AMONG THE HIGH HILLS; THE BIGHORN OR MOUNTAIN SHEEP
During the summer of 1886 I hunted chiefly to keep the ranch in meat.
It was a very pleasant summer; although it was followed by the worst
winter we ever witnessed on the plains. I was much at the ranch, where
I had a good deal of writing to do; but every week or two I left, to
ride among the line camps, or to spend a few days on any round-up which
happened to be in the neighborhood.
These days of vigorous work among the cattle were themselves full of
pleasure. At dawn we were in the saddle, the morning air cool in our
faces; the red sunrise saw us loping across the grassy reaches of
prairie land, or climbing in single file among the rugged buttes. All
forenoon we spent riding the long circle with the cow-punchers of the
round-up; in the afternoon we worked the herd, cutting the cattle,
with much break-neck galloping and dexterous halting and wheeling. Then
came the excitement and hard labor of roping, throwing, and branding
the wild and vigorous range calves; in a corral, if one was handy,
otherwise in a ring of horsemen. Soon after nightfall we lay down, in
a log hut or tent, if at a line camp; under the open sky, if with the
round-up wagon.
After ten days or so of such work, in which every man had to do his
full share--for laggards and idlers, no matter who, get no mercy in
the real and healthy democracy of the round-up--I would go back to the
ranch to turn to my books with added zest for a fortnight. Yet even
during these weeks at the ranch there was some outdoor work; for I was
breaking two or three colts. I took my time, breaking them gradually
and gently, not, after the usual cowboy fashion, in a hurry, by sheer
main strength and rough riding, with the attendant danger to the
limbs of the man and very probable ruin to the manners of the horse.
We rose early; each morning I stood on the low-roofed veranda, looking
out under the line of murmuring, glossy-leaved cottonwoods, across the
shallow river, to see the sun flame above the line of bluffs opposite.
In the evening I strolled off for an hour or two’s walk, rifle in hand.
The roomy, home-like ranch house, with its log walls, shingled roof,
and big chimneys and fireplaces, stands in a glade, in the midst of
the thick forest, which covers half the bottom; behind rises, bare and
steep, the wall of peaks, ridges, and tablelands.
During the summer in question, I once or twice shot a whitetail buck
right on this large bottom; once or twice I killed a blacktail in the
hills behind, not a mile from the ranch house. Several times I killed
and brought in prong-bucks, rising before dawn, and riding off on a
good horse for an all day’s hunt in the rolling prairie country twelve
or fifteen miles away. Occasionally I took the wagon and one of the
men, driving to some good hunting ground and spending a night or two;
usually returning with two or three prong-bucks, and once with an
elk--but this was later in the fall. Not infrequently I went away by
myself on horseback for a couple of days, when all the men were on the
round-up, and when I wished to hunt thoroughly some country quite a
distance from the ranch. I made one such hunt in late August, because
I happened to hear that a small bunch of mountain sheep were haunting a
tract of very broken ground, with high hills, about fifteen miles away.
I left the ranch early in the morning, riding my favorite hunting
horse, old Manitou. The blanket and oilskin slicker were rolled and
strapped behind the saddle; for provisions I carried salt, a small bag
of hard tack, and a little tea and sugar, with a metal cup in which to
boil my water. The rifle and a score of cartridges in my woven belt
completed my outfit. On my journey I shot two prairie chickens from a
covey in the bottom of a brush coulie.
I rode more than six hours before reaching a good spot to camp. At
first my route lay across grassy plateaus, and along smooth wooded
coulies; but after a few miles the ground became very rugged and
difficult. At last I got into the heart of the Bad Lands proper, where
the hard, wrinkled earth was torn into shapes as sullen and grotesque
as those of dreamland. The hills rose high, their barren flanks carved
and channeled, their tops mere needles and knife crests. Bands of
black, red, and purple varied the gray and yellow-brown of their sides;
the tufts of scanty vegetation were dull green. Sometimes I rode my
horse at the bottom of narrow washouts, between straight walls of clay,
but a few feet apart; sometimes I had to lead him as he scrambled up,
down, and across the sheer faces of the buttes. The glare from the
bare clay walls dazzled the eye; the air was burning under the hot
August sun. I saw nothing living except the rattlesnakes, of which
there were very many.
At last, in the midst of this devil’s wilderness, I came on a lovely
valley. A spring trickled out of a cedar canyon, and below this spring
the narrow, deep ravine was green with luscious grass and was smooth
for some hundreds of yards. Here I unsaddled, and turned old Manitou
loose to drink and feed at his leisure. At the edge of the dark cedar
wood I cleared a spot for my bed, and drew a few dead sticks for the
fire. Then I lay down and watched drowsily until the afternoon shadows
filled the wild and beautiful gorge in which I was camped. This
happened early, for the valley was very narrow and the hills on either
hand were steep and high.
