Scent...
Scent...is relatively minor...so long as you reasonably stay downwind...
I would say sound and movement are more important than 'scent'.
The effort to 'eliminate' one's scent - is a bit vain ie. your body is constantly
manufacturing 'scent'. I would rather swim through the ocean quietly and bleeding...than to thrash about in the ocean not bleeding... I would rather
be stinking and silent in the woods...as I hunted a deer... rather than odorless and moving about...
Deer have poor depth perception, but they are highly sensative to 'movement' and 'sound'. During rut...the deer are highly tuned to the scent of each other...BUT remember this is also the time of year when the native of yore discovered that they could get close enough to a deer...to kill the deer with a throwing spear...because the deer were so distracted by the smell of 'rut'. Deer are also very curious. What makes one deer run - just might attract another deer. I won't go so far as to say they are unpredictable - but I would say it is like with us in the sense that it gets complicated as to what particular sound scares us...and what sound just makes us curious... The same sort of complication applies to 'scent'. There are bears and lions and bobcats and humans and snakes all over the place...and just the scent of any of these critters...is not going to make a deer panic and run away... I actually tend to think my pipe tobacco might be an attractant... For example, my Virginia blend...is a complex sweet natural fragence... My English flake...is a 200yr.old recipe that has a steamy vanilla fragrence comingled with the sweet complexity of the Virginia
tobacco...and my Balkan mix...has a musty dirty sox mildewy scent wrapped in sweet virginia... These scents are 'natural' and 'complex' - and to some degree mask the human scent. Their complexity probably cause just a little curiosity... The nice thing about pipe smoke...is that it tells you also which direction the wind is blowing... These vegetal odors and fragrences ironically remind me of the fragrences of certain products sold to 'mask' human scent... It's not been problem ie. I've eaten my share of venison...and never once have I felt that by getting rid of my leather straps or by scrubbing myself a bit more...would there be that much more venison for the table.
I would say pronghorn are more sensative...BUT think about it. Pronghorn have less 'cover' so over the openess of the plain they read the wind like a newspaper... Staying downwind is important. Nevertheless, a scoped rifle ought to erase their advantage. In regard to pronghorn and archery - I think the desire to go to the waterhole can override the pronghorn's nose. Incidentally, the Sabre tooth cat(which was like a giant bobcat)likely went extinct because the climate changed,destroyed the more lush forested habitat and as the giant stags and mammoth disappeared...the old Sabre tooth wasn't fast enough to chase pronghorns and bison...and couldn't compete with wolves,bears, and cougars and bobcats..for the caribou moose,deer and elk... If the Sabre tooth cat had learned how to make arrows and use a bow - he might have overcome the problem and survived!