CHAPTER VII. 



MOUNTAIN GAME ; THE WHITE GOAT. 



LATE one August I started on a trip to the Big 

 Hole Basin, in Western Montana, to hunt white 

 goats. With me went a friend of many hunts, 

 John Willis, a tried mountain man. 



We left the railroad at the squalid little hamlet of 

 Divide, where we hired a team and wagon from a 

 "busted" granger, suspected of being a Mormon, who 

 had failed, even with the help of irrigation, in raising a 

 crop. The wagon was in fairly good order ; the harness 

 was rotten, and needed patching with ropes ; while the 

 team consisted of two spoiled horses, overworked and 

 thin, but full of the devil the minute they began to pick 

 up condition. However, on the frontier one soon grows 

 to accept little facts of this kind with bland indifference ; 

 and Willis was not only an expert teamster, but possessed 

 that inexhaustible fertility of resource and unfailing readi- 

 ness in an emergency so characteristic of the veteran of 

 the border. Through hard experience he had become 

 master of plainscraft and woodcraft, skilled in all frontier 

 lore. 



