THE MOUNTAIN SHEEP 
except, perhaps, the buffalo. It took them some time to learn that the sound 
of a gun meant danger, and when shot at often they only jumped about and 
stared at the intruder. Without doubt the range of the mountain sheep in 
former times occupied a great area, both in the plains as well as the moun- 
tains, and after feeding on the prairies they sought refuge in the “bad- 
lands ’’ that border so many of the western rivers, or on the tall buttes that 
rise out of the prairies. Many old residents in the west thought that these 
prairie sheep were driven out of their former haunts to their last strong- 
holds in the mountains; but this is no doubt an error, for knowing, as we 
do now, the habits of these sheep and their tenacity in clinging to their 
homes, it seems certain that these sheep of the plains were simply 
exterminated by man, whilst the sheep of the mountains always lived 
there and never migrated to lower levels. In the same way the wapiti, 
which were formerly abundant over the whole of the plains as far east as 
Omaha, and away north to the Canadian boundary, were exterminated, 
and had really no connexion with, nor were they driven to join, the herds 
frequenting the main range of the Rockies. 
In early times the Indians of Wyoming, Montana, Utah and Nevada, 
hunted the wild sheep by driving them from below up to the summits of 
the mountains, where concealed bowmen shot at them with arrows at 
short range. Just as we find in Norway to-day the stone shelters used by 
the Lapps and primitive Scandinavians for the destruction of reindeer, so 
there are to be seen to-day in the mountains of Nevada such shelters 
built of stone slabs which were used by the Indians. These Indians also 
used the corral or pound, with diverging wings of stone, at the ends of 
which, no doubt, the women and children were secreted and from which 
they rose and drove the affrighted game into the stone prison. According 
to Mr Muir, who has seen the remains of these shelters in Nevada, they 
seem to have been worked on exactly the same principle as the pine 
fences formerly used by the Beothic Indians of Newfoundland for the 
capture of caribou, and which are still employed to-day by the Esquimaux, 
Yellow Knife, and Point Barrow Indians. 
The Bannocks and Sheep Eaters seem to have depended very largely 
for their food on sheep, and the latter tribe of Indians are said to have 
killed little else. 
Both of these tribes, when hunting, wore on the head and shoulders the 
skin and horns of the mountain sheep, and when stalking or awaiting their 
prey assumed a stooping position so as to simulate the animal as closely 
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