60 STALKS ABROAD 



Then one day I saw my big ram, alas ! that the 

 pronoun should be merely a literary euphemism, for 

 he was never mine. 



It was a fine country, too, that over which he 

 roamed ; a country of long narrow glens with steeply 

 rising sides ; of firs, set fast about the scattered 

 clumps of poplars and graceful gold-crowned cotton- 

 woods, of rocky crags and steeply driven slides, about 

 which, by tortuous paths known only to themselves, 

 the great white goats mysteriously moved ; of bare 

 open hilltops, roamed by wandering bands of sheep, 

 and swept by all the winds of heaven ; of sunlit 

 corries, shadowed by vast frowning cliffs ; a country a 

 man may thank the gods that he has seen when 

 young, whose memory he wraps about his heart 

 when old. 



On the hillside below, looking in the distance like 

 a small bear, a porcupine ploughed through the snow 

 with an air of sturdy independence. Somewhere in 

 the rocks a second one kept squeaking. " Beastly 

 weather ! Beastly weather ! " he seemed to say. I 

 idly watched the one in sight. Far, far beneath him, 

 right at the bottom of a gorge, just where the rocky 

 walls opened out on to the open hillside, something 

 dark was moving. It was the first view I had of my 

 ram. I have a vision of him now as he breasted the 

 steep slope ; of his great chest and sturdy limbs 

 moving with the regularity of a machine, his nose up 

 and his mighty horns curving back on either side of 

 his swollen neck. 



