THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
In Wyoming and Montana the typical race has practically disappeared 
from the prairie and butte region owing to the settlement of white men, 
but there are still a few in desert places where the water is so bad or scarce 
that man can never desire the district for farming purposes. Away to the 
south and south-west in Arizona, Old Mexico and Lower California there 
rise from the arid deserts buttes and small ranges of mountains, which 
are still frequented by local forms of wild sheep, and in such places water 
is very scarce and only used by the sheep at long intervals. Yet they do go 
to the water holes, for most of the sheep killed there are shot when they 
come to them. 
Nowadays, the haunts of the mountain sheep are the Alpine meadows 
close above the timber-line and shadowed by towering peaks. The hunter 
must get to some point above these if he is to find the game. From some 
sheltered ridge he must carefully survey the rolling slopes below and the 
verges of dwarf willows that line the little watercourses which come 
from the snow-banks far up the mountain sides. If he is careful in his 
search with the glass, he may in time discover ten, fifteen or twenty sheep. 
These will, in all probability, be only ewes with, perhaps, a young ram or 
two whose horns have just begun to curve backwards. 
The great difficulty in all sheep hunting is to find the big rams. They 
are not numerous and have a way in summer and autumn of occupying 
different ranges to the females and young. It is probably true that at this 
season they retire under the summits of the highest peaks and so often 
escape observation. 
It is true that a man must find a hundred sheep before he sees one with 
a head that is worth a shot, and then, having found it, it may take weeks 
to obtain the desired trophy. 
It is essential that a man should be of the right age and in the pink of 
condition to kill the mountain ram, but its pursuit will take him into 
such glorious scenery, and furnish him with such incidents of hope, despair 
and ultimate triumph, that he feels it is good to have lived. Even in Alaska, 
where sheep are still abundant, unless a man achieves one of those flukes 
in which he finds the rams at once and surprises them in one of their dazed 
moods, he must be prepared for very severe toil and considerable exposure, 
before standing over those curled horns. 
Even so good a hunter as Mr Charles Sheldon was not invariably success- 
ful in his expeditions, and when he failed it must be remembered that he 
was pioneering new ground of which he had no previous information. In 
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