By Owen Wister

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Should you wish with your own eyes to look upon this odd and much-debated creature, it is (to name some of his territories) in the Saw Tooth Range in Idaho, and among the peaks northward from Lake Chelan, the Okanogan and Methow rivers, all three in Washington, and also upon many mountains near the coast in British Columbia that, if you climb high and hard enough, you are almost sure to find him; and you would be perfectly certain to find him in the ZoÖlogical Gardens at Philadelphia to-day April twenty, 1903. But it may be that by the time you shall read this the summer heat of Philadelphia will have ended his existence there; and this is the only place in our country (or in any country at present writing) where he is in captivity. Of his natural habitat and the interesting questions that it raises, I shall presently speak; let me at once dismiss the question of his species, now finally known as Oreamnus montanus.

He is not a goat at all. We have fallen to speaking of him so in English because for a good number of years it has been the name he has gone by where he lives; but he is an antelope, and his nearest relative is the chamois, whose quite peculiar way of walking his own gait closely resembles. The chamois I have never hunted, but have often watched the singular hunching and truculent movement of the goat, as with head lowered (you might suppose for a charge) he slowly and heavily proceeds along his chosen vertiginous paths of rock and snow. He is a mountain antelope; and his various Latin names, and the confusion, both popular and scientific, of which he was the subject through most of the nineteenth century, are curious and interesting matters. He was doubtless in zoÖlogic truth an emigrant, having walked from frozen Asia to frozen America across that great old Aleutian Isthmus between two frozen oceans, adjacent seas unmerged as yet by Behring Strait. With other newcomers he replaced the original dwellers of the soil, the American rhinoceros and any number more of old inhabitants with whom the climate had ceased to agree. After landing upon our continent away up in the north the goat and sheep spread themselves widely; but the goat not half nor a quarter so widely as the sheep. The more we compare these similar creatures, the more singular seem their contrasts.

If they were fellow-travellers and twin arrivals, if they did come over the Aleutian bridge together, it is either because there was only one bridge and both had to use it, or else they fell out on the way, and reached here not on speaking terms. The first hypothesis is the one to which I incline: they had to use the same trail because there was only one. Sheep and goat do not seem to me to live on good terms. I should not venture this observation were it based upon my individual experience alone. What my campings have gradually led me to notice is this: you don’t find sheep and goat on the same hill as you find elk and deer in the same wood. Considering that both animals like steep places, like rocks, like very high rocks; and also that their respective habitats coincide in certain regions,—in British Columbia, for instance, and in Washington, and, I think one might fairly add, in Idaho,—I dare by no means make the sweeping assertion that sheep and goat have never been found, or are never to be found, frequenting the same pasture; I don’t know this, and all of us do know that negatives are difficult of proof. But I have camped high in Washington, with goats in profusion all around, and the whole country looking precisely like a sheep country, yet never the sign of a sheep anywhere to be seen. People said, “Plenty of sheep over there,” and they would point to some clearly visible heights. And next, people came from not thirty miles away, having seen and killed sheep. It was the same latitude, the same altitude, the same season, the same everything. What is to be drawn from this? That it was an accidental year, and just happened so for the few weeks that I was there? This is the conclusion that you might draw, as I then did; and you would be wrong, as I then was. For I returned there six years later, and it was still the case, and had been the case meanwhile, saving only that goats and sheep and all wild animals, wherever their chosen abode was, had been growing scarcer and shyer, and were approaching that extinction which we deal to all helpless things that do not minister to our own comfort and survival. During those intervening years I had hunted sheep in a country which for all the world looked as if a goat might come round the corner at any moment. But no goat ever did; and yet, had I ridden down those mountains, and over a space of plains to the westward, and up the very first mountains I should then have met, there would then have been all the goat I wanted, and not (I have been told) a single sheep!

Thinking these things over, I began to wonder if some particular kind of food (since climate it could absolutely not be) was the cause of this flocking apart. Was there, perchance, some little herb which a goat must have and a sheep didn’t like? Well, if that be so, no botanist has so far told me its name; while on the other hand, very recently, I have had news of a sportsman who was hunting in some mountains of British Columbia where sheep and goat were both readily to be found, and whose experience was like mine, only more marked and significant. He had stood upon one mountain where there were goat, and looked across to an adjacent one where he could plainly see sheep. Now on his mountain there was not a single sheep; he must go to the other for them; but over there he must expect no goat. He found this so, and he was assured that it was always so: the animals did not seem to trespass upon each other’s premises.

These few facts that I have here gathered seem to me worthy of recording, and perhaps enough to warrant a presumption; but insufficient for an assertion. Until others shall have on their part added similar observations, I would lay down no rule that a chronic hostility separates Ovis and Oreamnus. Perhaps such a rule has been laid down, but if it be printed anywhere, I have not met it; nor have I had the fortune (after consulting the books) to meet any accounts of goat which essentially add to what has been said already by Audubon; and that is somewhat meagre. Many pictures there are, much better than his old-fashioned plates, but further solid information is uncommonly scarce. Even the latest and most official authorities, when you test their pages by an intimate searching for a piece of comprehensive and definite information, do not give you that information.

