128 THE WILDERNESS HUNTER. 



bounds he tumbled headlong, and fell a very 

 great distance, unfortunately injuring one 

 horn. 



When much hunted, bighorn become the 

 wariest of all American game, and their chase 

 is then peculiarly laborious and exciting. 

 But where they have known nothing of men, 

 not having been molested by hunters, they 

 are exceedingly tame. Professor John Bache 

 McMaster informs me that in 1877 he pene- 

 trated to the Uintah Mountains of Wyoming, 

 which were then almost unknown to hunters ; 

 he found all the game very bold, and the wild 

 sheep in particular so unsuspicious that he 

 could walk up to within short rifle range of 

 them in the open. 



On the high mountains bighorn occasion- 

 ally get killed by a snow-slide. My old friend, 

 the hunter Woody, once saw a band which 

 started such an avalanche by running along 

 a steep sloping snow field, it being in the 

 spring; for several hundred yards it thun- 

 dered at their heels, but -by desperate racing 

 they just managed to get clear. Woody was 

 also once an eye-witness to the ravages the 

 cougar commits among these wild sheep. 

 He was stalking a band in the snow when he 

 saw them suddenly scatter at a run in every 

 direction. Coming up he found the traces of 

 a struggle, and the track of a body being 

 dragged through the snow, together with the 

 round footmarks of the cougar ; a little farther 

 on lay a dead ewe, the blood flowing from the 

 fang wounds in her throat. 