Springing to my feet, I climbed the nearest ridge, and then made my
way, by hard clambering, from peak to peak and from crest to crest,
sometimes crossing and sometimes skirting the deep washouts and
canyons. When possible I avoided appearing on the sky-line, and I
moved with the utmost caution, walking in a wide sweep so as to hunt
across and up wind. There was much sheep sign, some of it fresh,
though I saw none of the animals themselves; the square slots, with
the indented marks of the toe points wide apart, contrasting strongly
with the heart-shaped and delicate footprints of deer. The animals
had, according to their habit, beaten trails along the summits of the
higher crests; little side trails leading to any spur, peak, or other
vantage-point from which there was a wide outlook over the country
roundabout.
The bighorns of the Bad Lands, unlike those of the mountains, shift
their range but little, winter or summer. Save in the breeding season,
when each master ram gets together his own herd, the ewes, lambs,
and yearlings are apt to go in bands by themselves, while the males
wander in small parties; now and then a very morose old fellow lives by
himself, in some precipitous, out-of-the-way retreat. The rut begins
with them much later than with deer; the exact time varies with the
locality, but it is always after the bitter winter weather has set
in. Then the old rams fight fiercely together, and on rare occasions
utter a long grunting bleat or call. They are marvelous climbers, and
dwell by choice always among cliffs and jagged, broken ground, whether
wooded or not. An old bighorn ram is heavier than the largest buck;
his huge, curved horns, massive yet supple build, and proud bearing
mark him as one of the noblest beasts of the chase. He is wary; great
skill and caution must be shown in approaching him; and no one but a
good climber, with a steady head, sound lungs, and trained muscles, can
successfully hunt him in his own rugged fastnesses. The chase of no
other kind of American big game ranks higher, or more thoroughly tests
the manliest qualities of the hunter.
I walked back to camp in the gloaming, taking care to reach it before
it grew really dark; for in the Bad Lands it is entirely impossible to
travel, or to find any given locality, after nightfall. Old Manitou
had eaten his fill and looked up at me with pricked ears, and wise,
friendly face as I climbed down the side of the cedar canyon; then he
came slowly toward me to see if I had not something for him. I rubbed
his soft nose and gave him a cracker; then I picketed him to a solitary
cedar, where the feed was good. Afterward I kindled a small fire,
roasted both prairie fowl, ate one, and put the other by for breakfast;
and soon rolled myself in my blanket, with the saddle for a pillow, and
the oilskin beneath. Manitou was munching the grass nearby. I lay just
outside the line of stiff black cedars; the night air was soft in my
face; I gazed at the shining and brilliant multitude of stars until my
eyelids closed.
The chill breath which comes before dawn awakened me. It was still and
dark. Through the gloom I could indistinctly make out the loom of the
old horse, lying down. I was speedily ready, and groped and stumbled
slowly up the hill, and then along its crest to a peak. Here I sat
down and waited a quarter of an hour or so, until gray appeared in
the east, and the dim light-streaks enabled me to walk further. Before
sunrise I was two miles from camp; then I crawled cautiously to a high
ridge and, crouching behind it, scanned all the landscape eagerly. In
a few minutes a movement about a third of a mile to the right, midway
down a hill, caught my eye. Another glance showed me three white specks
moving along the hillside. They were the white rumps of three fine
mountain sheep, on their way to drink at a little alkaline pool in the
bottom of a deep, narrow valley. In a moment they went out of sight
round a bend of the valley; and I rose and trotted briskly toward them,
along the ridge. There were two or three deep gullies to cross, and
a high shoulder over which to clamber; so I was out of breath when I
reached the bend beyond which they had disappeared. Taking advantage
of a scrawny sage brush as cover I peeped over the edge, and at once
saw the sheep, three big young rams. They had finished drinking and
were standing beside the little miry pool, about three hundred yards
distant. Slipping back I dropped down into the bottom of the valley,
where a narrow washout zigzagged from side to side, between straight
walls of clay. The pool was in the upper end of this washout, under a
cut bank.
An indistinct game trail, evidently sometimes used by both bighorn
and blacktail, ran up this washout; the bottom was of clay so that
I walked noiselessly; and the crookedness of the washout’s course
afforded ample security against discovery by the sharp eyes of the
quarry. In a couple of minutes I stalked stealthily round the last
bend, my rifle cocked and at the ready, expecting to see the rams by
the pool. However, they had gone, and the muddy water was settling
in their deep hoof marks. Running on I looked over the edge of the
cut bank and saw them slowly quartering up the hillside, cropping the
sparse tufts of coarse grass. I whistled, and as they stood at gaze I
put a bullet into the biggest, a little too far aft of the shoulder,
but ranging forward. He raced after the others, but soon fell behind,
and turned off on his own line, at a walk, with dropping head. As he
bled freely I followed his tracks, found him, very sick, in a washout
a quarter of a mile beyond, and finished him with another shot. After
dressing him, and cutting off the saddle and hams, as well as the head,
I walked back to camp, breakfasted, and rode Manitou to where the sheep
lay. Packing it securely behind the saddle, and shifting the blanket
roll to in front of the saddle-horn, I led the horse until we were
clear of the Bad Lands; then mounted him, and was back at the ranch
soon after midday. The mutton of a fat young mountain ram, at this
season of the year, is delicious.
