232 The White Goat 



of his species, now finally known as Orearnnus 

 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 zoologic truth an 

 emigrant, having walked from frozen Asia to frozen 

 America across that great old Aleutian Isthmus be- 

 tween 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 



