By Owen Wister

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Upon a Sunday morning, the 10th of July 1892, I awaked among my scanty yet entangling Pullman blankets, and persuaded the broken-springed window-shade of my lower berth to slide upward sufficiently for a view of Livingston, Montana. Outside I beheld with something more than pleasure a fat and flourishing mountain ram. He was tethered to a telegraph pole, and he scanned with an indifference bred by much familiarity our sleeping-car, which had come from St. Paul, being dropped last night from the coast-bound train, because it was this morning to trundle its load of tourists up the Yellowstone Park branch to Cinnabar. The ram had been looking at Eastern tourists and their cars long enough for the slow gaze of his eye to express not a kindred but the same contempt which smouldered in the stare of the Indians at Custer station, of the cow punchers at Billings, of every Rocky Mountain creature, indeed, beneath whose observation the Eastern tourist passes. Dear reader, go stand opposite the lion at the zoo if you don’t know what I mean. So patent was the stigma cast that it fantastically came into my head to step down and explain to the animal that I was not a tourist, that I had hunted and slain members of his species before now, and should probably do so again. And while thus I sat speculating among the Pullman blankets, the ram leaped irrelevantly off the earth, waved his fore legs, came down, ran a tilt at the telegraph pole as though at a quintain, and the next instant was grazing serene on the flat with an air of having had no connection whatever with the late disturbance.

What had started him off like that? Extreme youth? No; for when I came to hear about him, he was five years old—a maturity corresponding in us men to about thirty. It was simply his own charming temperament. No locomotive had approached; moreover for locomotives he, as I was later to observe, did not care a hang; no citizen old or young of either sex had given him offence; nor was there stir of any kind in Livingston, Montana, this fine early Sunday morning. When I presently stood on the platform, only the wind was blowing down from the sunny snow-fields, and that not bleakly, while from high invisible directions came thinly a pleasant tankling of cow-bells.

Not two minutes had I been on the platform when the ram did it again. Yes, it was merely his charming temperament; and often since, very often, when encompassed with ponderous acquaintance, have I envied him his blithe and relaxing privilege. I was now thankful to learn that the branch train had still some considerable time to wait for the train from Tacoma, before it could take me from the ram’s company; no such good chance to watch a live healthy mountain sheep on his own native heath was likely again to be mine, and after breakfast I sought his owner at once.

“It’s a fine dy,” said the owner.

“And a very fine ram,” I assured him.

“He’s quite tyme,” the owner went on. “You can have him for five hundred.”

“You’re a long way from London,” was my comment; and he asked if I, too, were English. But I was not, nor had I any wish to bear away the ram, skipping and leaping into civilization.

Three hundred pounds would, I suppose, have been a little heavier than he was, but not much; he stood near as high as my waist, and he had at some period of his long, long ancestry marched across to us from Asia upon his lengthy un-sheeplike legs—skipped over the icy straits before Adam (let alone Behring) was in the world, and while the straits themselves waited for the splitting sea to break the bridge of land between Kamchatka and Alaska. This is the best guess which science can make concerning our sheep’s mysterious origin. Upon our soil, none of nature’s graveyards hold his bones preserved until late in the geological day; earlier than the glacial period neither he nor his equally anomalous comrade, the white goat, would seem to have been with us; and we may comfortably suppose that sheep and goat took up their journey together and came over the great old Aleutian bridge which Behring found later in fragments. Having landed up there in the well-nigh Polar north, they skipped their way east and south among our Pacific and Rocky Mountains, until, by the time we ourselves came over to live in the North American continent, they had—the sheep especially—spread themselves widely, and were occupying a handsome domain when we met them.

“Among other things we procured two horns of the animal … known to the Mandans by the name of ahsahta … winding like those of a ram.”

This, so far as I know, is the first word of the mountain sheep recorded by an American. Thus wrote Lewis on December the twenty-second, 1804, being then in winter camp with the Mandan Indians, not many miles up the river from where to-day the Northern Pacific’s bridge joins Bismarck to Mandan. We find him again, on the twenty-fifth of the May following, when he has proceeded up the Missouri a little beyond the Musselshell, writing, “In the course of the day we also saw several herds of the big-horned animals among the steep cliffs on the north, and killed several of them;” as to which one of his fellow explorers correctly comments in his own record, “But they very little resemble sheep, except in the head, horns, and feet.” It is not worth while to quote a later reference made when the party was near the Dearborn River, north, sixty miles or so, of where now stands the town of Helena.

Thus it is to be seen that Meriwether Lewis, private secretary to President Jefferson and commander of that great expedition, met the mountain sheep in Dakota, and from there to the Rocky Mountains grew familiar with him; though not so familiar as to prevent his later making a confusion between sheep and goats, which, being handed down, delayed for many years a clear knowledge of these animals. To this I shall return when goats are in question.

Until very lately, until the eighties, that is to say, sheep were still to be found in plenty where Meriwether Lewis found them among the Bad Lands of Dakota; and they dwelt in most ranges of the Western mountains from Alaska to Sonora. They had not taken to the peaks exclusively then; the great table-land was high enough for them. I very well recall a drive in July, 1885, when, from the wagon in which I sat, I saw a little band of them watching us pass, in a country of sage-brush and buttes so insignificant as not to figure as hills upon the map. That was between Medicine Bow and the Platte River. To meet the bighorn there to-day would be a very extraordinary circumstance; and as for Dakota, there too has civilization arrived; and you will find divorces commoner than sheep—and less valuable.

