34 ANIMAL ARTISANS 



difficult to account for. Sheep have for unknown 

 ages been the great path-makers on mountains and 

 downs, and have left their mark on the faces of the 

 everlasting hills. The sheep-walks are only made in- 

 tentionally in so far that the flocks, having once settled 

 which is the shortest, easiest, and best route across 

 these roadless hills, never seem to abandon what their 

 reason has decided to be the best. Out on the hills 

 these animals are almost in their primitive condition 

 before domestication, and not the least interesting 

 feature of their conduct in this relapse to the wild life 

 is, that in spite of the highly artificial conditions in 

 which they live to-day, they retain the primitive in- 

 stincts of their race. That this " peremptory and 

 path-keeping" impulse is part of their early instinct 

 is clear from an account of the habits of the musk-ox 

 recently written by the Times correspondent in Canada. 

 The musk-ox, the ovibos, is as much akin to the sheep 

 as to the bovid*, and in habits more like what we 

 imagine the undescended great original of our sheep 

 was than are the wild sheep of to-day. It naturally 

 assembles in great flocks, and is migratory, just as all 

 the domesticated flocks of Spain are, and those of 

 Thrace and the Caspian steppe. These flocks of musk- 

 oxen always return from the barren lands in the Far 

 North by the same road, and cross rivers by the same 

 fords. Nothing but too persistent slaughter at these 

 points by the Indians who beset them induces them 

 to desert their ancient highways. Pictures and anec- 

 dotes of the migrations of these animals, and of the 

 bison in former days, represent them as moving on 