If my surmise be true, and sheep and goat are apt to be upon strained relations, I think we may be certain which of the two has regulated the affair. I will hazard the guess that in single combat the goat could ruin the sheep before the sheep was fully aware of what had befallen him. Hunters can picture such an encounter, which probably would be brief if grand. The gallant old sheep would stand, aim, bound to the attack and leap in the air, expecting to dash his forehead and curling horns against the face and horns of the goat. But the goat—ah! that’s not the goat’s way. It would have happened so quickly as not to be made out; but there the poor ram would lie, ripped open. The goat does nothing so picturesque and unpractical as jumping in the air. He lowers his sullen head, one shrewd thrust and jerk-back with his deadly sharp horns, and the business is despatched. And the goat looks it, too. His appearance suggests immediately that you had better look out for him if you happen to be a ram with beautiful useless horns—useless, that is, against any such apparatus as the goat carries. One day I stood watching a good specimen billy-Oreamnus. The nanny, less conspicuous, lay in the shade on some flat ground, asleep. But the billy sat hunched on the peak of a built-up pyramid of rocks. It was in the ZoÖlogical Gardens at Philadelphia where this pair, taken into captivity in 1901, have grown and thrived, but have not bred. The billy shows his formidable nature; no strangers can go near him; he would disembowel them in a jiffy; even his keeper has to be wary. At the top of his pile of rocks sat the captive, hunched, as I have said, and truculent and lowering, in spite of his stillness. His eye had that gaze which so wonderfully remains with wild animals who are prisoned from the great free natural spaces that belong to them, whose birthright is a liberty of no sparrow-and-robin size, but a colossal liberty, the range of the primal world, where fences and statutes are not. Our delightfully conventional intelligence is familiar with this look in the eyes of the lion and the eagle because the poets have called our attention to it, have said pretty things about it; but if you have the unusual gift of making your own observations, you will find it in many other animals, including certain types of man. As for this goat, no goat sitting on a rock at Harlem could stare like him; he might have been sitting on the top of the Cascade Mountains, surveying huge gulfs, and (possibly) meditating how improving it would be to disembowel a ram.

As I watched him, an odd thought revisited me: how Asiatic he looked, for some obscure reason! I remembered thinking this same thing when I had shot my first goat eleven years before. Asiatic? Yes; and I cannot at all explain why, unless it be that one has seen pictures of animals which hail from somewhere like Tibet, and which bear some resemblance to the Oreamnus. I know that no other of our Western big game strike me in this way; buffalo, elk, deer, antelope, sheep,—all these have always seemed to me to look indigenous, to belong to our North American soil. But this goat is a figure that it surprises me to meet among the haunts of my own language; his idiom should be Mongolian!

He’s white, all white, and shaggy, and twice as large as any goat you ever saw. His white hair hangs long all over him, like a Spitz dog’s or an Angora cat’s; but it is stiff and coarse, not silky, and against its shaggy white mass the blackness of his hoofs, and horns, and nose, looks particularly black. His legs are thick, his neck is thick, everything about him is thick, saving only his thin black horns. They’re generally about six inches long, they spread very slightly, and they curve slightly backward. At their base they are a little rough, but as they rise they cylindrically smooth and taper to an ugly point. His hoofs are heavy, broad, and blunt. The track they make is huge, and precisely the reverse of the sheep’s; it is a capital V, pointing backward. The sheep’s track is a V also, but pointing forward. By his clumsy-looking hoofs, and his thick-set and apparently unwieldy legs, it would seem as though this goat had best keep his level, as though he might seldom go up two steps of even a porch without accident; a set of legs and hoofs could scarce be instanced of seemingly less avail for a mountaineer. So, at least, I should argue, recalling the various sharp apparatus which we need ourselves. One does not see how these heavy animals can leap and cling. But let me transcribe uncorrected some sentences from my hunting journal of November, 1892, pencilled in flippant spirit after a day’s pursuit of the goat.

“They … chose places to lie down where falling off was the easiest thing you could do.… The individual tracks we have passed always choose the inclined plane where they have a choice between that and the level.… I suppose these animals sometimes must fall, though they have a projecting heel of horn to their hoof which is wonderfully adapted to their vertical habits. But if they do fall, it probably amuses them. Their hair is more impenetrably thick than any hair I have seen, and beneath this is the hide thicker than buffalo. If they play games together, it is probably to push each other over a precipice, and the goat that takes longest to walk up again loses the game.”

You can see from these lines what a tide of resentment flows between them. I remember that hard but successful day very well; and it furnished some facts about size and weight and so on, which were all recorded on the spot, and which give some good details well to know.