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It is Gass whom I have cited above as to the scant likeness between this wild so-called sheep and the usual sheep of our experience; and it was Gass whose word I remembered this Sunday morning at Livingston, while I stood taking my fill of observation. The ram, as his owner had assured me, was in all truth quite “tyme”; and you could examine him as near as you wished. I took hold of his rope and pulled him to me, and rubbed his nose. Like a sheep? I have already spoken of his long legs. I now looked him over carefully for a sign of anything in the nature of fleece. There was no sign. Short hair, in texture not unlike the antelope’s and in color not far from that gray we see in fishing-line, covered him close and thick. Upon his neck and shoulders it merged with a very light reddish brown, and on his rump it became a patch much lighter, though not white. In fact, the hue of his coat varied subtly all over him; and I am tempted to remark in this connection that in describing the color of wild animals most of us have been apt to make our assertions far too rigid. Animals there are, of course, completely white, or black, and so forth; but many, the more you scrutinize them, the more reveal gradations, as this ram did; gray fishing-tackle is only a rough impression of his tint upon the 10th of July; on December the 1st of that same year I saw him again, and his hair had darkened to something like a Maltese cat’s. Furthermore, I have seen other sheep in summer that struck me, some as lighter, and some as darker, than the gray of fishing-tackle. And what, shall we infer, do these variations import? Adjustments to climate and environment, state of the individual’s age and health, or several distinct species of sheep? I think I should be shy of the last inference unless I were prepared to accept a difference in the color of the eyes and hair of two brothers as being a basis sufficient to class them as separate subspecies of man. It is a dear thought to many of us that some mountain, some lake, some river, some street, or even (rather than nothing at all) some alley, shall be labelled with our name, and thus bear it down the ages; and from this very human craving our zoÖlogists are not wholly exempt; but I have been taught to doubt that of the mountain sheep, the Ovis canadensis[8] (or Ovis cervina, as some books still have it), more than one or two subdivisions will prove, in the end, valid enlargements of our knowledge. These are Ovis dalli,[9] a white variety in central Alaska, north of latitude 60°, and (perhaps) Ovis stonei,[10] a dark variety with horns more slender and outward curving, in Alaska and North British Columbia. The four other would-be subspecies have been set down as Ovis canadensis auduboni, Ovis nelsoni,[11] Ovis mexicana,[12] and Ovis fannini.[13] These four may be considered not so much varieties of sheep as works of fiction.

As to the general name, all are agreed to let him pass conveniently as a sheep,—conveniently, but with a number of reserves which science can state. He has, for instance, some things in common with the goat family. Indeed, science can, in final analysis, hardly separate sheep from goat. Relatives in this continent our Ovis possesses absolutely none; but there are cousins to be found in Kamchatka, Tibet, and India; and I have been told by one hunter that the moufflon of Corsica resembles him not a little. I’ve forgotten to mention that he hasn’t any tail to speak of. So now at length, you, who have never looked upon him, see him, if you can, through my unscientific vision, as I rubbed his nose at Livingston, Montana: tall almost as a deer, shaped almost like a heavy black-tail deer, close haired, grayish, tailless, with unexpected ram’s horns curving round his furry ears and forward, with eyes dark yellow and grave, and with the look of a great gentleman in every line of him. The tame sheep is hopelessly bourgeois; but this mountain aristocrat, this frequenter of clean snow and steep rocks and silence, has, even beyond the bull elk, that same secure, unconscious air of being not only well bred, but high bred, not only game but fine game, which we still in the twentieth century meet sometimes among men and women. What gives distinction? Who can say? It is to be found among chickens and fish. What preserves it we know; and our laws will in the end extirpate it. Many people already fail to recognize it, either in life or in books. But nature scorns universal suffrage; and when our houses have ceased to contain gentlefolk, we shall still be able to find them in the zoÖlogical gardens.

During my interview with the sheep, freight trains had passed once or twice without disturbing him or attracting his notice; but as I walked away and left him grazing, there came by a switching-engine that made a great noise. This didn’t frighten him, but set him in a rage. Once again he leaped into the air waving his fore legs and eccentrically descended to charge with fury his telegraph pole. Yes, he was “tyme,” if by that word one is to understand that he was shy neither of men nor locomotives; but just here there is a hole in our dictionary. Do you imagine that five years of captivity are going to tame the blood and the nerves of a creature that came over the Aleutian bridge from Asia during the Pleistocene, and has been running wild in the mountains until 1887? He was “tame” enough to pay you no attention—until he wanted to kill you; and this was what he did want when I saw him on the first day of the following December. Then was his rutting time; he was ready to attack and destroy with his powerful horns anything in Livingston; and so it was in a stable that I found the poor fellow, took a peep through the quarter-opened door, where his owner had shut him and tied him in the dark, away from his natural rights of love and war. I noted his winter coat of maltese, I heard his ominous breathing, I saw the wild dangerous lustre in his rolling eye; and that was my farewell to the captive.

