Part 10

=======+=======+======+=======+=================+================= LENGTH | | | | | ON |CIRCUM-|TIP TO|WIDEST | | OUTSIDE|FERENCE| TIP |INSIDE | LOCALITY | OWNER CURVE | | |SPREAD | | -------+-------+------+-------+-----------------+----------------- --21½ | 15¼ | .. | 35 |Northern Montana |W. F. Sheard | | |outside| | | | | | | 20⅞ | 15 | .. | 30½ |Wyoming |Hon. F. | | | | | Thellusson | | | | | --20¼ | 16⅛ | 33½ | .. | ? |W. H. Root | | | | | --19 | 12½ | .. | .. |Western Montana |P. Liebinger | | | | | 18⅞ | 14¾ | .. | 16⅞ |Western Montana |The late J. S. | | | | | Jameson | | | | | --18¼ | 14 | 26¼ | 29 |Sioux Country |Sir Greville | | | | | Smyth, Bart. | | | | | --18 | 14 | .. | .. |Montana |F. Sauter | | | | | 17¾ | 12⅜ | 15⅛ | .. | ? |H.R.H. the Duke | | | | | of Saxe-Coburg | | | | | and Gotha | | | | | --17½ | 12½ | .. | .. |Southwestern |Theodore | | | | Montana | Roosevelt | | | | | 17½ | 12 | .. | 25½ |Wyoming |H.R.H. le Duc | | | | | d’Orléans | | | | | 17½ | 13½ | 21 | .. | ? |Viscount | | | | | Powerscourt | | | | | 17⅛ | 11⅜ | 10⅜ | 17⅛ | ? |British Museum | | | | | --17 | 14 | 17½ | .. |Yellowstone, |Count E. Hoyos | | | | Montana | | | | | | 16⅝ | 14¼ | 24 | .. |Bighorn Mts., |Moreton Frewen | | | | Wyoming | | | | | | 16½ | 12½ | 19⅜ | .. |Colorado |Sir Edmund G. | | | | | Loder, Bart. | | | | | 16¼ | 13½ | 14¼ | .. | ? |Duke of Portland | | | | | 16⅛ | 15⅞ | 25¾ | .. |Colorado |Sir Edmund G. | | | | | Loder, Bart. | | | | | 15½ | 14⅜ | .. | 19¾ |Wyoming |St. George | | | | | Littledale | | | | | --15.8 | 12.14 | 15 | .. |Indian Territory,|Prince Henry of | | | | near Texas | Liechtenstein | | | | | 14 | .. | 12¼ | .. |North Park, |Col. Ralph Vivian | | | | Colorado | | | | | | 13½ | 13½ | 17½ | .. | ? |G. Wrey | | | | | 13⅜ | 12 | .. | .. | ? |Hon. Walter | | | | | Rothschild =======+=======+======+=======+=================+=================

THE MOUNTAIN SHEEP: HIS WAYS

BY OWEN WISTER

Upon a Sunday morning, the 10th of July 1892, I awaked among my scanty yet entangling Pullman blankets, and persuaded the broken-springed window-shade of my lower berth to slide upward sufficiently for a view of Livingston, Montana. Outside I beheld with something more than pleasure a fat and flourishing mountain ram. He was tethered to a telegraph pole, and he scanned with an indifference bred by much familiarity our sleeping-car, which had come from St. Paul, being dropped last night from the coast-bound train, because it was this morning to trundle its load of tourists up the Yellowstone Park branch to Cinnabar. The ram had been looking at Eastern tourists and their cars long enough for the slow gaze of his eye to express not a kindred but the same contempt which smouldered in the stare of the Indians at Custer station, of the cow punchers at Billings, of every Rocky Mountain creature, indeed, beneath whose observation the Eastern tourist passes. Dear reader, go stand opposite the lion at the zoo if you don’t know what I mean. So patent was the stigma cast that it fantastically came into my head to step down and explain to the animal that I was not a tourist, that I had hunted and slain members of his species before now, and should probably do so again. And while thus I sat speculating among the Pullman blankets, the ram leaped irrelevantly off the earth, waved his fore legs, came down, ran a tilt at the telegraph pole as though at a quintain, and the next instant was grazing serene on the flat with an air of having had no connection whatever with the late disturbance.

What had started him off like that? Extreme youth? No; for when I came to hear about him, he was five years old--a maturity corresponding in us men to about thirty. It was simply his own charming temperament. No locomotive had approached; moreover for locomotives he, as I was later to observe, did not care a hang; no citizen old or young of either sex had given him offence; nor was there stir of any kind in Livingston, Montana, this fine early Sunday morning. When I presently stood on the platform, only the wind was blowing down from the sunny snow-fields, and that not bleakly, while from high invisible directions came thinly a pleasant tankling of cow-bells.