To begin with, there is that “projecting heel of horn” to the goat’s hoof. We cannot imagine how he manages to make such a slight thing (not over a quarter of an inch) catch his weight. He weighs anywhere from one hundred and eighty to three hundred pounds. I had no means that day on top of the Cascade Mountains to ascertain how much the male I had killed might weigh, but he was very much of a load for two of us to move. His hide (not the hair but the leather) on his rump was as thick as the sole of my boot. My boot was made for climbing mountains, and the sole was filled with hobnails; the hide was as thick as such a sole, and when balanced against things in camp whose weight we knew,—such as flour and sugar bags,—it alone weighed thirty pounds! We carried home, beside the head and hide, the web-tallow, and this was three-quarters of an inch thick. Hunters will know what ample supply this means in animals much larger than the goat. This specimen was, my most companionable guide told me, of good but not supreme size. We carried home none of the meat. The flesh of the grown-up goat cannot be eaten with much pleasure; but later, for the sake of a complete set of specimens, I shot a kid; and the flesh of this we ate with entire satisfaction for our Thanksgiving dinner. And this brings me to the next point.

“These wild goat,” says my journal, “are twice the size and more of the ordinary goat, and if their hides kept clean and snow-white as they naturally are, they would be a splendid-looking animal.”

This was written two weeks before I was able to examine one that was in very truth snow-white; and lately, while looking through the books to find what they have to say that may fill out my imperfect knowledge, I have come more than once on the statement that the goat is not pure white, but has a tinge of yellow, or some shade, here and there, that dulls his total sheen. This I conceive to be error. Age, it is possible, may bring a few dark hairs to the white goat. But I should wish to be very sure about this before I asserted it. The sum of my experience is, that first I killed some plainly old male goats (they were off by themselves, no longer with the herd), and of these the coats were dingy; that presently I found a plainly younger male goat (he was lighter in weight and his horns and hoofs showed less wear), and his coat was spotless; and that finally I found the coat of a kid born that same year to be equally spotless. What is the inference—almost the conclusion? Is it not that in the older goats the color was discoloration, from causes external; that by nature the goat is perfectly white; and that the books have gone on reproducing an original mistake which grew from some writer’s having seen only goats that were weather-stained? Oh, the reproduction of error! The way one man’s inaccurate statement is blandly copied down by the next man, and verification shirked at every turn! Why will they do it, these little scientific folk? For the great ones never do. The great ones verify, or else, when they come to a hole in their knowledge, they frankly tell you that they don’t know. They paste no piece of paper over the hole, pretending it’s all solid underneath. But the small fry—the popular magazine size,—these unceasingly are pasting paper. And why? Because they’re not afraid of being found out. They know how few of their readers can discover the holes and poke their fingers through the paper. Don’t you believe me, reader? Does your kind heart repudiate with heat this aspersion? Perhaps—for instance—you’re not aware how some little writers go on deriving the name of a well-known St. Lawrence fish from two French words, masque allongÉe. I would tell you about it, only I did not discover their ludicrous blunder myself; but here’s a hole where I happened to poke my own finger through the paper. During ten years I used every official map of Wyoming that I could procure. First it was a territory, and next a state, but all the while the map-makers continued to draw Pacific Creek as flowing into Buffalo Fork. Now Pacific Creek is a thoroughfare between the two sides of the Continental Divide, and it does not flow into Buffalo Fork, but into Snake River. It was a really bad geographical mistake. Some original map-maker had traced his map on hearsay or guesswork, hadn’t gone down the creek to see for himself, and all his successors faithfully reproduced his ignorance. The people who knew better were merely Indians, prospectors, cowboys, or stray hunters like myself. We didn’t count; that wasn’t being found out!

Pacific Creek being wrong to a certainty, how then about Atlantic Creek, and Thoroughfare, and a good many more? Did these, also, flow one way officially, and actually another? How could I be sure until I had crossed mountains and found them for myself? And how should you, reader, enjoy being condemned to such maps in a country where Indians, and bears, and blizzards prevailed? You will scarce wonder that I grew to place upon those maps the same chastened reliance that I place to-day upon books which tell me that the goat is not strictly white, or that he lives in the Rocky Mountains. You might search a good many hundred miles of Rocky Mountains that have never seen a goat, but which the sheep has frequented since before the memory of man. Here again comes the contrast between the two: having come the same road from Kamchatka, their ranges upon this continent but partially coincide, and even where both animals are established and flourishing in the same zone, their localities within that zone are so capriciously separated as to baffle even the explanation that one drives the other out.

