In the High Range of the Soul

At the Heart We Cross Paths

Three winters past I go to find something I never thought existed here. Over the mountain out onto the high range of the Awapa Plateau. The snow has settled in the sagebrush, and the few roads out here are tough to get into. Half a day, two failed attempts from two different directions. Late afternoon, third time around I get in a ways, maybe 7 miles, until the drifts get so big I get out to walk. Cold, a perfect blue, wind spinning over the snow, crystalline and cool. Out here is a horizonless beauty that keeps going. Does something to me.

I’ve given up at this point on finding what I’m looking for but am okay with that. Happy to be stunned by the vastness. Nature does that too. And hearing the roar of silence stills me like stone. I am vanishing into this solace when suddenly I hear a noise behind me. My heart leaps. “It can’t be”, I think.

I ever so slowly turn like a star around the night. The emotion is a rogue wave.  On the shield hill behind me 100 ft away 14 Pronghorn Antelope are watching. Me. Their breath steams in the cold. Their white underfur mirrors the snow beneath, their tawny, cream, and auburn coats like soft desert fur, their large black obsidian eyes like pools of water, and the dark striping on their faces crowned by their v-shaped black horns casts them mythic. Their bright curiosity breaks my heart. Expressions are exquisite. I hold my breath, and they shimmer ephemerally in the heat waves rising like angel ghosts from the snow. Tears run slow, untouched from the corners of my eyes. I want it to last. We stare. You don’t get to get this close to Pronghorns.

After about three minutes of falling into something unspoken, shared between us, they snort and prance, display their barely contained vitality, unsure of what I am, then they burst and turn and fade over the hill. I run after. Out of breath, heart like thunder, at the top of the hill, and they’re already a mile away. Now walking. Occasionally looking back. I can’t say if I found them or they found me. But what does it matter? When an encounter unravels all the unimportant things and then weaves you into fierce viable presence. This. This is aliveness.

We are the Whole Dream

When we talk about community on my side of the mountain, we usually are addressing all our humanness: material needs, personal interactions, weight of responsibilities, endless political drama, the future. Community though, in my opinion, includes the Other-than-human World too. Ever since Constance and I met we have realized our lives are dedicated to re-wilding, not only literally but also on an interior level. We’ve wandered toward this through trial and error: from growing gardens, teaching plant medicine, rites of passage, dreamwork, being vigilant with how the government and people manage/use/think about land, etc... We’ve lost and we’ve won. We’ve struggled and we’ve triumphed. Beauty and pain. We try to inspire and keep imagination alive. Keep Earth in the conversation.  All of nature conspires to give us life, and by holding and tending the full ecology of our community we can bring a different sort of balance, intricacy, magnificence and sustenance to bear. Imagine how we might live our lives if all our decisions were based on this full range of “community”. True kinship. It's common sense. It’s Natures’ Law.

 The Quintessential Pronghorn

So, when I heard after all the years I’d spent in the high desert, that over the mountain were prolific herds of Pronghorn Antelope, creatures I met and used to track and watch two decades ago when I lived in western Montana, I felt called.  I’d been vaguely guilty for “abandoning” them so many years ago. The old adage is “nature loves to hide” so I thought to seek. Question is: Why are the Pronghorns and their places so important to my spirit and to our communities?

To start with: for themselves, for their own intrinsic value. And that’s enough. But there is also more: Over the years as I’ve followed them about, and learned something of their story, I am in awe of their nobility, their toughness, their survivability against all odds. Their history on the North American continent as the oldest native ungulate that survived through the Pleistocene (not land bridge crossers) marks them. This means they knew the three-toed Horses, the bone crushing Dogs, Mastodons, Camels, Sabretooths and of course their primal nemesis, the American Cheetah. The Pronghorns’ speed today is a ghost adaptation from co-evolving with them. Now, Pronghorns’ top speeds are 60mph, but it is the enduring velocity at 40mph for miles that keep them out of danger. They can hit 30mph in a few strides. They also know the great ice age, its migrating generations of freeze and thaw, the massive creep of ice sheets that shape and define so much of our geography from mountain range to watershed to plain in the upper North American continent. Pronghorns’ ancestral blood is imprinted by this era, witness to it all.

With their 320 degree peripheral vision that is 8x more powerful than the human eye (like looking through binoculars) they thrive on the high range. The ultimate sentinel. Spaciousness, majestic silence, remote, untouched. Their finely attuned and incredibly sensitive awareness bonds them to the vastness. For some humans, these places seem like loneliness, with the emptiness rolling out in all directions, mirrored upside down by fleets of clouds drifting along the blue sky. It’s a specific sensibility, and in fact, a lost treasure, that in our modern times is fading fast, losing its luster – just as the literal landscape of the Pronghorn Antelope is being devoured – hemmed in by more roads, cut through by fences (Pronghorn can’t jump, they have to crawl under), noise disturbance from gas exploration and fracking, the push of OHV proliferation, privatized property, careless multiple use of public lands: all of which shreds their essential wildlife corridors, their veins of life. The necessary roaming that once existed and frees their livelihood and vitality is being encroached every goddamned day. The zoom boom of the American Innerwest, with its goldrush like greed to buy up/sell out/occupy the remaining empty places in “connected” remote tech oblivion is an ignorant unchecked juggernaut.

