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?
[Illustration: SURPRISED (White Sheep--_Ovis dalli_)]
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.
[Illustration: THE SADDLEBACK SHEEP--(_Ovis fannini_)]
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.