Oct. 29, 1910.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
693 
The Crees, or Kniftianeaux, diftinguifh this 
animal by the name of My-Attic, or the Ugly 
Rein Deer. The Slave Nations, comprehending 
Blood Indians, Piecans, and Black Feet Indians, 
call it Emo-ki-ca^now, which alfo means a 
fpecies of the deer; but the Canadians who ac¬ 
companied me, at firft fight, named it le Belier 
dcs Montagues (the Mountain Ram). It is only 
to be met with in the rocky mountains, and it 
generally frequents the higheft regions which 
produce any vegetation, though fometimes it de- 
fcends to feed to the bottom of the vallies, from 
whence, on the leaft alarm, it returns to the 
molt inacceffible precipices, where the hunter 
can feldom follow it. His appearance, though 
rather clumfey, is expreffive of active ftrength; 
and the nimblenefs of his motion is (urprifing; 
he bounds from one rock to another with as 
much facility as the goat, and makes his way 
through places quite impracticable to 
any other animals, in that country, with¬ 
out wings. I know no animal which 
encourages purfuit fo much as this; in 
his flight he frequently turns back and 
ftares at the hunter with a kind of 
ftupid curiofity, which is often fatal to 
him. This ought, perhaps, to be af- 
cribed to his ignorance of man, the 
mountains being fo horribly defolate, 
that they are but little frequented, ex¬ 
cept it be by fome ftraggling war 
parties of the natives. 
The Mountain-Ram, or Sheep, though 
not numerous, are to be met with in 
confiderable numbers in fome parts of 
the mountains, from latitude 54 fouth- 
ward. I have, on feveral occafions, 
feen herds of twenty or thirty, but gen¬ 
erally not more than two or three of 
them together. Frequently I have been 
entertained with a view of one of them 
looking over the brink of the precipice, 
feveral hundred yards above my head, 
fcarcely appearing bigger than a crow, 
and bidding defiance to all approach. 
Thefe frightful fituations are quite 
natural to them; they run up declivities of hard 
fnow, or rough ice, with facility. Purfuing them 
in thefe fituations, I have been obliged to cut 
fteps with my knife, where they paffed without 
difficulty. Sometimes you think their progrefs 
is ftopped by a chafm, or projecting rock; but 
if you attempt too near an approach, at one 
bound the};, are out of your reach. 
The female does not differ materially from the 
male, except that her fize is much lefs, and fhe 
has only a fmall black ftraight horn, like that 
of the goat; the co’or and texture of the hair 
are the fame in both, and they are all diftin- 
guifhed by the white rump and dark tail. In 
other refpects, the female greatly refembles the 
fheep, in her general figure, and particularly in 
the timid, good-natured caft of the countenance. 
In winter they frequent the fouthern declivi¬ 
ties of the mountains, to enjoy the fun-fhine, the 
lower regions and the vallies, at that feafon, 
being covered with a great depth of fnow. The 
flefh of the female, and of the young male, is 
a great delitacy; for my own part, I think much 
more delicate than any other kind of venifon; 
and the Indians, who live entirely on animal 
food, and muft be epicures in the choice of 
flefh, agree, that the flefh of the My-Attic is the 
fweeteft in the foreft. 
[My-Attic is the narrator’s form of spelling the 
Cree word for sheep, which Sir John Richard¬ 
son (Fauna Boreali-Americana, Part I., Mam¬ 
malia, p. 271) spells My-Attehk. Father La- 
combe, in his “Dictionnaire de la Langue des 
Cris,” spells it Mayattik. The Blackfeet to-day 
call the sheep E mah ki' kin I, said to mean big- 
head. 
The account here reproduced from the New 
York Daily Advertiser is unquestionably the 
earliest account of mountain sheep hunting, and 
perhaps the earliest description of the mountain 
sheep in its northern home written. 
When Fathers Piccolo and de Salvatierra es¬ 
tablished their mission in California they re¬ 
ported “two sorts of deer that we know noth¬ 
ing of. We call them sheep, because they some¬ 
what resemble ours in make. The first sort is 
as large as a calf of one or two years old; its 
head is much like that of a stag, and its horns, 
which are very large, are like those of a ram ; 
its tail and ears are speckled and shorter than 
a stag’s, but its hoof is large, round and cleft 
as an ox’s. I have eaten of these beasts; their 
flesh is very tender and de.icious.” 