So good a chance to study a live ram I have never had again. Upon the other occasions when I have been able to approach them at all, study has not been my object, and the distance between us has been greater; but on one happy later day, I watched a ewe with her lamb for the good part of a morning.

In the summer of 1885, as I have said, the mountain sheep had not yet forsaken quite accessible regions in Wyoming; and very likely he still came down low in most of his old haunts. The small band which I saw was not many miles from one of the largest ranches in that country, and the creatures stood in full sight of a travelled road,—not at that time a stage-road, but one that might be daily frequented by people riding or people driving on their way north from Medicine Bow into the immense cattle country of the Platte and of the Powder River still farther beyond, all the way to the Bighorn Mountains. Those very mountains that bear the sheep’s name and were once so full of sheep as well as of every other Rocky Mountain big game are now sacked and empty. Hidden here and there, some may exist yet, but as fugitives in a sanctuary, not as free denizens of the wild. I saw three years bring this change which thirty years had not brought; and in 1888 you would have looked in vain, I think, for sheep on the road from Medicine Bow to Fetterman. I found them that year at no such stone’s throw from the easy levels of the earth, but up in the air a great distance.

The Washakie Needle, for steepness, is truly a heartrending country, and that is why the sheep are there. In it rise Owl Creek, Grey Bull, and certain other waters tributary to the Bighorn; and I have never gone with pack-horses in a worse place. A worse place, in fact, I have never seen; though they tell me that where Green River heads on the Continental Divide (in plain sight from the Washakie Needle across the intervening Wind River country) you can, if you so desire, enmesh yourself, lose yourself among cleavages and caÑons that slice and slit the mountains to a shredded labyrinth. From the edge of that rocky web I stepped back, discouraged, a year later; and for vertical effects the Washakie Needle remains, as they say, “good enough” for me. We struggled to it through a land of jumping-off places, a high, bald, bristling clot of mountains that, just beyond the southeast corner of the Yellowstone Park, come from several directions to meet and tie themselves into this rich tangle of peaks, ledges, and descents. You really never did see such a place! and my memory of it is made lurid by an adventure with a thunder-storm which cannot be chronicled here because it happened on one of the days when we found elk, but most lamentably missed our sheep. Missing a sheep, let me say, is of all missing the most thorough that I know.

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Encouragement, false encouragement, had come to us after our very first night in camp by the Washakie Needle. The next night we had wild mutton for supper. That initial day, Wednesday, August twenty-ninth, brought us this sweet luck, sweet not alone in its promise of more (for the country was evidently full of sheep), but almost equally because of late, during our perilous journey, we had come down to bacon. Now, to be a hunting party, to be in the Shoshone Mountains in August, 1888, and to be eating bacon, was to be humiliated; only our hard travelling that allowed no attending to other business could excuse such a bill of fare; hence did our pride and our stomachs hail this wild mutton. There was not much of him to hail: he was a young ram; and between six of us, after bacon … need I say more?

It had been my intention, until this very paragraph, to skip what happened next day. But I am growing confidential; these shall be the confessions of a bad shot. I have read in books and in periodicals so many pages where none but good shots were ever fired; I have listened—merciful heaven!—to the tales of my sportsman friends; and, reader, unless you are not at all like me, you have read such pages too, have listened to such stories too, and you have found a monotony creep over these triumphs of other people,—the hair’s-breadth climb, the noiseless approach, the long-range shot, one hundred yards, two hundred, five hundred, with sights not adjusted but elevation merely guessed at, and the inevitably unerring result; and in the midst of all this asphyxiating skill, you have sometimes longed for one pure, fresh breath of failure—have you not? Well, at all events you shall read of mine; and, besides variety, there is a second good reason for this; you could not better learn the ways of the mountain sheep, which, so far as I know them, I am attempting to tell you.

Four of us were so foolish as to set out together upon this evil morning; two parties, that is, of the guide and the guided. There is never any gain in doing this, and almost always loss. The attention which you should be giving to your business is divided by conversation, or by waiting for some member of the party who has fallen behind; and no matter how silent you keep yourselves, four people are sure at some wrong moment to prove conspicuous; better hunt alone, unless circumstances make it wise that there should be two of you—steep country does make this wise—but assuredly never go after game in fours, as we two white men and two Indians went now. We labored and we labored and we finally were upon the top instead of at the bottom of something. It was no more than a ridge, not high, that everywhere dropped off into our own valley or the next one; but two sweating hours had gone in getting merely here, and here our eight eyes discerned sheep, quite a band of them. Not, however, before the sheep had discerned us four wily hunters. We did not know this then, because they stayed still where they seemed to be grazing. It was a great way off in a straight line through the air, for the sheep were small dots upon the mountain; and there was no straight line for us to reach them by. We labored and we labored down to a new bottom and upward on a new slope, and made a most elaborate “sneak,” crouching, and stopping, and generally manoeuvring among stones, gravel, and harsh tufts of growth; so did we come with splendid caution upon where the sheep had been, and, lifting our heads, beheld the vacuum that they had left, and themselves contemplating us from the extreme top of the mountain. I am sure that you know how it feels to have your foot step into space at what you thought was the bottom of the staircase. There is a gasp of very particular sensation connected with this, and that is what I had now, followed at once by the no less distasteful retrospect of myself with my half-cocked rifle, crawling carefully for yards upon my belly, while the sheep watched me doing it. There they were on the top of this new mountain, away far above us, and we four hunters proceeded to go on wrong, as we had begun. I have forgotten to mention that, among our other follies, we had brought horses. Never do such a thing! If you are not in training good enough to hunt mountain sheep on your own legs, wait and climb about for a few days until you have got your breath. What my horse did for me on this precious day was this: our hills were too steep for him to carry me up, so I led him; they were too steep for him to carry me down, so I led him; and betweenwhiles, when I was stalking sheep, I naturally had to leave him behind, and naturally had to go back for him when the stalk was over. You will have by this time but a middling opinion of my common sense; but please bear in mind that Shoshone Indians invariably hunt with horses, and that in those days I was still too much one of the “guided” to be equal to dictating to any Indian what trail we should go, and in what manner we should hunt. This entire hunt of 1888, from the distant Tetons and the waters of Snake River over to the Washakie Needle and Owl Creek, is a tale of struggle between ourselves and our red-skinned guides; we were beginning to know the mountains, to crave exploration, to try the unbeaten path; and for an Indian (though you would never suspect it until you suffered from it) the unbeaten path is the one that he never wishes to try and will do all things to escape—even to deserting you and going home.

