130 The Wilderness Hunter. 



winter that the long hair and fine wool give the robe any 

 beauty. 



So the quaint, sturdy, musky beasts, with their queer 

 and awkward ways, their boldness and their stupidity, with 

 their white coats and big black hoofs, black muzzles, and 

 sharp, gently-curved span-long black horns, have held 

 their own well among the high mountains that they love. 

 In the Rockies and the Coast ranges they abound from 

 Alaska south to Montana, Idaho, and Washington ; and 

 here and there isolated colonies are found among the high 

 mountains to the southward, in Wyoming, Colorado, 

 even in New Mexico, and, strangest of all, in one or two 

 spots among the barren coast mountains of southern Cal- 

 ifornia. Long after the elk has followed the buffalo to 

 the happy hunting grounds the white goat will flourish 

 among the towering and glacier-riven peaks, and, grown 

 wary with succeeding generations, will furnish splendid 

 sport to those hunters who are both good riflemen and 

 hardy cragsmen. 



