A SHOT AT A MOUNTAIN SHEEP 189 



notes of all the important facts which he comes across. 

 Such note-books would show the changed habits of game 

 with the changed seasons, their abundance at different 

 times and different places, the melancholy data of their 

 disappearance, the pleasanter facts as to their change 

 of habits which enable them to continue to exist in the 

 land, and, in short, all their traits. A real and lasting 

 service would thereby be rendered not only to naturalists, 

 but to all who care for nature. 



Along the Little Missouri there have been several 

 curious changes in the fauna within my own knowledge. 

 Thus magpies have greatly decreased in numbers. This 

 is, I believe, owing to the wolf hunters, for magpies often 

 come around carcasses and pick up poisoned baits. I 

 have seen as many as seven lying dead around a bait. 

 They are much less plentiful than they formerly were. 

 In 1894 I was rather surprised at meeting a porcupine, 

 usually a beast of the timber, at least twenty miles from 

 trees. He was grubbing after sage-brush roots on the edge 

 of a cut bank by a half-dried creek. I was stalking an 

 antelope at the time, and stopped to watch him for about 

 five minutes. He paid no heed to me, though I was 

 within three or four paces of him. Porcupines are easily 

 exterminated; and they have diminished in numbers in 

 this neighborhood. Both the lucivee, or northern lynx, 

 and the wolverene have been found on the Little Mis- 

 souri, near the Kildeer Mountains, but I do not know 

 of a specimen of either that has been killed there for 

 some years past. Bobcats are still not uncommon. The 

 blackfooted ferret was always rare, and is rare now. But 



