236 CAMP-FIRES IN THE CANADIAN ROCKIES 



quarry, sometimes are fully as interesting as the game 

 itself. It is far from ideal hunting to tramp hour after 

 hour through a monotonous, brush-filled forest, " head " 

 the soggy-banked ponds and flounder through bogs for a 

 final shot at a moose in a tangle of underbrush so thick 

 you can see through it only a few yards. It takes a 

 mighty fine animal to compensate one for mean hunting- 

 grounds. 



But take mountains like ours, where at every mile 

 there rises around you a new cyclorama of crag and peak, 

 ridge and valley, timber, slide and glacier, and it takes 

 a fine animal to draw your gaze from the pictures! To 

 kill, in such a setting, a mountain ram, a goat or a grizzly 

 bear is Hunting, indeed. With all her bison and tigers, 

 buffalo and bear, India has nothing like it south of the 

 Himalayas, not even in the Nilgiris. Judging by a thou- 

 sand photographs, I should say that with all her multi- 

 tudes of big game, Africa has nothing like it, anywhere. 

 South America has her Andes, but alas! they are deplor- 

 ably barren of animal life. 



To one who has seen the cyclorama, and the dead 

 game lying on the mountain as I did, Mr. Phillips's 

 hunt for mountain sheep in the Big Bend of Avalanche 

 Creek was a fine performance, and it is a pleasure to help 

 the Reader to see it as it was. It fairly illustrates one 

 phase, and a difficult one, of mountain sheep hunting in 

 those precipitous mountains. 



It was undertaken for the special purpose of procur- 

 ing one or two extra-fine rams, for a laudable purpose, 

 and it was the appearance of the twelve rams on the sum- 