We hunters now set our legs to new laboring, and presently were again weltering in sweat, and could look down into a third valley similar to the two we had so painfully quitted. Down at the bottom of this new gash in the hills went a little stream like all the others, and beyond bristled interminably the knife-like intersections of the mountains. We had placed our sheep behind a little rise along the summit, and between this and ourselves some three hundred yards still intervened. We were, of course, much above where any trees grew, and the ground was of that stony sort with short growth and no great rocks immediately near; a high, lumpy pasture of mounds and hollows, wet with snows but lately melted, hailed upon often, rained on but seldom. Lower down, this pasture country (which made the top of all but the highest and severest mountains) fell away in descents of gravel and sheer plunges of rock. To get closer to our sheep we now discovered we must go down some of this hill we had just come up; they were on the watch, but were fortunately watching the wrong place, and we all sat down in happy pride for a consultation. The other side of the hill had turned out suddenly to be a precipice, a regular jumping-off one, that went a long way and ended in a crumble of shifting stones, and then took a jump or two more and so reached the water at the distant bottom. This side was our only possible course, and we took another look at the sheep. They had given up watching, and in joy we started for them quickly. We had so skilfully chosen the ground for our approach that we were screened by a succession of little rises and hollows which lay between us and the sheep. This time, this time, there was to be no crawling up to find a vacuum, no raising your head to discover the departed sheep taking a bird’s-eye view of you! What the hearts of the other hunters did, I don’t know, but my heart thumped with vindictive elation as we sped crouching among the little intervening hollows, perfectly hidden from the sheep and drawing close to them at last. Only one more rise and hollow lay between us and where they were pasturing; and over that rise we hastened straight into the laps of some twenty sheep we had known nothing about; they were all lying down. Neither had they known anything about us; the surprise was mutual. All round me I saw them rise, as it were, like one man and take to diving over the precipice. Bewilderment closed over me like a flood; all my senses melted into one blurred pie of perception in which I was aware only of hind legs and hopping. Frightful language was pouring from me, but I didn’t hear what it was; all was a swirl and scatter of men and sheep. Not one of us hunters was ready with his gun or his intelligence. We indiscriminately stampeded to the edge, and there went the sheep, hustling down over the stones, sliding, springing, and dissolving away. And now, suddenly, when it was of no use at all, we remembered that we carried rifles, and like a chorus in a comic opera we stood on the brow of the mountain, concertedly working the levers, firing our Winchesters into space.

It’s all fifteen years ago; yet as I read over my relentless camp-diary, I blush in spite of laughter; it’s hot work staring truth in the face! And now comes the last feeble pop of the ridiculous. We turned our heads, and beheld the sheep we had come for, the sheep we had climbed two mountains for, the sheep we had at length got within a hundred yards of, just disappearing over a final ridge so far away that there remained to them no color, and only one dimension—length. They looked like a handful of toothpicks. They naturally had not been idle while we were so busy; while we were losing our heads, they had kept theirs; and during that brief fusillade of ours—the whole preposterous affair could not have filled more than three minutes—they had put such a stretch of ups and downs between us, that going after them any more was not to be thought of.

We stood at the empty top of the mountain with our ruined day. There was not a live animal in sight anywhere. Those that jumped into the valley were lost among the pines, and warned about us beyond retrieve. We had banged away at such a rate up here that a wide circle of sheep must be apprised of our neighborhood. Why had we done it? For just the same reason that a number of brave persons ran away suddenly at Bull Run as if perdition were at their heels. Surprise, I take it, is at the bottom of the most unaccountable acts of men. And if you wonder why our two Indians were surprised, I can only answer with a theory of mine that Indians who hunt on horseback have small knowledge of mountain sheep. Antelope, deer, white-tail and black, and even elk, can be, and are constantly thus hunted by the Indians; but when it comes to climbing where the horses cannot go, I suspect that his rider seldom goes either. Looking back, I see now that this whole excursion was conducted ignorantly, and that our guides (both of them excellent hunters of other game) neglected the very first principle here, namely, to get to the top of the mountains and hunt down.

