T.J. Tavegie watched two orphaned pronghorn fawns plodding across the charred sand 15 yards away from him. They kicked up clouds of ashy dust with each step as they headed toward the small stock pond where Tavegie’s ground blinds still stood, miraculously, after surviving Wyoming’s House Draw Fire two days prior on Aug. 21. The fawns looked at him but didn’t seem to care much. They had other things to worry about, like where the rest of their herd had gone. The landscape near Buffalo, where Tavegie has outfitted big-game hunts for decades, was unrecognizable. A series of prairie fires, triggered by lightning strikes and driven by high winds, had scorched some 174,000 acres of sagebrush flats, including about 40,000 acres of ground that Tavegie leases for pronghorn and mule deer hunting. Archery season was only a few days away and Tavegie had antelope hunters inbound. But when he and the landowner went out to assess the damage, they found a small herd of pronghorn that had gotten trapp...