Not two minutes had I been on the platform when the ram did it again. Yes, it was merely his charming temperament; and often since, very often, when encompassed with ponderous acquaintance, have I envied him his blithe and relaxing privilege. I was now thankful to learn that the branch train had still some considerable time to wait for the train from Tacoma, before it could take me from the ram’s company; no such good chance to watch a live healthy mountain sheep on his own native heath was likely again to be mine, and after breakfast I sought his owner at once.

“It’s a fine dy,” said the owner.

“And a very fine ram,” I assured him.

“He’s quite tyme,” the owner went on. “You can have him for five hundred.”

“You’re a long way from London,” was my comment; and he asked if I, too, were English. But I was not, nor had I any wish to bear away the ram, skipping and leaping into civilization.

Three hundred pounds would, I suppose, have been a little heavier than he was, but not much; he stood near as high as my waist, and he had at some period of his long, long ancestry marched across to us from Asia upon his lengthy un-sheeplike legs--skipped over the icy straits before Adam (let alone Behring) was in the world, and while the straits themselves waited for the splitting sea to break the bridge of land between Kamchatka and Alaska. This is the best guess which science can make concerning our sheep’s mysterious origin. Upon our soil, none of nature’s graveyards hold his bones preserved until late in the geological day; earlier than the glacial period neither he nor his equally anomalous comrade, the white goat, would seem to have been with us; and we may comfortably suppose that sheep and goat took up their journey together and came over the great old Aleutian bridge which Behring found later in fragments. Having landed up there in the well-nigh Polar north, they skipped their way east and south among our Pacific and Rocky Mountains, until, by the time we ourselves came over to live in the North American continent, they had--the sheep especially--spread themselves widely, and were occupying a handsome domain when we met them.

“Among other things we procured two horns of the animal … known to the Mandans by the name of ahsahta … winding like those of a ram.”

This, so far as I know, is the first word of the mountain sheep recorded by an American. Thus wrote Lewis on December the twenty-second, 1804, being then in winter camp with the Mandan Indians, not many miles up the river from where to-day the Northern Pacific’s bridge joins Bismarck to Mandan. We find him again, on the twenty-fifth of the May following, when he has proceeded up the Missouri a little beyond the Musselshell, writing, “In the course of the day we also saw several herds of the big-horned animals among the steep cliffs on the north, and killed several of them;” as to which one of his fellow explorers correctly comments in his own record, “But they very little resemble sheep, except in the head, horns, and feet.” It is not worth while to quote a later reference made when the party was near the Dearborn River, north, sixty miles or so, of where now stands the town of Helena.

Thus it is to be seen that Meriwether Lewis, private secretary to President Jefferson and commander of that great expedition, met the mountain sheep in Dakota, and from there to the Rocky Mountains grew familiar with him; though not so familiar as to prevent his later making a confusion between sheep and goats, which, being handed down, delayed for many years a clear knowledge of these animals. To this I shall return when goats are in question.

Until very lately, until the eighties, that is to say, sheep were still to be found in plenty where Meriwether Lewis found them among the Bad Lands of Dakota; and they dwelt in most ranges of the Western mountains from Alaska to Sonora. They had not taken to the peaks exclusively then; the great table-land was high enough for them. I very well recall a drive in July, 1885, when, from the wagon in which I sat, I saw a little band of them watching us pass, in a country of sage-brush and buttes so insignificant as not to figure as hills upon the map. That was between Medicine Bow and the Platte River. To meet the bighorn there to-day would be a very extraordinary circumstance; and as for Dakota, there too has civilization arrived; and you will find divorces commoner than sheep--and less valuable.

It is Gass whom I have cited above as to the scant likeness between this wild so-called sheep and the usual sheep of our experience; and it was Gass whose word I remembered this Sunday morning at Livingston, while I stood taking my fill of observation. The ram, as his owner had assured me, was in all truth quite “tyme”; and you could examine him as near as you wished. I took hold of his rope and pulled him to me, and rubbed his nose. Like a sheep? I have already spoken of his long legs. I now looked him over carefully for a sign of anything in the nature of fleece. There was no sign. Short hair, in texture not unlike the antelope’s and in color not far from that gray we see in fishing-line, covered him close and thick. Upon his neck and shoulders it merged with a very light reddish brown, and on his rump it became a patch much lighter, though not white. In fact, the hue of his coat varied subtly all over him; and I am tempted to remark in this connection that in describing the color of wild animals most of us have been apt to make our assertions far too rigid. Animals there are, of course, completely white, or black, and so forth; but many, the more you scrutinize them, the more reveal gradations, as this ram did; gray fishing-tackle is only a rough impression of his tint upon the 10th of July; on December the 1st of that same year I saw him again, and his hair had darkened to something like a Maltese cat’s. Furthermore, I have seen other sheep in summer that struck me, some as lighter, and some as darker, than the gray of fishing-tackle. And what, shall we infer, do these variations import? Adjustments to climate and environment, state of the individual’s age and health, or several distinct species of sheep? I think I should be shy of the last inference unless I were prepared to accept a difference in the color of the eyes and hair of two brothers as being a basis sufficient to class them as separate subspecies of man. It is a dear thought to many of us that some mountain, some lake, some river, some street, or even (rather than nothing at all) some alley, shall be labelled with our name, and thus bear it down the ages; and from this very human craving our zoölogists are not wholly exempt; but I have been taught to doubt that of the mountain sheep, the Ovis canadensis (or Ovis cervina, as some books still have it), more than one or two subdivisions will prove, in the end, valid enlargements of our knowledge. These are Ovis dalli, a white variety in central Alaska, north of latitude 60°, and (perhaps) Ovis stonei, a dark variety with horns more slender and outward curving, in Alaska and North British Columbia. The four other would-be subspecies have been set down as Ovis canadensis auduboni, Ovis nelsoni, Ovis mexicana, and Ovis fannini. These four may be considered not so much varieties of sheep as works of fiction.