We returned our long way to camp, and the elk that one of us shot at sundown made no atonement for our melancholy farce. My diary concludes, “So ended Thursday, August 30, a most instructive day, full of weather, wind, and experience.”

By breakfast we were bearing up a little, making much of the fact that, after all, the sheep we had seen were only ewes and lambs. This would not have caused us to spare them, to be sure; we were out of fresh meat when we saw them; and though the head and horns of a ewe do not make a noble trophy for the sportsman, they represent hard work, and are decidedly better than nothing at all when you are a beginner, and hungry.

We took another course, making for mountains on the side of the valley opposite from yesterday’s route. My Indian was not hopeful. “Too much shoot,” he remarked. “Run away.” But presently we passed very fresh tracks, and began one of those ascents where you are continually sure that the next top is the real top. We had come looking for the sheep at a season when he is living mostly upon the roof of his house. He, with the goat, inhabits, it may be fairly said, the tallest mansion of all our ruminants; indeed, you may put the whole case thus:—

Our Rocky Mountains are a four-story building. The bottom is the sage-brush and cotton-wood, the second is pines and quaking-asp, the third is willow bushes, wet meadows, and moraines, and the fourth is bald rocks and snow-fields. The house begins about five thousand feet high, and runs to fourteen thousand. We have nothing to do with the prairie-dog and others that live in the cellar; it is the antelope to which the first floor belongs, and also the white-tail deer, which, however, gets up a little into the second. The elk, the black-tail, and the mule-deer possess second and third stories in common, while the fourth is the exclusive territory of the sheep and the goat. But here is the difference; these latter (the sheep, certainly) descend to all the other stories if the season drives or the humor suits them; they go from roof to ground, while the other animals seldom, save when hunted, are to be met above or below their assigned levels. I have met a sheep on Wind River in July where the sage-brush was growing, and another on a wooded foot-hill just above Jackson’s Lake.

This day we went to the fourth story by a staircase dear to the heart of a sheep. I mounted through an uncanny domain where all about me stood little pillars of round stones baked together in mud, and planted on end, each supporting a single rock of another color set upon them transversely; shafts of necromancy they would have seemed in the age of witches, altars which might flame by night while some kind of small, naked beings with teeth held rites over the traveller’s crushed body, for from one’s feet here the little stones rolled down to right and left into depths invisible. You who have not seen cannot imagine how here and there in the Rocky Mountains these masonries of nature suggest the work not of men but demons. Silence drew around me as I passed upward through the weird dwarf Stonehenge; and on top we found ourselves looking down the other side at a gray stump which presently moved. The glasses showed us the stump’s legs and fine curling horns; and our hearts, which had been for some time heavy at the poor luck, grew light. Only, how to get at him?

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We had almost given up the game when we spied the ram; we had come so far for so long; and we now had been sitting upon—almost straddling—this ultimate ridge, with the Indian every little while lugubriously repeating, “No sheep.” The ram had not a suspicion of us, and presently lay down in the sun near the bottom of a rocky gulch. The whole of the gulch we could not see, not even when we had crawled down a side of the mountain, an endless surface of rolling stones with scanty patches of grass and an occasional steadfast rock. This descent seemed the most taxing effort yet. It was nearly always (and sometimes quite) impossible to stir a foot or a hand, or shift any fraction of my weight, without starting a rippling stream of stones that chuckled and bounced and gathered noise as they flowed downward, and finally sprang into a rocky chasm which gave out hollow roars. I often felt certain these sounds must reach the ram; but they were only next door to him, so to speak, and separated by the tilted wall of mountain which divided his gulch from the one down the side of which I was so very gradually making my way. I don’t believe the whole distance could have been more than three hundred yards; yet I was nearly thirty minutes accomplishing it with the help of the grass tufts and every other fixture that came within available reach in this sliding sea of stones. I at length arrived where I wanted to be, and a truly unkind thing happened: I was taken with “buck-fever”! It didn’t prevent my finally getting a shot in; but here is the whole adventure.

I lifted myself and looked over the edge into the next gulch. There was the ram, who saw me at the same moment, and rose. I probably missed him; for after my shot he continued to walk toward me in a leisurely manner, not fifty yards distant, I should think, down in his gulch. Whether I fired at him again or not, I can’t remember,—couldn’t remember that same evening when I tried to put the whole event faithfully down in my diary! Buck-fever is not the only reason for this uncertainty; for now, from behind every rock below me, horns rose up like tricks out of a trap-door, apparitions of horns everywhere, an invasion of mountain sheep. They came straight up to me,—this was the most upsetting part of it all. Not one did I see running down the gulch; they hadn’t made me out, or made anything out, save that some noise had disturbed them. They came up and up around me, passing me, steadily coming and going on over the mountain while my buck-fever raged. “I saw their big grave eyes and the different shades of their hair, and noticed their hoofs moving—but whether they came by fast or slow, or what number there were, I cannot remember at all.” Such are the actual words I wrote not more than six hours later, and I am glad to possess this searching record of that day and of my bygone state of mind; for with the best honesty in the world no man can from memory alone rebuild the minute edifice of truth that has been covered by the heap of fifteen gathering years. So I stood, crazy and inefficient, upon the mountains, and after a little no more sheep were there. A speck of conscious action remained with me, namely, that during the passage of the sheep I had held myself enough in control to get “a bead” on the broadside of two successively; I remembered following them along for a moment with my rifle before pulling the trigger. But these I never saw again, and know not where I hit them—if hit them I did. One trophy remains to show for this day. A ram that had been shot at some moment of the invasion returned to the gulch where I was, and stood at a short distance above me; and then I succeeded in placing one shot where I meant it to go.

