summit of South Pass, reaching the divide just before dark.

A ribbon of gravel led from the highway toward the remnants of South Pass City, a once-booming mining town now sporting more rusting corrugated metal than bustling mines. Reaching the boundary of a broad expanse of public land, we pulled over and prepared to bed for the night in the back of the pickup. Outside, the heady scent of sage filled the refreshingly cool air. We settled into our sleeping bags, awed with the absolute silence of the landscape, broken after many long minutes by the faraway yodeling of a lonesome coyote.

Having drawn a muzzleloader tag in a hunting district that extends from the south buttress of the Wind River Mountains to the Oregon Buttes, we planned to concentrate our effort in the southern part of the unit that had more the look of traditional antelope country than the north. Pronghorn we found, but as is typical of those frequenting high places, none of the bucks were particularly long of horn.

Just a day before the season's opening, we decided to check out the highest, most remote country in the district. Bumping toward the headwaters of the Sweetwater River, we spied a large, dark form in the willows that lined a tiny creek in a deep ravine. Through binoculars, the dangling dewlap of a cow moose swung oddly over her gangly brown calf. Ahead, a cool aspen grove beckoned at the fringe of an island of evergreens in a gray sea of sage. We passed the aspens, then continued on the rutted track, wheeling deeper into the backcountry that sloped upward toward the craggy peaks of the Wind River Range.