192 AMERICAN GAME BIRD SHOOTING. 
afterwards, for every tree, shrub, rock, and peak seemed 
to echo it in thunderous tones for several minutes. The 
Indian who remained with us was evidently frightened at 
this unusual phenomenon, though his fear was not the 
result of any apprehensions about death, for Indians are 
indifferent to that, too often, but it was rather a sense of 
alarm that nature—or what is the same thing to him, the 
bad spirits of the other world—was angry at us, and in- 
tended to do us some mischief. The ice-bound billows 
of the mountains, the towering pinnacles and rolling 
plains of snow, the crash and rumble of the thunder and 
the play of the lightning, the loud blast that sweeps the 
rugged hills or gives the forest a deeply agitated voice, 
even the goats that flit like white spectres among rocks 
and chasms, are, to the savage, the handiwork or expres- 
sion of good or bad spirits, and when he sees or hears 
them in any unusual form he becomes frightened, 
although he may silently adore them. 
While returning to the forest, we saw a flock of moun- 
tain sheep some distance to our right, but as we were sep- 
arated from them by a deep chasm, we made no effort to 
shoot them, much as we might have liked to do so. The 
Indian looked upon their presence as a good omen, and 
expected that we should be fortunate in our enterprise, 
but this, like other superstitions, turned out to be wrong, 
for bagging ptarmigans was not the aim of our expedi- 
tion. Soon after entering the woods we flushed another 
pack of white-tails, and bagged seven, and from that time 
until we returned to dinner we picked them up in ones 
and twos until we had secured twenty-one brace. The 
Indian did not consider this good work, however, for he 
said that some of their boys had frequently killed nearly 
twice that number in a day when the birds left the 
higher latitudes, in winter, and sought refuge m the 
regions below, where the snow was not so deep and 
food was more abundant. Ptarmigans remain at a 