It would seem that they can stand equal cold; both are to be found in Alaska, as might be expected from the manner of their emigration. And beginning with Alaska (one authority, R. Lydekker, “The Royal Natural History,” London, 1898, the best authority I have found for coherence and completeness, names latitude 64° as the northern limit), we find goat and sheep alike plentifully distributed as we come south. But only for a certain distance. If the Northwest be plain like a picture in your mind’s eye, you can recall how in the far North the Cascades and Rockies are intermingled, and how, as we come down through British Columbia to our own soil, they gradually separate, slope apart, so that by the time they reach the latitude of Portland, Oregon, a wide, flat domain lies between them. Both have slanted inland; but while the Cascades are only some hundred and sixty miles from the Pacific coast, the Rockies are away over in Idaho and Montana, and continue to diverge until they sink among the hot sands of the mesquite and the yucca. Now, in Arizona, in the Colorado CaÑon for instance, we still find the sheep, and can find him yet farther down in northwest Mexico. But no goat is so far south. The goat stops more than a thousand miles to the north. It seems clear, then, that goat and sheep will inhabit equal cold, but not equal heat.

Where, exactly, does the goat stop? That is something which no book (that I have seen) will tell you. The London book, which I have quoted already, names latitude 40° as the southern limit of his habitat. This is considerably farther south than I have ever heard of him. My knowledge of him goes no farther south than the Saw Tooth Range, which is in Idaho. These sharp ridges nourish the head waters of the Salmon River, and are in the southern-central part of the state. And I am inclined to say, in spite of Mr. Lydekker, but supported by Mr. Arthur Brown, that the Saw Tooth and Salmon River country in Idaho is about the southeastern corner of the goat’s province. Saving stray and accidental individuals, you are not likely to find him beyond that point, south or east. I have never talked with any hunter who had seen him in Wyoming, although (and here again I will re-enforce my own experience with Mr. Brown’s) there seems to be a sort of goat tradition in Wyoming, here and there. This myth is, to be sure, highly sublimated. You don’t hear that goat used to be upon this or that definite mountain, or that So-and-So saw a man who saw a goat, or whose wife or uncle saw one; it never comes as near you as that; yet still faintly in the air of the Continental Divide there hovers this vague rumor of the animal.

If he was ever in Wyoming as a domiciled resident, who shall say why he departed? Why is he not to-day upon the Washakie Needle, or in the abrupt country where heads Green River, or among the formidable Tetons, since to-day he is but a little farther west of the Tetons, in the Saw Tooth Range? And why, if man (or sheep) drove him from these Wyoming peaks, has he not been driven from the peaks of Idaho? Difference in neither heat, nor cold, nor humidity, nor accessibility, can be the explanation, for there is no difference; and as for difference in food, I find no suggestion of it in the pages of the authorities.

“What they eat in winter is a mystery. But it must be the little knobs of moss that grow at the edges of the steep rocks on top, where the snow cannot lie. They never come down into the valleys, as the mountain sheep do when the snow grows deep up above.”

This is no authority, but merely my camp notebook again; and the statement that the goat is never, like the sheep, driven to low pastures by the snow is but the popular account of him that I was able to gather from the inhabitants—the prospectors, the trappers—of the mountains where I hunted him. Yet it is interesting; and if generally true, it may furnish some clue to the capricious local separations between sheep and goat in the zone of their common habitat. But if the goat cannot, when the weather would drive him down, subsist upon the less lofty growths that then satisfy the sheep, you will remark how truly unlike the real goat is this narrow discrimination as to diet.

It is surprising, indeed, that at this late day, when investigation and verification are so easy, no naturalist seems anywhere to have written a plain, complete paragraph answering the plain, natural question: In what states and territories does the white goat live? It would seem the naturalist’s business to tell us this. We have the right to expect to open some single standard book, and find such facts at once. Well, I have had to open eight, gathering here a fact and there a fact in a manner not unlike the painful process of rag-picking. The result is far from covering the ground; let me acknowledge this, and beg friendly correction and amplification,—and let me say, nevertheless, that the following is the most detailed information to be found so far set down in any one place.

In Alaska and British Columbia we find the goat, and in northwest Montana, and in Idaho, but only in spots; he is also in the northern Cascades in Washington, but, oddly enough it appears, not in the Olympic Range. Nor is he in the southern Cascades, in Oregon. Elsewhere he is not, unless possibly in California. There is an ancient legend of him among the higher mountains of that state; the Spanish Padre de Salvatierra and his fellow-missionary, Padre Piccolo, are supposed to have seen him. We must uselessly wonder if they did; and I should have been more indebted to a foot-note in the “Biological Survey of Mount Shasta,” which touches upon the goat’s habitat in Oregon and Washington, were it not wholly silent as to the animal’s presence or absence, past or present, in the state of California.

The farther we follow the story of the white goat, the more do we find his steps attended with the mists of confusion; and for the gloomy critic this would be a timely moment to write some sentences about the longevity of error. But it all came out right in the end; and we will get to the facts at once, and how I first began to meet the stream of uncertainty of which the fountain-source lies in the old romantic pages of Lewis and Clark.

