A Lillooet Sheep Hunt. 
Continued from page 854. 
As soon as the pack train had drawn up at 
White’s, we had a talk with the men and found 
that the party were perfectly willing to go back 
with Chief Peter, and that we could start the 
next morning for the sheep country. It was 
certainly a great relief to get our outfit and be 
able to start, whether we got sheep or not. Grant 
White explained his being late by saying that 
the present party was a hunter, N., who had 
been out the spring before for bear without 
success, and had come in the fall with Grant’s 
assurance that he could surely get him some 
sheep, and Grant had therefore stayed out a little 
longer than he had at first planned, hoping not 
to bring in the same man twice without satis¬ 
factory results. 
ihat night we again slept on the floor of 
Grant’s kitchen and got up early to see Chief 
Peter, N. and his party start off in a great rush 
for Lillooet. They were planning to make the 
town that same night, doing in one day what 
had taken us a day and a half, and therefore had 
to make good time from the start. The day was 
about as bad as could be had for a start on a 
tiip, as it began with a fine rain, which held 
out no hope of stopping. We packed up about 
* 11 o clock and were off by noon, going straight 
up the river and then across the ridge where the 
first party had come down. 
Our pack train consisted of seven pack 
horses and six saddle animals. The men of our 
party were of course Cutler and myself. Grant 
White, who was certainly a fine hunter and 
knew the country thoroughly, and another guide, 
Patrick, a fine looking full blood Indian of 
about thirty years of age. He was fully as good 
a hunter as Grant White himself, and a cheer¬ 
ful, hard-working man. It fully doubled the 
pleasure of the trip to have two guides who were 
equally efficient, as in that way neither one of 
us could feel that he was at a disadvantage. 
The cook was a white man named Dick, an ex¬ 
cellent one for camp work, cooking well and 
being cheerful around the camp, full of jokes 
and prophecies about what a good time he was 
going to have when he returned to Lillooet after 
three months in the woods. His idea of a good 
time in Lillooet lived up to my idea of that 
place, as it consisted wholly in getting gloriously 
drunk, and I can state here and now that on 
our return he made good. The fourth man was 
an Indian named Shemoo, who acted as horse 
wrangler. He said nothing, but he certainly had 
the biggest appetite I have ever had the good 
fortune to meet. 
Our pack train started out with Grant White 
leading and Cutler and myself following. Grant 
had just provided me with a new buckskin shirt 
which I had asked him to get, and it was the 
most satisfactory and comfortable garment I 
have ever possessed. 
When we reached the bottom of the ridge where 
the trail winds straight upward for a thousand 
feet from the valley of Bridge River, it suddenly 
came to the minds of the pack horses that we 
w'ere bound for another few weeks’ jaunt in the 
mountains, and they one and all turned back— 
not once, but many times. For two hours we 
sat on the hillside in the rain watching Dick, 
Shemoo and Pat round up the pack train. In 
this work Dick had a tremendous advantage, as 
he could speak the English language with more 
force than either of the Indians. 
It was a discouraging start, but after a couple 
of hours the horses submitted to necessity, and 
we started in fairly good order up the moun¬ 
tain. After three hours’ very hard climbing the 
trail pitched down again for a thousand feet to 
a little lake in the mountains with a meadow 
at one end. Here we made our first camp in 
British Columbia. Everything was wet, but as 
it was only to be a temporary camp and as it 
was nearly dark, it was not worth while to make 
things comfortable. We succeeded only in set¬ 
ting up the tent and getting a hasty supper, and 
then lay down and went 'to sleep in the wet. 
Cutler told me afterward that this first camp 
was the most discouraging moment of the trip. 
As for me I was so tired from getting started 
and the unaccustomed continued use of the sad¬ 
dle that I knew nothing from immediately after 
supper until I heard Dick calling that breakfast 
was ready. 
Dick had the proper idea for a breakfast in 
a cold country. Pie invariably started out with 
oatmeal and ended up with pancakes, while in 
between he put everything else we had to eat, 
generally bacon, potatoes, beans, apple sauce, 
steak, tea and coffee; in fact, as a rule Dick’s 
principle was to cook everything we had at 
every meal so that we always had plenty to eat 
and all the variety that was possible. 
