The White Goat 249 



"What they eat in winter is a mystery. But 

 it must be the little knobs of moss that grow at 

 the edges of the steep rocks on top, where the 

 snow cannot lie. They never come down into 

 the valleys, as the mountain sheep do when the 

 snow grows deep up above." 



This is no authority, but merely my camp note- 

 book again ; and the statement that the goat is 

 never, like the sheep, driven to low pastures by 

 the snow is but the popular account of him that 

 I was able to gather from the inhabitants the 

 prospectors, the trappers of the mountains 

 where I hunted him. Yet it is interesting; and 

 if generally true, it may furnish some clue to the 

 capricious local separations between sheep and 

 goat in the zone of their common habitat. But 

 if the goat cannot, when the weather would drive 

 him down, subsist upon the less lofty growths 

 that then satisfy the sheep, you will remark how 

 truly unlike the real goat is this narrow discrimi- 

 nation as to diet. 



It is surprising, indeed, that at this late day, 

 when investigation and verification are so easy, 

 no naturalist seems anywhere to have written a 

 plain, complete paragraph answering the plain, 

 natural question : In what states and territories 