A while ago I spoke of a goat tradition in Wyoming. Now it was not until the fall of 1889 that I believed there was such a thing as this goat anywhere. I thought—I could not then say why—that the unlettered mountaineers and plainsmen, whose talk I heard, were speaking of the sheep; and, also, they contradicted each other in a way so curious and persistent that the animal became in a manner fabulous to me, like the unicorn, or the wool-bearing horse. Now I would meet the assurance that “over there somewhere,” among the mountains near the Pacific, a snow-white goat lived, with long hair; again, I would meet a positive denial of this. Some sceptical old trapper or prospector would proclaim that he “guessed he had been most everywhere,” and nobody could “fool him about no goat” with long hair. Indeed, when I at last laid my own goat trophies, heads and hides, before the eyes of my old friend John Yancey of the Yellowstone Park, they gave him a genuine sensation. He had wasted small faith in any tales of goat. He stared at them, he touched them, he lifted them, he could not get over it; they caused me to rise in his esteem, and he refused to believe that circumventing a mountain sheep is a far more skilful exploit. He, too, like myself, had supposed that in some way this notion about goats could be traced to mountain sheep, and that they were one and the same animal. I found this error spread eastward to great cities.

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In the front hall of a certain club there used to hang—and still hangs, for all I know—the head of a white goat. I stood near it one day in 1894 or 1895, while two gentlemen were looking at it. One had hunted in our West, and was asked by the other what animal this was. He replied with certainty, “A mountain sheep.” It was no business of mine, and I did not correct him. But how inveterate and singular was the confusion! for these two wild animals do not resemble each other a particle more than do their domestic namesakes. In the hall of the club that day I did not know that, ninety years before, the self-same blunder had been made and written down for the first time, and that we were still inheriting its consequences.

On September twenty-six, 1805, Meriwether Lewis, quite inconveniently sick, was, with his equally inconveniently sick comrades, camped for the purpose of building canoes. They lay at the confluence of the north fork with the main stream of that river which Idaho now most often calls the Clearwater, and which the Indians then called the Kooskooskee. They had come overland a great way—two thousand miles—walking and riding. They had lately been high among the cold snows, and they were now abruptly plunged in the flat climate of the plains. Heat and the copious new food made every mother’s son of them ill. But a few days before this, and they had been sparingly serving out rations of horse flesh to keep together soul and body; now the Indians have given them all the salmon they can swallow, and taught them to eat the camass, a precarious vegetable. In the language of Doctor Coues (the admirable annotator of the 1894 edition, one can hardly imagine a better and honester piece of work): “Having been neither frozen nor starved quite to death—having survived camass roots, tartar emetic, and Rush’s pills (the famous Dr. Rush of Philadelphia,) the explorers have reached navigable Columbian waters.…” I could quote from this splendid book forever. It is our American Robinson Crusoe. Somebody, no doubt, will grind it into a historical novel; but no novel, no matter how big a sale it has, can spoil the journal of Lewis and Clark. Well, at this sick camp, while they’re making ready to float to Astoria, enter the white goat. It is his first recorded appearance.

Says Gass: “There appears to be a kind of sheep in this country, besides the ibex or mountain sheep, and which have wool on. I saw some of the skins, which the natives had, with wool four inches long, and as fine, white, and soft as any I had ever seen.”

Here, you perceive, is the error, appearing simultaneously with the goat.

These sheep “live,” says the text in another place, “in greater numbers on that chain of mountains which forms the commencement of the woody country on the coast and passes the Columbia between the falls and rapids.” Accurate in everything save the name.

Next comes the observation (William Dunbar and Dr. Hunter) written on the Columbia River near the Dalles: “We here saw the skin of a mountain sheep, which they say lives among the rocks in the mountains; the skin was covered with white hair; the wool was long, thick, and coarse, with long, coarse hair on the top of the neck and on the back, resembling somewhat the bristles of a goat.”

This time, you see, they are on the very edge of getting the thing straight. But no; they recede again, after the following which seems to promise complete clearing up:—

“A Canadian, who had been much with the Indians to the westward, speaks of a wool-bearing animal larger than a sheep, the wool much mixed with hair, which he had seen in large flocks.”

April ten, 1806, the party is on its return journey. It has successfully wintered on the coast, and has now come up the Columbia again, fifty miles above Vancouver.

“While we were at breakfast one of the Indians offered us two sheepskins for sale; … the second was smaller … with the horns remaining.… The horns of the animal were black, smooth, and erect; they rise from the middle of the forehead, a little above the eyes, in a cylindrical form, to the height of four inches, where they are pointed.”

Here there is no mistake about the mistake; he describes a goat and calls it a sheep. Why he should do this when he had seen the bighorn constantly during his journey up the Missouri may possibly be thus explained: He says that he did not think the bighorn much like a sheep, and so, perhaps, the goat did not strike him as much like a goat; we know it happens to be an antelope. But however we account for this original mixing of names, it is easy to perceive how good a start the mixing got; and after reading the text of the old confusion, is it not odd and interesting to trace it down through the years, down through Yancey, to the front hall of the club? to find it cropping up among all sorts and conditions of men, now in a city and now on top of the Wind River Mountains, where it used to perplex me?

