MOUNTAIN GAME. 129 



CHAPTER VII. 



MOUNTAIN GAME ; THE WHITE GOAT. 



LATE one August I started on a trip to the 

 Big Hole Basin, in Western Montana, to 

 hunt white goats. With me went a friend of 

 many hunts, John W T illis, a tried mountain 

 man. 



W r e left the railroad at the squalid little 

 hamlet of Divide, where we hired a team and 

 wagon from a " busted" granger, suspected 

 of being a Mormon, who had failed, even 

 with the help of irrigation, in raising a crop. 

 The wagon was in fairly good order; the har- 

 ness was rotten, and needed patching with 

 ropes ; while the team consisted of two spoiled 

 horses, overworked and thin, but full of the 

 devil the minute they began to pick up condi- 

 tion. However, on the frontier one soon 

 grows to accept little facts of this kind with 

 bland indifference ; and Willis was not only 

 an expert teamster, but possessed that inex- 

 haustible fertility of resource and unfailing 

 readiness in an emergency so characteristic 

 of the veteran of the border. Through hard 

 experience he had become master of plains- 

 craft and woodcraft, skilled in all frontier lore. 



For a couple of days we jogged up the 

 valley of the Big Hole River, along the mail 

 road. At night we camped under our wagon. 



