MOUNTAIN GOATS AND SHEEP 
Hunting the white goat, says George Bird Grinnell, editor 
of Forest and Stream and of the Boone and Crockett Club’s 
excellent publications, is man’s work, and “calls goat 
for the best qualities of the mountaineer.”” When Hunting. 
the goats have once been found, however, it is usually easy to 
secure them, for they are gentle and unsuspicious. 
“The most charming, innocent creatures that I met in the Cascade 
Mountains were the white goats,” writes Frederick Irland. ‘What do 
you think of a wild animal which, after he knows you are on his track, will 
stop and turn back, to peer around the corner and see what you are? 
These stately animals, with their long white aprons, coal-black+ eyes, and 
sharp little horns, really seem to me too unsophisticated to shoot.” ‘“Al- 
though the goat is nearly related to the chamois,” to quote again from Mr. 
Grinnell’s narrative of a climb after these animals (Scribner's Magazine, 
Vol. XV), ‘it has little of the activity of that nimble species. The big- 
horn is the runner and jumper of the western mountains, while the goat 
is the plodder. He gets over the ground and climbs the loftiest peaks ‘by 
main strength and awkwardness.’ The bighorn rushes away along the 
mountain side at a headlong pace, the alarmed goat starts straight for the 
mountain top at a rate which seems slow, often no more than a walk, but 
which is so steady and continuous that it soon carries the animal out of 
the way of danger. 
“The goat is marvelously sure-footed, and from the day of its birth 
is practiced in climbing over the rocks, but it must not be imagined that it 
never falls from the insecure perches which it frequents. Such falls are 
not uncommon, but seem rarely to result in serious injury. Kids which 
have been captured when very young and kept in captivity have been ob- 
served to play at rolling down steep banks, repeating the tumble over and 
over again, as if practicing for the falls which they might be obliged to take 
later in life.” 
The musk ox, as already intimated, arranges itself better in 
this company than elsewhere, since it is now plain that it is not 
a connecting link between the oxen and sheep, 
but must stand quite by itself, with the takin as its 
nearest apparent relative. The musk oxen are arctic in the 
Musk Ox. 
1 The eyes are black only in kids; in adult goats they are straw-yellow. —E.VI. 
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