And this is only the popular side of it; the scholars have been just as mixed as Yancey. The scientific side of the story is picturesquely seen through the dynasty of Latin names successively lavished upon the goat.

The country at large first heard of the goat in 1806, when Thomas Jefferson accompanied his message to Congress about Lewis and Clark’s exploration with various documents, and among these the observations of William Dunbar and Dr. Hunter. Nine years later the eminent George Ord gave to the animal his first academic baptism, and he appeared as Ovis montana. Pretty soon M. de Blainville seems to have called him Antilope americana, and Rupicapra americana. By 1817 he was known as Mazama Sericea—which is wandering pretty wide of the family. Four years more, and he is plain Rocky Mountain sheep. Next follow Capra montana, Antilope lanigera, Capra Americana, and Haplocerus montanus. This last was beginning to look permanent, when it was discovered that somebody had for some time been styling the goat by a well-devised appellation, to wit, Oreamnus montanus. He goes by that now; and it may be doubted if any thief has more frequently employed an alias than this probably blameless animal. Such is the story of the confusion begun—we can only guess why—by Lewis and Clark, and not cleared up until our own day.

The goat is an animal far less wary than the sheep. His watch is concentrated upon approaches from below. All the hunter has to do is to get above him, to make at once for the summit of the ridge which he proposes to hunt, and the unsuspecting creature will never give you a thought. Upon my word, it is inexcusable to kill him, except for a specimen in a collection; he is so handsome, so harmless, and so stupid! And in his remoter haunts, where the nature of man is still a closed book to him, he “thinketh no evil”; he will stand looking at the hunter with a sedate interest in his large, deep brown eyes. The tenderfoot sportsman, it seems, will generally make his beginnings as a maniac. Suddenly confronted with a herd of wild animals, he frantically pumps his repeating rifle, hypnotized by the glut of destruction. Luckily, he is apt, in his excitement, to miss. His desire is for no one special trophy, but for a hot killing of all in sight. If we are not to blame him for this flare of blind brute instinct, for heaven’s sake don’t let us praise the performance! The best that can possibly be said for it is to call it the seamy side of masculinity; and the seamy side of masculinity fits cowardice like a glove. I am speaking from the sinner’s bench; and long back in the years (not so long materially, but miles and miles every other way) I see one or two spots of shame. To-day, my wish is to photograph the game, and let him go his way in peace.

With my rifle I carried a kodak among the goats. The kodak and the rifle made a discomfortable pair now and then. For instance:—

“Saturday twelfth (November) four and one-half hours’ climb up opposite ridge, so as to get above goat seen yesterday. Snow six and eight inches deep on top.” This was a day that I carried both instruments, and the rocks continually required the use of both hands. Well, I got the goat that I wanted with my rifle. I took the kodak home with one hundred pictures of my very long, hard, interesting journey. It was the year that the company’s films were bad, and I drew one hundred blanks; there was not the semblance of an image upon a single one. The same mischance had attended the Greely expedition, and I had not travelled as far as they did; so you see my mouth must utter no complaints. No; my mileage fell short of the Greely expedition; but no goat will ever tempt me through such adventures again. Alas, that a man should come to shrink from discomforts which once—but let me tell you about some of them.

Because nothing but good fellowship and kindness were shown me there, I suppress the name of the town at the railroad’s end where I waited from Saturday till Monday for the north-bound stage. It was Saturday, October ninth, my journal reminds me.

“They gave me a room.… I was glad to see as little of it as possible. I washed in the public trough and basin which stood in the office between the saloon and the dining room; and I spent my time either in the saloon watching a game of poker that never ceased, or in wandering about in the world outside. A Chinaman named Madden … played poker and of course lost to his American friends, … swearing in the most ludicrous jargon.… Yet he was good-natured … the men seemed to like him … at night he returned to the never ending game and lost some more.… I went to my room to go to bed, turned down the bed clothes, and saw there, not what I feared, but cockroaches to the number of several thousand, I should think. They scampered frantically, jostling each other like any other crowd. Then I lifted one pillow and watched more cockroaches hurry under the neighboring pillow for shelter. Then I saw that the walls, ceiling, and floor were all quivering and sparkling with cockroaches. So I told the landlord downstairs. I said that if he had no other room, I would throw my camp blankets on the office table and sleep there if he had no objection. He was sympathetic, and explained that the cockroaches must have come up from the kitchen which was below my room. This was Saturday night, and every Saturday night the cook put powder in the kitchen; so that must have sent them up. This explanation was given me in a voice full of condolence. And I replied that very likely this was how they came and that sleeping in bed with so many at a time would be impossible. He entirely agreed with me. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘cockroaches is hell.’ …

“So I unrolled my blankets and the landlord helped me make my bed on his office table, lifting the inkstands and newspapers for me.… I went to sleep, hearing the game of poker in the adjoining room, the gobbling of Madden when he lost, and the hoarse merriment of the other men at his gibberish.

