IV THE BIG GAME OF ALASKA 71 



natives from the mountains some miles inland which were 

 like the horns of the Ovis dalli ewe, but v/ere more than 

 twice the length of the sheep's horns and also larger. He 

 said he imagined they belonged to some kind of ibex. 



Mr. J. Folstad, the owner of the schooner Alice, in which 

 we sailed along the coast of the Alaska Peninsula, who was 

 a Norwegian engineer, and had travelled over a great part of 

 the interior of Alaska, makes the following statement. 



During the first great rushes to Dawson in 1897 ^-^^^ 

 1898 he was in the town of Dawson. There he saw, hanging 

 outside a store (the owner of which sold meat such as moose, 

 sheep, etc.), two animals with long horns which were 

 unknown to him. On inquiry at the store he was told that 

 numbers of people had been to look at the animals, and no 

 one knew what to call them. But a sporting English doctor 

 in the town, hearing of the episode, had been to examine 

 them, and pronounced the beasts to be undoubtedly ibex. 

 The only part of this story which I cannot understand is why 

 this doctor did not obtain the horns of these beasts, and why 

 the sporting world heard no account of his discovery. 



On board the ss. Bertha, going down to Seattle in 

 November 1903, we heard that there were two prospectors 

 on board who had seen specimens of the fabled ibex. Mr. 

 Vander Byl and I went to interview these men. They both 

 described the animals as being darker than sheep, with 

 shaggy hair underneath the throat and belly, horns brown in 

 colour and curving backwards, about 30 inches long. One 

 man claimed to have seen three of four dead ones killed by 

 prospectors, and he said he had seen them in the mountains, 

 sometimes in company with sheep, but that they were not so 

 numerous as the sheep. We produced some photos of dead 

 ibex killed in the Altai Mountains, and asked if he had ever 



