90 Sport and Life. 



smaller, and their horns are also a trifle shorter and not quite 

 as thick at the base.*" They are jet black and smooth, and, 

 while they are much less crooked, they are as sharply pointed as 

 those of the chamois, making them very formidable weapons. 

 When wounded, they are decidedly nasty foes to tackle. I 

 have seen four or five large hounds either disabled or. put to the 

 rout by a wounded female goat, while an old ram would, I should 

 say, remain master against half a dozen dogs so long as he could 

 not be tackled from the back. 



There are two ways of hunting it : firstly, stalking (or still 

 hunting, as it is called out West) ; and secondly, with dogs to 

 "tree " i.e., corner them on ledges or crags, giving the sportsman 

 time to get up to them. The former, of course, is the only manner 

 really worth going in for, though sometimes, as the ground is 

 always of the roughest, and the narrow ledges to which these 

 amazingly sure-footed beasts ordinarily take refuge are not the 

 easiest to crawl along, even following the hounds is sufficiently 

 arduous work to please an average climber. Where I found them 

 the first time -i.e., the Bitter-Root Mountains they had probably 

 never been hunted before, for the few Indians who remained in 

 that locality after the battle of the Big Hole river, in the Nez 

 Perces' War of 1878, never penetrated to these uplands. They 

 had all the deer and wapiti they wanted nearer home, and white 

 men had probably never penetrated to regions above timber-line. 



The sportsman of to-day is far better off than was his 

 predecessor in bygone years, when he set to work to obtain 

 reliable information respecting the home of the mountain ante- 

 lope, or about the animal itself, for now scores of men have 

 shot them and know all about their geographical distribution. In 

 those days it also took him very much longer to reach the place 

 than it does to-day, when the numerous railways of the north- 

 west traverse countries which harbour this game. f 



* I do not agree with Mr. Pike when he says in the Encyclopaedia of Sport 

 that the horns of the female are usually the best. 