“Sunday.… This morning the game was still going on, but Madden had retired about four o’clock a loser. The bar-tender, sweeping the office, waked me, and I arose and made a toilet, as usual, in the public trough.”

The retrospect fills me with merriment—and regret that it’s all over for ever and ever; and the goat does not live for whose sake I would do it again.

It is hard not to yield to further temptation, not to transcribe from that diary of 1892 much more about the appearance and customs of the strange wild country through which I now passed on my way to the goat. Some of the landscape was the worst, the forlornest, the most worthless that I know, far outstripping Nevada in sheer meanness, and as desolate as Arizona, without Arizona’s magic splendor and fascination. Great deserts without grandeur, great valleys without charm, great rocks without dignity, mere lonely ugliness everywhere; that is the Big Bend country; and the river Columbia itself, when you finally descend to it from the parched bare dust and the strewn black boulders of the table-land, is a sweeping, sullen, shadeless flood, the most unlovely river that ever I have seen.

I like, when I can, to bring support to my opinions. On a later day, in the middle of the Big Bend, I came upon a desolate sign-post, placed there no doubt to cheer up the wayfarer’s discouraged heart. This post announced that Central Ferry was thirty-five miles distant; and below this a wayfarer had scrawled his personal comment:—

Forty-five miles to water.

And a subsequent wayfarer had added:—

Seventy-five miles to wood.

And a final wayfarer:—

Two and one-half miles to hell.

Ah, the dauntless, invaluable spirit of man! Those few words scrawled by a hand that I should like to shake, made the desert blossom with humor, and I continued on my journey with a smiling heart.

Three nights out from the cockroaches, and I was sleeping in the open, among pleasant hills. An old ragged fiddler, with hair hanging grizzled to his shoulders, had kept me listening late to all sorts of old-fashioned tunes and dances. He had fiddled his way across our continent, and had taken his lifetime to do so. Here he was, with silvering hair, up in the Cascade Mountains. I spread my blankets a hundred yards from his cabin, where he lived alone. He was perfectly blithe-hearted and perfectly penniless. I don’t know his name; I never saw him but that once; I suppose he is dead; but his discourse and his fiddle gave me an evening of entertainment over which I still sometimes dwell. Had I found no goat, the characters that I met, such as he, would have rewarded my excursion. But all things came to me. After some vain trips, whence I returned empty handed from fairly rough camping, on Wednesday, November 2, the diary reads, “One of my particular long-cherished wishes is accomplished, and I have seen and killed a mountain goat.” On the next day a second head and hide hung in our very snug camp. These first two were males, and they served as a basis for the description that I have attempted to draw earlier in this chapter. It was while we sat, my companionable guide and I, skinning the second goat, that we held a conversation which I must here record.

How we ever fell upon such a subject as the royal family of England, I do not remember; but camping in the wilderness uses up subjects, and leaves you with a steadily narrowing choice each day; and T—, who took an illustrated paper, observed to me that he had always rather liked “that chap Lorne.” This was how he phrased it; his language about some of the others held less of compliment.

Now I had happened, not long before this, to read of a distressing contretemps that had befallen the procession during the Queen’s jubilee, and I reminded T— of this; but it was new to him. So I told him that while the crowned heads were proceeding in state through London streets with the eyes of the civilized world watching them with admiration, the Marquis of Lorne’s horse kicked up. It was a horse that required a better rider than the Prince of Wales had considered the marquis to be, for he had warned him against the animal beforehand. But the marquis preferred to ride him. And so the horse kicked up, and off fell the marquis, right in the middle of the Queen’s jubilee.

T— looked at me and said nothing. I was therefore left uncertain if it came home to the mind of the mountaineer that this royal progress, this historic and panoplied moment, was a bad one for a nobleman to select to tumble off his horse in. I continued:—

“I believe that the Queen, upon seeing the accident, sent somebody.”

“Where?” said T—.

“To the marquis. She probably called the nearest King and said, ‘Frederick, Lorne’s off. Go and see if he’s hurt.’”

“‘And if he ain’t hurt, hurt him,’” added T—, speaking for the Queen. So I perceived that he had given the situation its full value.

After this second day of success, storm and snow beat down upon us, a blinding day, keeping us in camp. More storms followed, and no more goat; and we had to shoot a horse which had “cast” himself, being entangled in his rope, and so frozen as he lay helpless overnight in the heavy snow. We left these mountains and departed to others in search of a herd of goat; I wished a female and kid, and we seemed to have lighted upon a resort of old solitary males. Eight days after the second goat we sighted our herd, and this occasioned an experience more enlightening.