That’s the literal, now, if you allow me, let’s cross the frontier from the literal into the more mysterious: you could say part of our mythic essence, our pronghorn psyche is being corralled and contained by the endless distractions of the encroaching screen. The biggest prison lives inside the smallest devices of the world.  Social media, globalization, instant news: all are diminishing our creative expansiveness and freedom, to feed us instead these claustrophobic emotionally manipulated imaginings and human-only crafted scenarios. Our bodies are more domesticated, sedentary and out of shape than ever before. The wisdom of empty places like the high range, the wandering drift of the open stare, the immense dignity of the Pronghorn has sunk away into an unconsciousness – replaced by the shadows of misunderstood fear or dominion over. Without an “inner” high range, an old blood knowing of Pronghorn, this sense of divine fathomlessness and healthy hardship inside of us, we become blind to the real predators. And when they do show up we’ve forgotten how to move with an agile instinct, and the speed of our wit. We shut down and get taken again and again by a modern sickness that includes distraction, addiction, gossip, and others’ narratives. In the end, a certain wildness in us has been eclipsed. Our discernment for truth has been killed.

So in regards to the full council of community and the complete kinship of ecology, the Pronghorn bring something unique, as each being always does, an ancient wisdom in their blood though their physical lives generally last only 7 to 10 years. They bring an instinct of self preservation by way of great openness, breadth and depth of vision, speed of action, incomparable adaptation in co-evolving with nature. As humans, if we lose them (as we almost have: 40 million, pre-America down to 13,000 in1900, and now with conservation efforts back up to 930,000) we lose the deep ripple of our own vital imagination, and a sheer wellspring of awe. We lose an indefinable relationship older than words. We lose a paradox of feeling so nuanced, so profound that it can disappear into history much like a Pronghorn shape-shifting into a wrinkle of the landscape. My prayer: let this ghost-like shimmering mystery of the world, the Pronghorn Antelope with their cloak of invisibility, stay free and unimpeded for their sake – and for the community at large. All the natural world knows how to sustain itself. Trying to “manage” such a thing, treating them as only Resource, falls way short. Misses the mark. Humans alone simply cannot match the imagination of the Earth.

The Unseen Moves Us

So, yes, over the mountain not far from here is a ghost land. A place out of time. A high range plateau that borders and then weaves seamlessly into extensive aspen glades interspersed with dark green high-altitude pines. On one side its wide open, on the other its dense impassable forest, yet in-between it’s a wide intricate mosaic. Curving corridors of range touching up against white aspens – creating a spacious labyrinth of hidden life and awestruck forgotten places. This is where the Pronghorn Antelope raise their fawns. A newer adaptation to the predation of encroachment. Let’s meet here.

We are out here. I am here on the aspen edge with Constance. The landscape falls away. We are watching a Pronghorn herd of about 60 through binoculars. Bucks, and Does and their twinned Fawns. Early summer. I stand on a log to get a better view and step onto an unseen ant hill and start dancing around. A mile off the Pronghorn see my sudden movement. In a cascading murmuration, a swift peregrination, moving as one by the purity of their instinct which is simply unconscious skill, the Bucks flank out like sparks from a fire flickering and careening to the edges capturing attention, while the Does flow and curve in such graceful fluidity they must all be queens.  They cast a loving current that eddies up all the innocent royal Fawns like swirling phosphorescence and move them in a quiet riptide along an unseen channel, running seamlessly to safety out the back, down through an unseen drainage. 27 seconds later, gone, through wild orchestration, the herd has completely ghosted away. The silence a song hanging in the air.  Hearts are beating like the last drums in the wake of beauty, it’s just us standing here in the wide emptiness of presence…forlorn, and full of love.

That’s the medicine. 

essay written by Matt Cochran, September 2025; https://www.ravendreamtracking.org

 Matt and I met nearly 20 years ago during a dream workshop at Rune Hill in central New York facilitated by two guides from Animas Valley Institute, Lauren Chambliss and Jeffrey Allen. Early on in our relationship we planted seeds for what we called The ReWilding Project, a vision that tended to re-wilding Nature and the Human Soul. For the last 17 years we have been quietly and consistently watering those seeds while living in a strawbale house we built and caring for our garden, land and a greater community of all beings. Matt’s essay on the Pronghorn Antelope reveals an aspect of re-wilding that is all but overlooked in our culture—that of the intimate relationship that is possible between one’s Self and the wild beings of Nature. May the poetry of Matt’s expression touch your indigenous soul and inspire you to deepen your participation in this amazing gift of life. ~constance lynn