BIG GAME OF NORTH AMERICA 391 



sportsmen when I aver that there is no wild animal easier to 

 stalk than Haploceros. There are many men out here who, 

 after having killed their first few heads, will have nothing more 

 to do with goat hunting, regarding it as unworthy the name of 

 sport. I remember well one old goat which I stalked in the 

 Bridge River country. The beast was a very big one, and was 

 first seen feeding upon a bare hillside. He was on one side 

 of an amphitheatre, we were on the other. Between us lay over 

 half a mile of rattling shale and moraine, and there was no cover 

 for a mouse. However, there was nothing else to hunt, and the 

 goat was the largest I had ever seen, so with my Indian behind me 

 I began the stalk. I am confident that any other beast would 

 have seen us before we had gone a hundred yards ; we slipped 

 and fell, we rattled the stones about, and the whole thing was 

 so ludicrous that I had to sit down and laugh more than once ; 

 but in spite of all this I got within forty yards of the poor stupid 

 brute, who had been looking in our direction in a puzzled way 

 for the last ten minutes, and felt thoroughly ashamed of myself 

 when I put an end to his doubts with a bullet. To give an 

 idea of the tameness of these brutes, I took six or seven photo- 

 graphs of goats in one day last year with a very elaborate 

 photographic apparatus, the photographs unfortunately being 

 destroyed before they could be developed, when the whole 

 apparatus, together with my guide, went rolling down a steep 

 incline almost into the Bridge River. 



Though not worth stalking, these goats are quaint beasts 

 and worth watching. As a rule, they live where nothing else 

 would care to, on precipitous rock faces overhanging a stream 

 where no grass grows, and where there is very little even to browse 

 upon. Just at dawn you may see them crossing a wall of rock 

 high above your camp in single file, or wending their way slowly 

 from their feeding grounds to the timber patches in which they 

 lie all day. They are very local in their distribution and very 

 conservative in their habits, infesting one small mountain in 

 great numbers and never seeming to stray into the neighbouring 

 heights. Day after day they appear to seek the same feeding 