We discovered immediately after breakfast 
that the horses had repented of their submis¬ 
sion of the day before and during the night had 
started for home. It took about two hours to 
find them, so that it was n o’clock before we 
had struck camp and started. However, as we 
had only a short day’s march to the sheep range, 
we had great hopes of getting there before dark. 
The trail rose gradually from this camp over 
ridges covered mostly with small pine. As w r e 
were passing over one of these, a blacktail doe 
stepped out on the point of a neighboring ridge 
350 yards away. As we were greatly in need of 
meat, I jumped off my horse and fired both 
barrels of my rifle at her as quickly as I could 
pull the trigger. On the crack of the gun the 
doe started and I felt almost certain that I had 
missed her. However, on crossing to where she 
stood, we found blood, and it soon appeared 
from the trail that she was badly hit. There 
is no question that if we had not been in too 
much of a hurry we would have got the doe, but 
we were hard pressed for time in c*rder to make 
camp before dark, and the temptation to follow 
the doe and jump her at once in the hope of a 
shot was too much for us. Pat and I started 
down the ridge after her and succeeded in 
jumping her three times, but each time in such 
thick brush that it was impossible to get a shot 
and in the end we had to give her up. 
Had we left her alone to lie down for half an 
hour we would not have had any trouble in get¬ 
ting her. Plowever, I was a little bit consoled 
with the fact that I had made a fairly good shot. 
After Pat and I finally lost the doe, we had 
thi ee-quarters of an hour’s hard climbing back 
to the pack train and found them just finishing 
lunch. We got some lunch hurriedly and again 
started over the mountains. For at least an¬ 
other hour we kept climbing through forests 
composed of old pines which had been killed 
by fire, and little Christmas trees which had just 
started up among them. As we got higher we 
found three inches of snow, and at last when 
we arrived above timber line at about 4 o’clock 
in the afternoon, we found the mountains heavily 
covered with snow and a bitter wind blowing. 
With this wind at our backs we crossed the 
pass and wound down to another little lake 
called Noaxe Lake, w T here we made camp for 
the night. This lake was about 7,000 feet high 
and was located right under a huge peak which 
rose to the north of our camp and was called 
Shallops, the Indian word for ram. The whole 
country around Noaxe Lake was a great range 
for the ewes of the mountain sheep, and as the 
rut was just on and it was the full of the moon, 
we expected to find rams with the ewes. 
It was almost dark when we finally came to 
our camp on the side of the lake which was 
sheltered from the wind which was blowing 
down the pass about forty miles an hour. It 
was bitterly cold, with about two inches of hard 
snow. It was impossible then to get sticks or 
drive them properly, so we finally hoisted our 
tent on a line between two trees and weighted 
down the edges with large boulders. Dick again 
proceeded to give us everything in the outfit to 
eat, and we went to bed praying that the tent 
would not leave us during the night.* I never 
expected to see that tent in the morning, for 
being loosely set up it cracked like the sail of a 
ship in a heavy wind, but we found it there 
when we woke for our first morning in the 
sheep country. 
The day was a wonderful day for the sheep 
country, calm and sunny. I remember at the 
time that I .thought it was a windy, disagreeable 
day, but subsequent events caused me to realize 
that it was a perfect morning for Noaxe Lake 
and Shallops. Immediately after breakfast Cut¬ 
ler and White started up on one side of Noaxe 
Lake and Pat and I on the other. Pat carried 
a sack containing lunch and a camera, while I 
carried my rifle. The weather was cold and I 
wore a flannel shirt and over that a buckskin 
shirt. 
Starting to the north side of the camp we 
climbed straight up the western edge of Mount 
Shallops for four or five hundred feet until we 
came out on a small plateau. There we saw the 
first sheep of the trip, three small ewes passing 
through a little gulch about a mile to our left. 
We did not disturb them, but started up the 
mountain that lay directly in front of us. Later 
I learned to look scornfully at mountains such 
I 
