!66 RANCH LIFE AND THE HUNTING-TRAIL 



down the valley ; and another look showed me that it was a ram feeding 

 leisurely up the hill-side. The wind was good for a direct approach. I 

 got off the butte by carefully letting myself down from one little ledge or 

 niche to another, and started along the valley towards the ram, only to 

 find my way barred by a deep chasm whose straight, ice-coated sides 

 yawned too far apart to permit of any attempt at crossing. There was no 

 help for it but laboriously to retrace my steps and make my way round its 

 head with what speed I could. This I did, the work making me thor- 

 oughly warm for the first time that morning. Once across the walking 

 was better, and I went down the valley-side at a good pace, until I came 

 to a shoulder some two hundred yards from where I had seen the sheep. 

 I was a good deal higher than where he had stood ; but in the time I 

 had been out of sight of him he must have gone up the hill quite a dis- 

 tance, for when I looked round the shoulder I saw him about as far off 

 as I expected, but above instead of below me. Slow though my move- 

 ments had been when I cautiously looked round the edge, they had not 

 escaped his quick eye ; for when I made him out he was standing motion- 

 less, gazing in my direction. Before I could raise my rifle he gave a great 

 jump sideways and galloped off, disappearing instantly behind a huge 

 mass of detached sandstone, and I never saw him again. 



A little chagrined at my fruitless stalk I plodded on, doing much hard 

 climbing but seeing no signs of game until nearly midday. Then in the 

 snow at the head of a coulee I came across the tracks of a band evidently 

 made that morning while returning from the feeding-grounds. I followed 

 them until I became convinced that the animals had gone to a great table- 

 land or plateau that I could see a good way ahead ; then, as the wind was 

 behind me, I struck off to one side, made a circle through some very 

 rough country, and clambered out along the knife-like crests of a line of 

 high hills separated from the plateau by a broad valley. Every hundred 

 paces or so I would stop and examine the country far and near with the 

 glasses ; often I had to crawl on all-fours to avoid appearing against the 

 sky-line on the ridge. 



At last I caught sight of the band. There were some fifteen or twenty 

 of them, and they were lying at the point of a spur that was thrust out 

 from the plateau, nearly opposite to me and half a mile off. They were in 

 a position which it was impossible to approach within six hundred yards 

 without being observed, for they could see over the level plateau behind 

 them, and from the brink of the lofty cliff on which they lay they looked 

 up, down, and across the wild, deep valley beneath. 



With the glasses I could make out that there was no good head 



