Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig saddle.network. NS
Answer
saddle.network. 5 NS elly.ns.cloudflare.com.
saddle.network. 5 NS burt.ns.cloudflare.com.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0