The visions of this band, as it scattered in twos and threes after crossing my gulch, would incline me to guess there must have been from fifteen to twenty of them—all rams. Their sex is quite certain; the most intense impression that was given to my unstrung perceptions is of their huge curving horns and their solemn eyes. It is hateful to think that some of them were hurt and so went off to limp, or to die; and I am thankful to have but very few memories of wanton shooting, and some consoling ones of temptations resisted. These rams mostly escaped the indiscriminate blasts from my rifle; of this I am sure. I saw them, high and low, near and far, scuttling into safety over the steep ridges, or down into unseen caÑons; and upon presently searching the vicinity, we found but one trace of blood. As for the buck-fever, it was the first seizure that I ever had, and it has proved the last. Why it should have held off in previous years and come down upon me in 1888, who shall say? You will wonder as much as I do that a silver-tip bear did not give me the slightest touch of it in July, 1887. A bear is more important game than a sheep; this grizzly was the first I had ever seen, and I was less experienced. Excitability is a matter of temperament that varies infinitely; but this scarcely explains why, with a bear to shoot, no cucumber could have been cooler than I was one year, and why the next, with these rams, I seem to have been a useless imbecile. The unexpected apparition of so many animals does not account for it, because when I raised myself to look over the ridge before my first shot that brought them into sight, I was shaking thoroughly.

These proceedings did not, at any rate, impair appetite. With the flavor of elk, deer, antelope, bear, and even porcupine, we were familiar; but wild mutton was still a great novelty, and we found it the most palatable of all. I say “we found it” and not “it was,” because I have found a lump of dough sponged round a tin plate full of bacon grease so very delicious! The romance of wild game so mixes with its taste that we carve a venison steak with unction and respect. Yet I have come almost to think that our good old friend roast beef is more savory than anything we can find in the woods. If it is merely the pleasure of the table that you seek, take a good walk every day in the park, or even just up and down town, and the meats from your kitchen (if your lot is blest with a kitchen) will be superior to all the meats of camp.

I become, as I look back, surer than ever that our Indians knew not much more than we did ourselves about the habits of the mountain sheep, and that they did as little reasoning as we did. On the day preceding this, what had been our experience? To run into bands of ewes and lambs. If the women and children were thus off by themselves in the month of August, it was no great jump to conclude that the men must be keeping each other company somewhere else. When we spied that ram down the gulch sunning himself, we should have tried to ascertain whether or not he was alone. As a matter of natural history, the summer season does find the Ovis canadensis, as well as many other of the ruminants, thus separated by sex; and the chances are that if you meet a ewe she is not far from more, and that a ram had better not be presumed solitary until his individual habit has been so proved. You are not likely to find ewes and rams together till the rutting season,[14] in December. I have read in some book, or books, that the lambs are dropped in March, but I think this is a somewhat early date, or, rather, that many come in April, and that it is scarcely correct to limit their season to the single month. The lambs, from the time of their birth on into the late fall, follow their careful mothers—receive, in fact, a half-year’s bringing up. And I had, one day in September, 1896, the singular good fortune to watch a mamma with her child for a period even longer than my observation of the ram at Livingston.

The Tetons lie just south of the Yellowstone Park, and directly upon the borders of Wyoming and Idaho. Any recent map might seem to prove this geography inaccurate, because, as I understand it, a late extension of the timber reservation reaches below these mountains, and most wisely includes both them and Jackson’s Lake with the whole piece of country eastward to the Continental Divide. Of all places in the Rocky Mountains that I know, it is the most beautiful; and, as it lies too high for man to build and prosper in, its trees and waters should be kept from man’s irresponsible destruction; those forests feed the great river system of the Columbia and Snake. But I have been a poacher, according to the recent map. In 1896, however, the line was north of me by a few miles; and the day before I saw the ewe and the lamb, I had shot a ewe. It is, I believe, considered unsportsmanlike to do this; I have never seen the sportsman yet, though, who would not cheerfully bring home a ewe to an empty larder. Our larder was empty, even of fish, which had been plentiful until we had climbed up here among the Tetons, where the brooks ran too small for fish.

My object this second day was to find, if I could, a ram; and it proved one of those occasions (sadly rare in my experience) when, being disappointed of one’s wish, something actually better descends from the gods, bringing consolation. It was a climb less severe than those of which I have already written, for our camp among the Tetons was close to the fourth story; less, I should suppose, than a thousand feet above our tent, the mountain grew bare of trees. Upward from this, it was not a long walk to snow.

