232 Mountain Sheep. 



the fresh footprints of a ewe or yearling ram in a little 

 patch of snow. On tracing them back we found that it 

 had been lying down on the other side of a small bluff, 

 within a hundred yards of where we had passed, and must 

 have either got our wind, or else have heard us make 

 some noise. At any rate it had gone off, and though we 

 followed its tracks a little in the snow, they soon got on 

 the bare, frozen ground and we lost them. 



After that we saw nothing. The cold, as the day wore 

 on, seemed gradually to chill us through and through ; 

 our hands and feet became numb, and our ears tingled 

 under our fur caps. We hunted carefully through two or 

 three masses of jagged buttes which seemed most likely 

 places for the game we were after, taking a couple of 

 hours to each place ; and then, as the afternoon was 

 beginning to wane, mounted our shivering horses for 

 good, and pushed toward the bend of the river where we 

 were to meet the buck-board. Our course lay across a 

 succession of bleak, wind-swept plateaus, broken by deep 

 and narrow pine-clad gorges. We galloped swiftly over 

 the plateaus, where the footing was good and the going 

 easy, for the gales had driven the feathery snow off the 

 withered brown grass ; but getting on and off these table- 

 lands was often a real labor, their sides were so sheer. 

 The horses plunged and scrambled after us as we led 

 them up ; while in descending they would sit back on their 

 haunches and half-walk, half-slide, down the steep inclines. 

 Indeed, one or two of the latter were so very straight that 

 the horses would not face them, and we had to turn them 

 round and back them over the edge, and then all go 



