ss BIG GAME OF NORTH AMERICA 308 
sportsmen when I aver that there is no wild animal easier to 
stalk than Hap/oceros. 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 
ofan amphitheatre, we were on the other. Between us lay over 
half a mile of rattling shale and moraine, and there was no cover 
fora mouse. However, there was nothing else to hunt, and the 
goat was the largest I hadever 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 couid 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. Asa 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 
wate 
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