174 The Mountain Sheep 



Three hundred pounds would, I suppose, 

 have been a little heavier than he was, but not 

 much ; he stood near as high as my waist, and 

 he had at some period of his long, long ancestry 

 marched across to us from Asia upon his lengthy 

 un-sheeplike legs skipped over the icy straits 

 before Adam (let alone Behring) was in the 

 world, and while the straits themselves waited for 

 the splitting sea to break the bridge of land be- 

 tween Kamchatka and Alaska. This is the 

 best guess which science can make concerning 

 our sheep's mysterious origin. Upon our soil, 

 none of nature's graveyards hold his bones pre- 

 served until late in the geological day ; earlier 

 than the glacial period neither he nor his equally 

 anomalous comrade, the white goat, would seem 

 to have been with us ; and we may comfortably 

 suppose that sheep and goat took up their jour- 

 ney together and came over the great old 

 Aleutian bridge which Behring found later in 

 fragments. Having landed up there in the well- 

 nigh Polar north, they skipped their way east 

 and south among our Pacific and Rocky Moun- 

 tains, until, by the time we ourselves came over 

 to live in the North American continent, they 

 had the sheep especially spread themselves 



