=======+=======+======+=======+=================+===========_Musk-Ox, Bison, Sheep and Goat

-------+-------+------+-------+-----------------+-----------------

--21½ | 15¼ | .. | 35 |Northern Montana |W. F. Sheard

| | | | |

20⅞ | 15 | .. | 30½ |Wyoming |Hon. F.

| | | | |

--20¼ | 16⅛ | 33½ | .. | ? |W. H. Root

| | | | |

--19 | 12½ | .. | .. |Western Montana |P. Liebinger

| | | | |

18⅞ | 14¾ | .. | 16⅞ |Western Montana |The late J. S.

| | | | |

--18¼ | 14 | 26¼ | 29 |Sioux Country |Sir Greville

| | | | |

--18 | 14 | .. | .. |Montana |F. Sauter

| | | | |

17¾ | 12⅜ | 15⅛ | .. | ? |H.R.H. the Duke

| | | | |

--17½ | 12½ | .. | .. |Southwestern |Theodore

| | | | |

17½ | 12 | .. | 25½ |Wyoming |H.R.H. le Duc

| | | | |

17½ | 13½ | 21 | .. | ? |Viscount

| | | | |

17⅛ | 11⅜ | 10⅜ | 17⅛ | ? |British Museum

| | | | |

--17 | 14 | 17½ | .. |Yellowstone, |Count E. Hoyos

| | | | |

16⅝ | 14¼ | 24 | .. |Bighorn Mts., |Moreton Frewen[7]

| | | | |

16½ | 12½ | 19⅜ | .. |Colorado |Sir Edmund G.

| | | | |

16¼ | 13½ | 14¼ | .. | ? |Duke of Portland

| | | | |

16⅛ | 15⅞ | 25¾ | .. |Colorado |Sir Edmund G.

| | | | |

15½ | 14⅜ | .. | 19¾ |Wyoming |St. George

| | | | |

--15.8 | 12.14 | 15 | .. |Indian Territory,|Prince Henry of

| | | | |

14 | .. | 12¼ | .. |North Park, |Col. Ralph Vivian

| | | | |

13½ | 13½ | 17½ | .. | ? |G. Wrey

| | | | |

13⅜ | 12 | .. | .. | ? |Hon. Walter

=======+=======+======+=======+=================+=================

THE MOUNTAIN SHEEP: HIS WAYS

BY OWEN WISTER

[Illustration: ROCKY MOUNTAIN SHEEP]

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.

[Illustration: ALERT--(_Ovis stonei_)]

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.

[Illustration: UNDER A HOT SKY--(_Ovis nelsoni_)]

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 manœuvring 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 _un_beaten 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.