THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
and truly magnificent quarry, the Ovis amnion. It is in search of this trophy 
that all hunters make for the Altai. In order to become the proud possessors 
of those heavy, well -curled horns men have travelled for thousands of 
miles before outfitting with caravan to make the final assault on the cold, 
bleak, upland home of this sheep. But this distance is discounted in view 
of the reward that awaits them. The glorious journey by boat up the great 
Siberian waterways, the novel stages by tarantass through the idyllic 
scenery of this Siberian Switzerland, and finally the life with caravan 
and native hunters on the high mountain pastures beyond : these are the 
things that count, and make a trip to the sheep grounds of the Altai well 
worth the while of anyone with four months at his disposal. 
The ammon of the Altai rival the poli of the Pamirs in bulk, weight and 
size of horn. In fact no other beast, for its size, carries such weight of horn. 
The earliest travellers who attempted to describe this animal remarked 
that it had the appearance of a sheep, although it was as large as a donkey, 
and that the horns were so weighty that a man could scarcely lift them. 
In point of fact, an adult ram of this species stands over 50 inches in height 
at the shoulder, while even the wild ass or kulon of Central Asia does not 
measure more than 53 inches. The horns, which run to 60 inches or more, 
have the immense girth of 20£ inches, and weigh, with the dry skull, as 
much as 45 lb. As compared with Ovis poli the ammon is actually larger 
in size, while its horns, although never attaining the same length, are 
enormously massive. The chief characteristics of the ammon are its very 
thick, heavy horns which nip in close to the head on their middle spiral, 
and the lack of the throat ruff which is such a feature of the Ovis poli. 
The existence of this wonderful beast has been known since the days of the 
earliest European travellers to Mongolia in the middle of the thirteenth 
century, but detailed information was lacking until about forty years ago, 
when the first modern traveller penetrated to those bleak plateaux ’twixt 
China and Siberia. It was not until 1895 that the first sportsman reached 
these solitudes, and only in 1896 did the first gnarled horns of the great 
Mongolian wild sheep arrive in England. These were the trophies ob- 
tained on the second expedition of Major Cumberland to the Russian Altai. 
Since then, keen hunters have followed in his footsteps at the rate of about 
one party a year. It is a long way to go for the sake of procuring a single 
trophy; for with the exception of a chance at gazelle and a few small ibex 
it being unlikely that anything else would fall to the rifle of the hunter. 
But this one trophy is worthy of a special expedition; and it will take all 
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