When first I saw the mother and child, I already had them at a great disadvantage; they were, to be sure, where I had not expected them to be, but I was where they had not expected me to be; and thus I became aware of them a long distance below me, actually coming up to me by the trail I had come myself. Trail, you must understand, does not here mean a path beaten by men, or even by game, but simply the pleasantest way of getting up this part of the mountain. The mother had been taking her child upon a visit to the third story, had been away down among the pine woods and open places, where brooks ran and grass grew with several sorts of flowers and ripe berries; and now she was returning to the heights of her own especial world. Alas for my camera! it was irretrievably in camp. I laid my useless rifle down, for from me neither of these lives should receive any hurt; and with the next best thing to a camera—my field-glasses—I got ready for a survey of this family as prolonged and thorough as they should allow. But field-glasses are a poor second best in such a case; a few pictures of this lady and her offspring “at home” would have told you more than my words have any hope of conveying.

I never saw people in less haste. From beginning to end they treated the whole mountain as you would treat your library (dining room were, perhaps, nearer the mark) upon an idle morning between regular meals. No well-to-do matron, with her day’s housekeeping finished, could have looked out of the window more serenely than this ewe surveyed her neighborhood. The two had now arrived at what, in their opinion, was a suitable place for stopping. “Their” opinion is not correct; it was, I soon unmistakably made out, the mamma who—far more than the average American mother as American mothers go now—decided what was good and proper for her child. This lamb was being brought up as strictly as if it were English. They had just completed a somewhat long and unrelieved ascent,—so I had, at any rate, previously found it. This upper region of the mountain rose above the tree belt in three well-marked terraces which were rimmed by walls of rock extremely symmetrical. Each terrace made a platform fairly level and fairly wide, upon which one was glad to linger for a while before ascending the slant to the next terrace wall. I was seated at the edge of the top terrace, a floor of stones and grass and very thick little spruce and juniper bushes; the mamma had just attained the terrace next below me, and up the wall after her had climbed and scrambled the little lamb with (I was diverted to notice) almost as much difficulty as I had found at that spot myself. The mamma knew a good deal more about climbing than the lamb and I did.

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There this couple stood in full view some few hundred feet—about three hundred, I should think—below me; and here sat I at my ease, like a person looking over a comfortable balcony, observing them through my glass. There was a certain mirth in the thought how different would have been the mamma’s deportment had she become aware that herself, her child, and her privacy were all in the presence of a party who was taking notes. But she, throughout, never became aware of this, and I sat the witness of a domestic hour full of discipline, encouragement, and instruction. The glasses brought them to a nearness not unlike peeping through the keyhole; I could see the color of their eyes. The lady’s expression could easily have passed for critical. After throwing a glance round the terrace, her action to the lamb was fairly similar to remarking, “Yes, there are no improper persons here; you may play about if you wish.”

Some such thing happened between them, for, after waiting for the scrambling lamb to come up with her on the level and stand beside her, she appeared to dismiss it from her thoughts. She moved over the terrace, grazing a little, walking a little, stopping, enjoying the fine day, while her good child amused itself by itself. I feared but one thing,—that the wind might take to blowing capriciously, and give their noses warning that a heathen stranger was in the neighborhood. But the happy wind flowed gentle and changeless along the heights of the mountains. I have not more enjoyed anything in the open air than that sitting on the terrace watching those creatures whose innocent blood my hands were not going to shed.

After a proper period of relaxation, the mother judged it time to go on. There was nothing haphazard in her action; of that I am convinced. How she did it, how she intimated to the lamb that they couldn’t stop here any longer, I don’t pretend to know. I do, however, know that it was no mere wandering upward herself, confident the lamb would follow; because presently (as I shall describe) she quite definitely made the lamb stay behind. She now began mounting the hill right toward me, not fast but steadily, waiting now and then, precisely as other parents wait, for her toddling child to come up with her. Here and there were bushes of some close stiff leaf, that she walked through easily, but which were too many for the toddling child. The lamb would sometimes get into the middle of one of these and find itself unable to push through; after one or two little efforts, it would back out and go round some other way, and then I would see it making haste to where its mother stood waiting. Upon one of these occasions the mother received it with a manner that seemed almost to say: “Good gracious, at your age I found no trouble with a thing of that kind!” They drew, by degrees, so near me that I put away my glasses. There was a time when they were not fifty feet below me and I could hear their little steps; and once the ewe sneezed in the most natural manner. While I was wondering what on earth they would do when they found themselves stepping upon the terrace into my lap, the ewe saw a way she liked better. Had she gone to my left as I watched her, and so reached my level, the wind would have infallibly betrayed me; but she turned the other way and went along beneath the terrace wall to a patch of the bushes high enough to make severe work for the lamb. While she was doing this, I hastened to a new position. Where I had been sitting she was bound to see me as soon as she climbed twenty feet higher, and I accordingly sought a propitious cover, and found it in a clump of evergreens. She got to the wall where she could make one leap of it. It was done in a flash, and resembled nothing that any well-to-do matron could perform; but once at the top, she was again the complete matron. She scanned the new ground critically and with apparent satisfaction at first. I stole the glasses to my eyes and saw her closed lips wearing quite the bland expression of a lady’s that I know when she has entered a room to make a call, and finds the wall-paper and furniture reflect, on the whole, favorably upon the lady of the house. Meanwhile, the poor little lamb was vainly springing at the wall; the jump was too high for it. Its front hoofs just grazed the edge, and back it would tumble to try again. Finally it bleated; but the mother deemed this not a moment for indulgence. She gave not the slightest attention to the cry for assistance. There was nothing dangerous about the place, no unreasonable hardship in getting the best of the wall; and by her own processes, whether you term them thought or instinct, she left her child to meet one of the natural difficulties of life, and so gain self-reliance.