A Natural and Civil History of California, 
written by Father Miguel Venegas, a Mexican 
Jesuit, and published at Madrid in 1758, gives a 
description and figure of the “taye or Californian 
deer” which is absolutely unmistakable, yet 
Father Venegas’ description closely resembles 
that of the old priest who wrote about this ani¬ 
mal fifty years before. 
David Thompson, whom the writer of this ac¬ 
count accompanied, was a famous astronomer, 
geographer, explorer and fur trader, and the 
earliest map maker of the great Northwest. Fie 
was born April 30, 1770, and died Feb. 16, 1857, 
having almost reached the 1 great age of eighty- 
seven years. Though a fur trader for his liveli¬ 
hood, Thompson was above all a mathematician, 
a geographer and a traveler over the whole 
Northwest, of which he made many maps, one 
of which is reproduced in Francis P. Harper's 
edition of the Journals of Alexander Henry and 
David Thompson, edited by Elliott Coues. 
Thompson’s work, though of the greatest im¬ 
portance and value, is quite forgotten, except by 
a very few persons, and even to those persons 
it is to-day of only slight interest. As Dr. 
Coues says, however, “the world can never be 
allowed to forget the discoverer of the sources 
of the Columbia, the first white man who ever 
voyaged on the upper reaches and main upper 
iributaries of that mighty river, the pathfinder 
of more than one way across the Continental 
Divide from Saskatchewan and Athabaskan to 
Columbian waters, the greatest geographer of his 
day in British America, and the maker of what 
was then by far its greatest map—that ‘Map of 
the Northwest Territory of the Province of 
Canada. From actual survey during the years 
1792 to 1812.’ ” 
To be carried back in the beginning of the 
twentieth century to the very first year of the 
nineteenth and to have reproduced for us an 
absolute account of mountain sheep 
hunting no years old and previously 
not known to exist, seems as extra¬ 
ordinary as it is interesting.—E ditor.] 
Bears Abundant. 
Linville Falls, N. C., Oct. 20.— 
Editor Forest and Stream: The bear 
hunting season has been auspiciously 
opened. After several bootless hunts, 
in which the mountaineers and their 
hounds started up and pursued several 
bears, they succeeded in getting two last 
week. One day the woods and the 
canon of the-Linville River were full 
of hunters and hounds. They jumped 
three bears, killed one and wounded an¬ 
other. As on previous hunts they could 
easily have killed all the bears they saw 
if they had been armed with bear-kill¬ 
ing weapons. As it was they had light 
single barrel shotguns, revolvers and 
two or three rifles. The men with 
rifles had no shots and the others could 
not ki 1 until the dogs cornered the 
bear or put it up a tree, so the shot¬ 
guns could pour in buckshot and the revolvers 
get in their work at close range. The small bear 
killed was dispatched among the dogs with shot¬ 
guns and a big revolver. 
Early next morning about fifteen of the hur. 
ters started out to find the wounded bear. Tha, 
one was not found, but John Wiseman, who has 
killed fifteen bears about here, jumped a fresh 
one, followed it alone, and as it was fat and 
unused to traveling, it climbed a ta’l pine to get 
away from the dogs. Wiseman fired two charges 
of buckshot into it from directly below, when the 
bear fell about fifty feet among the dogs. He 
was still full of fight and rolled down hill into 
a small creek, where he settled with several dogs 
before Wiseman silenced him with three or four 
loads of buckshot. This was a fine specimen, fat 
and clean of fur, with perfect long claws, show¬ 
ing that he had been quietly lying about getting 
his fill of acorns and perhaps occasionally a pig, 
as one man has had seventeen hogs killed by 
bears within three or four miles of this place. 
This bear was killed within two miles, and the 
one of the day before within a mile of Linville 
Falls. And still there are more, the hunters say. 
The acorn crop is the heaviest this year that has 
been known for many years, and this attracts the 
bears. Frank W. Bicknell. 
From Venegas’ “A Natural and Civil History of 
California”—Madrid, 1758. 
