MOUNTAIN SHEEP. 



77 



and anxious mothers, they are too apt to expose them- 

 selves at critical moments, and are rarely out of trouble. 

 The old rams seem to know this, and to have come to 

 the conclusion that the safest paths are those which a 

 body can walk alone, and that celibacy is, after all, the 

 best life for a peace-loving cimarron. Near Granite 

 Gap, Colorado, the surveyors of the San Juan Railroad 

 became familiar with the track of an old bighorn that 

 used to pay a nightly visit to their bivouac in order to 

 share the hay-rations of their ponies ; but when they 

 took it into their heads to patrol the camp after dark 

 their guest failed to return, and his spoor was seen no 

 more. 



The San Juan range used to be a great hunting- 

 ground for bighorns, and it seems that they are reap- 

 pearing on the southern slope since the old Utah trail of 

 ante-railroad fame has been abandoned, and that portions 

 of the California Coast Range have thus been repeopled 

 by emigrants from the Sierra Nevada. On the heights 

 of the great central plateau that forms the backbone of 

 our continent the cimarrons will never be entirely exter- 

 minated. Their range is too boundless ; the extent of 

 the far-western sierras is too immeasurable. Even on 

 a map the maze of winding and intertwisted mountain- 

 ranges, with their net-work of foot-hills, branches, and 

 spurs, is quite bewildering ; but only the hunter knows 

 what a sub-labyrinth of highlands and valleys every one 

 of those little shaded streaks represents, what jagged 



