BIG GAME OF NORTH AMERICA 381 



V. THE BIGHORN (Ovi's monland] 



To a man who loves the hill-tops, where the winds blow 

 keen and pure over the red gold of sun-dried grass and the 

 deep blue of snow-fed tarns, there is no game in America to 

 compare with the bighorn of the Rocky Mountains. Other 

 beasts may hide away in the dense timber of Oregon, Wash- 

 ington Territory, and Vancouver Island ; other beasts may 

 sneak out only at dusk and dawn, but the gallant bighorn still 

 lives out in the open, trusting for safety to the grey-faced ewes 

 who watch over him, or to his own marvellously keen sight 

 and scent. In spite of this, the man who kills a i6-in. ram 

 generally deserves his good luck, for there is no beast better 

 able to take care of himself than an old bighorn, nor any more 

 difficult to stalk. Where he lives the wind seems never still, 

 and never constant in any given direction ; at night it strains 

 at the hunter's tent-rope and makes his fire roar and blaze like 

 a mad thing, and in the morning it curls round the hill-tops and 

 heralds the stalker's coming from every quarter. It is the fashion 

 in books of sport to describe the haunts of Ovis montana as being 

 ' the highest, raggedest, and most forbidding mountain ranges/ 

 Nothing could be further from the truth than this, if the state- 

 ment is intended to be general. Sheep are undoubtedly some- 

 times found in difficult and even dangerous places, but to 

 describe sheep shooting as anything like ibex or chamois 

 hunting is pure folly. The first sheep it was ever my good 

 fortune to see was in the Bad Lands, on an eminence not 

 200 ft. above the level of the Northern Pacific Railway line, 

 and the last I shot in 1892 was not 1,000 ft. above the level 

 of the Frazer. As a rule, sheep in early autumn keep to the 

 bald knolls above the timber-line (where patches of snow still 

 linger), seeking refuge when disturbed in the abrupt rock 

 faces with which the hills abound. When the snow comes 

 they retire to the edge of the timber, sheltering among the 

 juniper bushes and stunted balsams from the early winter 