Do you think this fanciful? That is because you have not sufficiently thought about such things. The mamma did undoubtedly not use the words “self-reliance” or “natural difficulties of life”; but if she had not her sheep equivalent for what these words import, her species would a long while ago have perished off the earth. The mountain sheep is a master at the art of self-preservation; its eye is tenfold keener than man’s, because it has to be, and so is its foot ten or twenty fold more agile; every sense is developed to an extreme alertness. It measures foothold more justly than we do, because it has had to flee from dangers that do not beset us. That the maternal instinct (which these mothers retain until their young can shift for themselves) should fail in a matter so immediate as the needs of its young to understand rock climbing, is a notion more unreasonable than that it should be constantly attentive to this point. But—better than any talk of mine—the next step taken by the ewe will show how much she was climbing this mountain with an eye to her offspring.

The lamb had bleated and brought no sign from her. She continued standing, or moving a few feet onward in my direction. This means that she was coming up a quite gentle slant, and that thirty yards more would land her at my evergreen bush. She came nearer than thirty yards and abruptly stopped. She had suddenly not liked the looks of my evergreen. Behind her on one side, the last steep ascent of the mountain rose barer and barer of all growth to its stony, invisible summit which a curve of the final ridge hid from view. Behind her, down the quiet slant of the terrace, was the wall where she had left the lamb. She now backed a few stiff steps, keeping her eye upon the evergreen. Her uncertainty about it, and the ladylike reserve of her shut lips, caused me to choke with laughter. To catch a wild animal going through a (what we call) entirely human proceeding has always been to me a delightful experience; and from now to the end this sheep’s course was as human as possible. I had been so engaged with watching her during the last few minutes that I had forgotten the lamb. The lamb had somehow got up the wall and was approaching. Its mamma now turned and moderately hastened down the slope to it. What was said between them I don’t know; but the child came no farther in my suspicious direction; it stayed behind among some little bushes, and the mother returned to scrutinize my hiding-place. She looked straight at me, straight into my eyes it seemed, and her curiosity and indecision again choked me with laughter. She came even nearer than she had come before. How much of me she saw I cannot tell, but probably my hair and forehead; she at any rate concluded that this was no suitable place. She turned as I have seen ladies turn from a smoking-car, and with no haste sought her child again. How she managed their next move passes my comprehension; I imagined that every foot of the mountain ascent near me was in my full view. But it was not. Quite unexpectedly I now became aware of the two, trotting over the shoulder of the ridge above me, with already two or three times the distance between us that had been just now. If I had wished to follow them, it would have been useless, and I had seen enough. When I was ready, I made for the summit myself. The side which I had so far come up was the south side, and a little further climbing took me over the narrow shoulder to the north, where I was soon walking in long patches of snow. Across these in front of me went the tracks of the mamma and her lamb, the sage and gentle guide with the little novice who was learning the mountains and their dangers; across these patches I followed them for several miles, because my way happened to be theirs. No doubt they saw me sometimes; but I never saw them again. I hope no harm ever came to them; for I like to think of these two, these members of an innocent and charming race that we are making away with, as remaining unvexed by our noise and destruction, remaining serene in the freedom that lives among their pinnacles of solitude.

AMERICAN BIGHORN

(Ovis canadensis[15])

The bighorn of the American continent, inclusive of its local races (frequently regarded as distinct species), is a large sheep, distinguished from the Asiatic argalis, among other features, by the comparative smoothness of the horns, in which the outer front angle is prominent, and the inner one rounded off, and also by the smaller size of the face glands. There is a well-marked whitish patch on the rump, but the amount of white on the under parts and legs shows considerable local variation. In the typical Rocky Mountain race (O. canadensis typica) the ears are long and pointed, with short hair, and the horns, which are very heavy, diverge but little outwards, and generally have the tips broken. The Californian O. canadensis nelsoni is a paler southern race. On the other hand, in O. canadensis stonei of the northwest territories the color of the back is very dark, and the white on the belly and legs sharply defined. And both in this race and the light-colored O. canadensis dalli of Alaska the horns are lighter, more divergent, and sharper pointed, while the ears tend to become shorter, blunter, and more hairy. Height at shoulder about 3 feet 2 inches; weight about 350 pounds.

The horns of the ewes are very small in comparison to those of the rams, seldom measuring more than 15 inches on the curve from base to tip. Large male horns are now difficult to obtain, and of late years it is seldom that those of fresh-killed specimens are seen exceeding 38 inches on the curve from tip to tip. American sportsmen are keen to obtain horns of large basal girth; but these, as will be seen from the following table, rarely exceed 16 inches. The Maclaine of Lochbuie possesses a specimen whose girth, according to his own measurement, is 19 inches.

Distribution.—North America, from the Rocky Mountains southward to Sonora, northern Mexico, and California, and northward to Alaska and the shores of Bering Sea. The Alaskan race, for at least some portion of the year, is snow-white.

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Measurements of Horns

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