I've done this before.

Twenty-four years ago.

That time had been considerably more unpleasant. Back in that winter, we'd ridden out to the site on a snowmachine. Miles and miles of open white with two people on one machine.

A totally stupid thing to do. When riding on one snowmachine, the cardinal rule is...

Never ride farther than you can walk.

Those things are notorious for breaking down. Without a second machine with you, if you have a breakdown you either walk,

Or die.

Literally.

But we went, anyway. Had to. Somewhere out in that white, along those tracks, over 90 pronghorn had been hit, torn and splattered by a train. And not all were dead.

Someone had to go out and put the crippled ones out of their misery.

No, this time there were only 17 antelope hit. And the cripples had already been dispatched. And we could drive to the site, the railroad crews maintaining a plowed snowpath along their tracks.

Now, so far, this has been our hardest winter in seven years. If current trends keep up through February, it will easily rival the 1992-93 winter, or even 1978-79.

Let us hope it never nears the severity of 1983-84.

But in a few weeks, we will have to start making decisions on what type of hunting seasons to have this fall. How much of a harvest do we want? How many animals can we spare?

To do that, we'll want some idea of how many we've lost this winter. Losses are certainly more than average already. And a random sample of 17 suddenly deceased pronghorn provides a rare opportunity to see exactly what the winter has been doing to our herds.

First off, what was killed? The first to die in a hard winter are the fawns, since they have almost no fat reserves having spent the summer and fall simply growing up. And then come the mature bucks who burn their reserves guarding their harems during the fall rut. And the little yearling bucks who stupidly ran around chasing does and being driven off by the mature harem bucks.

Then the old, old does. Hard to lay on fat when your teeth are mostly gone.

The last to go are the younger bucks, and the does in prime breeding age.

So. Seventeen isn't much of a sample, but it is a picture of what is still on the hoof. We need to age as many of the carcasses as we can.

The other thing you want to look at is their bone marrow. As mammal bodies burn up fat reserves, the first to go is the subcutaneous fat. The cellulite just under their skin, most of it along the back.

Next to go is the mesentery fat. The energy stored inside the guts, clinging in globules on the tissues that connect the intestines and everything else.

Last to be spent is the fat stored in the bone marrow. When that is gone... well, then you die.

By the end of summer, all the leg bones of pronghorn (and deer, elk, etc.) will be packed with hard, white fat. But as the body starts burning those reserves, it grows tiny red capillaries into the marrow to extract the fat. And the color changes to pink.

As the fat reserves are depleted, the texture changes to what I call semi-wax in my notes. Like a thick pudding. When all the fat is used up, there is nothing left but the red blood vessels, which I note as "red jelly".

So on Friday, I and one of my wardens left town and worked our way back to the pronghorn carcasses strewn along the Trans-Continental railroad.

Right here, if you care...

View Larger Map

Before we could get there, we had to herd some of the survivors off our road.

A task done slowly, since the last thing you want to do is force them to burn off any more energy unnecessarily.

While we couldn't see the tracks because of the berms of snow

The site was easy to find. Just look for the flock of hungry crows and ravens. Without them, the buried bodies, and pieces of bodies, would have been hard to find.

Then each had to be dug out of the frozen snow,

a leg broken

and the teeth checked for age.

Problem is, we're well below freezing. Have been since these things died days ago. They're as hard and stiff as in a freezer, or worse. As we learned 24 years ago, the only way to get to the teeth...

is to chisel away the frozen lips and tongues. Not an easy task when you also have to make sure you don't break off the frozen, brittle incisors you need for aging.

Checking for bone marrow was a lot simpler. Find a leg, and break it with the hatchet. Most had marrow that was pink wax

that means they are starting to use their last reserves. But several had advanced to a dark pink that was only semi-waxy.

Which means they don't have much fat left. The bitter cold and added snow from this weekend may be enough to do some of them in.

While we dug up and chiseled at the dead pronghorn

we were scolded by a pack of coyotes just a couple hundred meters south.

Presumably we were keeping them from their frozen dinners.

We also had to watch out for trains as we worked.

'Course, the trains weren't so much dangerous as annoying. Their wakes must have dropped the windchill by at least ten degrees, and the clouds of swirling snow were none too pleasant either.

Not to mention what could come plowing out of those clouds.

We worked until dark, when we could no longer see the teeth and marrow, nor feel our fingers.

Then I got to freeze just a little more, as the heeler sisters finally got in a couple dragraces.

Letting them run loose had me just a little worried, as we were less than a mile from where I lost the little maskless one's tracks on that frigid February night four years ago.

But she showed little enthusiasm for the cold, and we were soon on the interstate, headed for home.