Such quick success is rare in hunting sheep. Generally each head has
cost me several days of hard, faithful work; and more than once I have
hunted over a week without any reward whatsoever. But the quarry is so
noble that the ultimate triumph--sure to come, if the hunter will but
persevere long enough--atones for all previous toil and failure.
Once a lucky stalk and shot at a bighorn was almost all that redeemed
a hunt in the Rockies from failure. I was high among the mountains at
the time, but was dogged by ill luck; I had seen but little, and I
had not shot very well. One morning I rose early, and hunted steadily
until midday without seeing anything. A mountain hunter was with me.
At noon we sat down to rest, and look over the country, from behind a
shield of dwarf evergreens on the brink of a mighty chasm. The rocks
fell downward in huge cliffs, stern and barren; from far below rose the
strangled roaring of the torrent, as the foaming masses of green and
white water churned round the bowlders in the stream bed. Except this
humming of the wild water, and the soughing of the pines, there was
no sound. We were sitting on a kind of jutting promontory of rock so
that we could scan the cliffs far and near. First I took the glasses
and scrutinized the ground almost rod by rod, for nearly half an hour;
then my companion took them in turn. It is very hard to make out game,
especially when lying down, and still; and it is curious to notice
how, after fruitlessly scanning a country through the glasses for a
considerable period, a herd of animals will suddenly appear in the
field of vision as if by magic. In this case, while my companion held
the glasses for the second time, a slight motion caught his eye; and
looking attentively he made out, five or six hundred yards distant, a
mountain ram lying among some loose rocks and small bushes at the head
of a little grassy cove or nook, in a shallow break between two walls
of the cliff. So well did the bluish gray of its body harmonize in tint
with the rocks and shrubbery that it was some time before I could see
it, even when pointed out to me.
The wind was favorable, and we at once drew back and began a cautious
stalk. It was impossible, owing to the nature of the cliffs above and
below the bighorn’s resting-place, to get a shot save by creeping
along nearly on a level with him. Accordingly we worked our way down
through a big cleft in the rocks, being forced to go very slowly and
carefully lest we should start a loose stone; and at last reached a
narrow terrace of rock and grass along which we walked comparatively
at our ease. Soon it dwindled away, and we then had to do our only
difficult piece of climbing--a clamber for fifty or sixty feet across a
steep cliff shoulder. Some little niches and cracks in the rock and a
few projections and diminutive ledges on its surface, barely enabled
us to swarm across, with painstaking care--not merely to avoid alarming
the game this time, but also to avoid a slip which would have proved
fatal. Once across we came on a long, grassy shelf, leading round a
shoulder into the cleft where the ram lay. As I neared the end I crept
forward on hands and knees, and then crawled flat, shoving the rifle
ahead of me, until I rounded the shoulder and peered into the rift.
As my eyes fell on the ram he sprang to his feet, with a clatter of
loose stones, and stood facing me, some sixty yards off, his dark face
and white muzzle brought out finely by the battered, curved horns. I
shot into his chest, hitting him in the sticking place; and after a
few mad bounds he tumbled headlong, and fell a very great distance,
unfortunately injuring one horn.
When much hunted, bighorn become the wariest of all American game, and
their chase is then peculiarly laborious and exciting. But where they
have known nothing of men, not having been molested by hunters, they
are exceedingly tame. Professor John Bach McMaster informs me that
in 1877 he penetrated to the Uintah Mountains of Wyoming, which were
then almost unknown to hunters; he found all the game very bold, and
the wild sheep in particular so unsuspicious that he could walk up to
within short rifle range of them in the open.
On the high mountains bighorn occasionally get killed by a snow-slide.
My old friend, the hunter Woody, once saw a band which started such an
avalanche by running along a steep sloping snow field, it being in the
spring; for several hundred yards it thundered at their heels, but by
desperate racing they just managed to get clear. Woody was also once an
eye-witness to the ravages the cougar commits among these wild sheep.
He was stalking a band in the snow when he saw them suddenly scatter at
a run in every direction. Coming up he found the traces of a struggle,
and the track of a body being dragged through the snow, together with
the round footmarks of the cougar; a little further on lay a dead ewe,
the blood flowing from the fang wounds in her throat.