OF WILD ANIMALS 149 



the sheep. Now, even then I was quite well up on the subject 

 of curiosity in wild animals, and I knew to a minute what to 

 count upon as the standing period of sheep, goat or deer. As 

 gently as possible I informed Milton that no sheep would ever 

 stand and look at a sorrel mule for the length of time it would 

 take us to foot it over that lava to camp, and return. 



But my companion was optimistic, and even skeptical. 



"Maybe he will, now!" he persisted. "Let's try it. I 

 think he may wait for us." 



Much against my judgment, and feeling secretly rebellious 

 at the folly of it all, I agreed to his plan, — solely to be "a good 

 sport," and to play his game. But / knew that the effort would 

 be futile, as well as exhausting. Jeff tied the mule, for the 

 sheep to contemplate. 



We went and got those rifles. We were gone fully 

 twenty minutes. When we again reached the habitat of the 

 mule, that ram was still there! Apparently he had not moved 

 a muscle, nor stirred a foot, nor even batted an eye. Talk 

 about curiosity in a wild animal! He was a living statue of it. 



He continued to hold his pose on his lava point while we 

 stalked him under cover of a hillock of lava, and shot him, — 

 almost half an hour after we first saw him. He had been 

 overwhelmingly puzzled by the uncanny sight of a pair of 

 curling horns like his own, growing out of the back of a long- 

 eared sorrel mule which he felt had no zoological right to wear 

 them. He did his level best to think it out; he became a 

 museum specimen in consequence, and he has gone down in 

 history as the Curiosity Ram. - — 



Mental Attitude of Captured Big-Hom Sheep. In 

 1906 an enterprising and irrepressible young man named Will 

 Frakes took the idea into his head that he must catch some 

 mountain sheep alive, and do it alone and single-handed. 

 Presently he located a few Ovis nelsoni in the Avavs^atz Moun- 

 tains near Death Valley, California. Finding a water hole to 

 which mountain sheep occasionally came at night to drink, 



