AND OTHER HUNTING ADVENTURES. 239 



genus. He is an agile, fearless climber, and appears 

 to delight in scaling the tallest, grandest, and most 

 rugged crags and cliffs to be found in the ranges 

 which he inhabits, not so much in quest of his 

 favorite food, for this grows abundantly lower down, 

 but apparently from a mere spirit of daring; from a 

 desire to breathe the rarest and purest atmosphere 

 obtainable, and to view the grandest scenery under 

 the sun without having his vision in the least 

 obstructed by intervening objects. These forbidding 

 and almost inaccessible crags are the favorite, and 

 nearly the exclusive, haunts of this strange creature, 

 and the hunter who follows it thither must indeed 

 be a daring mountaineer. The goat is frequently 

 found at altitudes of 10,000 to 14,000 feet, where the 

 atmosphere is so rare as to render it difficult indeed 

 for man to climb, yet this fearless creature nimbly 

 leaps from crag to crag, over deep yawning chasms, 

 with no more fear than the domestic lamb feels when 

 bounding over the greensward in an Eastern farm- 

 yard. 



The hunter literally takes his life in his hand 

 when pursuing the goat, for he must pass over many 

 places where a misstep or a slip of a few inches 

 would plunge him over a precipice, where he would 

 fall thousands of feet, or be hurled into some narrow 

 and deep fissure in the rocks whence escape would 

 be impossible. 



Over such rugged and perilous ground he may 

 climb, hour after hour, until he has passed the high- 

 est ranges of the elk, the mountain sheep, and all the 

 other game, for the mountain goat, " the American 

 chamois," as he has been aptly termed, ranges 



