Climbing for White Goats 



ride a horse up to the game's feeding- 

 ground, but usually much hard foot-work 

 must be done before the hunting-ground 

 can be reached. When the goats have 

 once been found, however, it is usually 

 easy to secure them, for they are gentle 

 and unsuspicious. 



A year or two since, I was hunting in 

 the Rocky Mountains with a friend who 

 had never shot a goat, and I was ex- 

 tremely anxious that he should secure 

 one. Besides that, there was no fresh 

 meat in camp, so we had a double motive 

 for hard work. Starting from the lodge 

 one morning with the rising sun, we 

 crossed the stream, and set our faces 

 against the great mountain that stood 

 before us. 



First above the valley's level we were 

 confronted by the talus, above that by a 

 thousand feet of cliff, and then by other 

 slide-rock and more cliffs, in all nearly 

 five thousand feet, if we could climb so 

 far. The slope at the foot of the cliff 

 was perhaps fifteen hundred feet high ; 

 a mass of small rock fragments, rather 

 firmly compacted with earth and vegeta- 

 tion, that lay at an angle of nearly forty- 

 five degrees, so that the climbing was 

 extremely steep and slow. After working 



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