XI 

 THE BIG- HORN SHEEP 



'T has happened that I have generally hunted big-horn during weather 

 of arctic severity ; so that in my mind this great sheep is inseparably 

 associated with snow- clad, desolate wastes, ice-coated crags, and the 

 bitter cold of a northern winter ; whereas the sight of a prong-buck, 

 the game that we usually hunt early in the season, always recalls to 

 me the endless green of the midsummer prairies as they shimmer in 

 the sunlight. 



Yet in reality the big-horn is by no means confined to any one 

 climatic zone. Along the interminable mountain chains of the Great Divide 

 it ranges south to the hot, dry table-lands of middle Mexico, as well as far 

 to the northward of the Canadian boundary, among the towering and 

 tremendous peaks where the glaciers are fed from fields of everlasting 

 snow. There exists no animal more hardy, nor any better fitted to grap- 

 ple with the extremes of heat and cold. Droughts, scanty pasturage, or 

 deep snows make it shift its ground, but never mere variation of tempera- 

 ture. The lofty mountains form its favorite abode, but it is almost equally 

 at home in any large tract of very rough and broken ground. It is by no 

 means an exclusively alpine animal, like the white goat. It is not only 

 found throughout the main chains of the Rockies, as well as on the Sierras 

 of the south and the coast ranges of western Oregon, Washington, and 

 British Columbia, but it also exists to the east among the clusters of 

 high hills and the stretches of barren Bad Lands that break the monoto- 

 nous level of the great plains. 



Throughout most of its range the big-horn is a partly migratory 

 beast. In the summer it seeks the highest mountains, often passing above 

 timber-line ; and when the fall snows deepen it comes down to the lower 

 spurs or foot-hills, or may even travel some distance southward. If there 

 is a large tract of Bad Lands near the mountains, sheep may be plentiful 



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