132 The Wilderness Hunter 



culiarly laborious and exciting. But where they 

 have known nothing of men, not having been mo- 

 lested by hunters, they are exceedingly tame. Pro- 

 fessor John Bach McMaster informs me that in 

 1877 he penetrated to the Uintah Mountains of 

 Wyoming, which were then almost unknown to 

 hunters; he found all the game very bold, and the 

 wild sheep in particular so unsuspicious that he 

 could walk up to within short rifle range of them 

 in the open. 



On the high mountains bighorn occasionally get 

 killed by a snow-slide. My old friend, the hunter 

 Woody, once saw a band which started such an 

 avalanche by running along a steep sloping snow 

 field, it being in the spring; for several hundred 

 yards it thundered at their heels, but by desperate 

 racing they just managed to get clear. Woody was 

 also once an eye-witness to the ravages the cougar 

 commits among these wild sheep. He was stalking 

 a band in the snow when he saw them suddenly scat- 

 ter at a run in every direction. Coming up he 

 found the traces of a struggle, and the track of a 

 body being dragged through the snow, together 

 with the round footmarks of the cougar; a little 

 further on lay a dead ewe, the blood flowing from 

 the fang wounds in her throat. 



