OF WILD ANIMALS 147 



column was ever made by Nature or developed by man that 

 could endure without breaking a headforemost fall from the top 

 of a cliff to the slide-rock bottom thereof. 



In Colorado, in May 1907, the late Judge D. C. Beaman 

 of Denver saw a big-horn ram which was pursued by dogs to 

 the precipitous end of a mountain ridge, take a leap for life 

 into space from top to bottom. The distance straight down 

 was "between twenty and twenty-five feet." The ram 

 went down absolutely upright, with his head fully erect, and 

 his feet well apart. He landed on the slide rock on his feet, 

 broke no bones, promptly recovered himself and dashed away 

 to safety. Judge Beaman declared that "the dogs were afraid 

 to approach even as near as the edge of the cliff at the point 

 from which the sheep leaped off." 



John Muir held the opinion that the legend of horn-landing 

 sheep was born of the wild descent of frightened sheep down 

 rocks so steep that they seemed perpendicular but were not, 

 and the sheep, after touching here and there in the wild pitch 

 sometimes landed in a heap at the bottom, quite against their 

 will. To me this has always seemed a reasonable explanation. 



The big-horn sheep has one mental trait that its host of 

 ardent admirers little suspect. It does not like pinnacle rocks, 

 nor narrow ledges across perpendicular cliffs, nor dangerous 

 climbing. It does not "leap from crag to crag," either up, 

 down or across. Go where you will in sheep hunting, nine 

 times out of ten you will find your game on perfectly safe 

 ground, from which there is very little danger of falling. 



In spirit and purpose the big-horns are great pioneers and 

 explorers. They always want to see what is on the other 

 side of the range. They will sight a range of far distant 

 desert mountains, and to see what is there will travel by night 

 across ten or twenty miles of level desert to find out. 



It was in the Pinacate Mountains of northwestern Mexico, 

 on the eastern shore of the head of the Gulf of California, that 

 we made our most interesting observations on wild big-horn 



