220 THE OX FAMILY 



is too lazy to climb, Mr. Shields says, he can simply 

 sit down anywhere within rifle-range of the cut bank 

 an hour before sunset, or at daybreak, and pot his 

 goats when they come in to get their supper or break- 

 fast of salt mud.* 



The cupidity of these poor brutes, Mr. Shields adds, 

 " has proved the destruction of most of them." The 

 time has evidently been when thousands of goats used 

 the lick he describes, where but a few, perhaps one 

 hundred, use it now. All about there, on the river 

 banks, are remains of old Indian camps, and in each of 

 these is a veritable bone-yard. The Indians have 

 evidently made a practice of going there every sum- 

 mer, for perhaps a hundred years past, killing goats 

 and drying the meat for winter use ; yet the poor 

 brutes crave the salt so eagerly that they keep on 

 going back every summer to get more. 



In "Our Feathered Game" I referred to the name 

 fool-hen, given the blue grouse of the Rocky Moun- 

 tains on account of its stupidity. Roosevelt says: 

 "Verily the white goat is the 'fool-hen' among beasts 

 of the chase." He describes shooting a buck at a 

 distance of thirty yards, and says the old she-goat, 

 which ran past, "went off a hundred yards and then 

 deliberately stopped and turned round to gaze at us 

 for a couple of minutes." 



As a game animal the white goat is no more desir- 

 able than the musk-ox. His flesh has a similar musk 

 flavor, and only the kids are edible. Sportsmen now- 



* On the coast of British Columbia, the white goat sometimes descends 

 so near to tidewater that more than one specimen has been shot from a 

 canoe. — Hornaday. 