I feel confident that those who have done much hunting of big game have sometimes heard such words as these: “This mountain used to have a bunch of sheep on it all the time; three hundred sheep;” or, “Just about here last season I ran into a band of twelve hundred elk;” or, “I passed two thousand antelope on the flat yesterday.” The person who says this to you will have been your own guide, or some visitor to camp who is comparing notes and exchanging anecdotes. I, at any rate, have listened many times to such assertions; and now and then I have been tempted to observe (for instance) in reply: “Two thousand antelope! When you’d counted nineteen hundred and ninety-nine, I should think you’d have been too tired to go on.” But these are temptations that I have resisted. I think, too, that the men believed what they said—in a general way. But here with the goat was a famous opportunity. We could see them clearly; they were across a caÑon from ourselves, a mile or so away; they were lying down, or standing, some eating, some slowly moving about a little; they were in crowds, and in smaller groups, and by ones and twos, changing their positions very leisurely; and they seemed numberless; they were up and down the hill everywhere. Getting to them this day was not possible, since most of the day was already gone, and we were high up on an opposite mountain side.

“There’s a hundred thousand goat!” exclaimed T—; and I should have gone home asseverating that I had seen at least hundreds.

“Let’s count them,” said I. We took the glasses and did so. There were thirty-five.

From these thirty-five during the next two days I completed with no trouble, save hard climbing, my tally of desired specimens,—an adult male and female, and a kid, for my own keeping, with two males to give away to friends. And I learned a little more about the goat.

The female is lighter built than the male, and with horns more slender—a trifle. And (to return to the question of diet) we visited the pasture where the herd had been, and found no sign of grass growing, or grass eaten; there was no grass on that mountain. The only edible substance was a moss, tufted, stiff, and dry to the touch. The largest horns at the base measured six inches in circumference, and twenty-one and a half inches from one tip down to the skull and so across and up to the other tip. I also learned that the goat is safe from predatory animals. With his impenetrable hide and his disembowelling horns, he is left by the wolves and mountain lions respectfully alone. And T— told me of a mother goat’s energy. A prospector had in early summer captured a kid still too young to run much. Its mother saw him taking it to camp, ran after him, chased him in full sight of his comrades so hotly that he had to drop her child, and she got it back! I have said by inference, but must definitely state, that the kids are dropped in May and June.

To the sum of our knowledge about the Oreamnus montanus, the gift of a subspecies has lately been offered; but acceptance of this gift would at present, I think, be premature. It depends on one’s idea of the number of facts needful in daily life to justify a generalization. For instance, if you should read in the paper that one person died of diphtheria last week in New York, it would not prevent your going to that city; but if you read that five hundred had died in a week, you might decide not to take your children there for the season,—and this would be the result of a justifiable generalization. The rule is nowise different in genuine science. This new variety of goat has been based upon a single specimen, and only the dried skull at that! Because the horns were a few inches longer and spread a few inches wider than the average, and because there were certain differences in measurement of the jaw, is scarce adequate proof that these variations were not a distortion, congenital or the result of accident. We have seen people with squints and with club-feet; we have also been to the circus, yet we do not make subspecies for the Kentucky giant and the bearded lady. But that little ache for self-perpetuation, for some sort of permanence in this forgetting world, throbs in many hearts, and since we are all trying to affix our names to something that will hand them down to the succeeding generations, why not tie them to Oreamnus and Ovis? And so, reader, you have the pleasing vision of our zoÖlogists, riding down to posterity upon the backs of sundry subspecies of goat and sheep.

These animals, like all our Western big game, are disappearing. It is not (as the political Western loud-talker has so frequently shouted) the Eastern “tenderfoot” who is responsible for this destruction; it is the Westerner himself, quietly breaking the laws he made, and killing (to take one recent example) dozens of bull elk out of season in Jackson’s Hole, Wyoming, merely to sell the two teeth known as “tushes,” and leaving the rest of the carcass to rot on the hills. That is the real man who is destroying our big game, just as he is wiping out our forests. Left in his hands, the face of our continent would presently look like a burnt house. Two years before I hunted the goat, the deer in those mountains came down in herds to stare at the new settlers—who shot them from their cabin doors for fun. The deer are scarce enough now.

The Yellowstone Park is a sanctuary for buffalo, elk, deer, antelope, and sheep. There (if anywhere) our big game have a chance of surviving. I have never heard of goat as existing in this sanctuary; but good news comes lately that the sheep are thriving upon Mt. Evarts. Let me suggest to the commandant that he take steps to secure some goat from the Saw Tooth Range—or anywhere he best can—and try the interesting experiment of breeding the animal in the Yellowstone Park.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN GOAT

(Haplocerus montanus[16])

This is one of the very few mammals that are permanently white or whitish at all seasons, and although commonly termed a goat, it really belongs to the same group as the serows, which it closely resembles in the form and color of the horns. In winter the hair is very long, and pure white in color; along the back it is erect, and much elongated on the withers and haunches, so as to give to the animal the appearance of possessing a pair of humps. The summer coat is comparatively short, and has a yellowish tinge. Height at shoulder just short of 3 feet; weight from 180 to 300 pounds.

Distribution.—North America, throughout the Rocky Mountains, from about latitude 36° in California at least as far north as latitude 60°. By American naturalists the proper generic name of the animal is considered to be Oreamnus instead of Haplocerus.

Measurements of Horns