As to the general name, all are agreed to let him pass conveniently as a sheep,--conveniently, but with a number of reserves which science can state. He has, for instance, some things in common with the goat family. Indeed, science can, in final analysis, hardly separate sheep from goat. Relatives in this continent our Ovis possesses absolutely none; but there are cousins to be found in Kamchatka, Tibet, and India; and I have been told by one hunter that the moufflon of Corsica resembles him not a little. I’ve forgotten to mention that he hasn’t any tail to speak of. So now at length, you, who have never looked upon him, see him, if you can, through my unscientific vision, as I rubbed his nose at Livingston, Montana: tall almost as a deer, shaped almost like a heavy black-tail deer, close haired, grayish, tailless, with unexpected ram’s horns curving round his furry ears and forward, with eyes dark yellow and grave, and with the look of a great gentleman in every line of him. The tame sheep is hopelessly bourgeois; but this mountain aristocrat, this frequenter of clean snow and steep rocks and silence, has, even beyond the bull elk, that same secure, unconscious air of being not only well bred, but high bred, not only game but fine game, which we still in the twentieth century meet sometimes among men and women. What gives distinction? Who can say? It is to be found among chickens and fish. What preserves it we know; and our laws will in the end extirpate it. Many people already fail to recognize it, either in life or in books. But nature scorns universal suffrage; and when our houses have ceased to contain gentlefolk, we shall still be able to find them in the zoölogical gardens.

During my interview with the sheep, freight trains had passed once or twice without disturbing him or attracting his notice; but as I walked away and left him grazing, there came by a switching-engine that made a great noise. This didn’t frighten him, but set him in a rage. Once again he leaped into the air waving his fore legs and eccentrically descended to charge with fury his telegraph pole. Yes, he was “tyme,” if by that word one is to understand that he was shy neither of men nor locomotives; but just here there is a hole in our dictionary. Do you imagine that five years of captivity are going to tame the blood and the nerves of a creature that came over the Aleutian bridge from Asia during the Pleistocene, and has been running wild in the mountains until 1887? He was “tame” enough to pay you no attention--until he wanted to kill you; and this was what he did want when I saw him on the first day of the following December. Then was his rutting time; he was ready to attack and destroy with his powerful horns anything in Livingston; and so it was in a stable that I found the poor fellow, took a peep through the quarter-opened door, where his owner had shut him and tied him in the dark, away from his natural rights of love and war. I noted his winter coat of maltese, I heard his ominous breathing, I saw the wild dangerous lustre in his rolling eye; and that was my farewell to the captive.

So good a chance to study a live ram I have never had again. Upon the other occasions when I have been able to approach them at all, study has not been my object, and the distance between us has been greater; but on one happy later day, I watched a ewe with her lamb for the good part of a morning.

In the summer of 1885, as I have said, the mountain sheep had not yet forsaken quite accessible regions in Wyoming; and very likely he still came down low in most of his old haunts. The small band which I saw was not many miles from one of the largest ranches in that country, and the creatures stood in full sight of a travelled road,--not at that time a stage-road, but one that might be daily frequented by people riding or people driving on their way north from Medicine Bow into the immense cattle country of the Platte and of the Powder River still farther beyond, all the way to the Bighorn Mountains. Those very mountains that bear the sheep’s name and were once so full of sheep as well as of every other Rocky Mountain big game are now sacked and empty. Hidden here and there, some may exist yet, but as fugitives in a sanctuary, not as free denizens of the wild. I saw three years bring this change which thirty years had not brought; and in 1888 you would have looked in vain, I think, for sheep on the road from Medicine Bow to Fetterman. I found them that year at no such stone’s throw from the easy levels of the earth, but up in the air a great distance.

The Washakie Needle, for steepness, is truly a heartrending country, and that is why the sheep are there. In it rise Owl Creek, Grey Bull, and certain other waters tributary to the Bighorn; and I have never gone with pack-horses in a worse place. A worse place, in fact, I have never seen; though they tell me that where Green River heads on the Continental Divide (in plain sight from the Washakie Needle across the intervening Wind River country) you can, if you so desire, enmesh yourself, lose yourself among cleavages and cañons that slice and slit the mountains to a shredded labyrinth. From the edge of that rocky web I stepped back, discouraged, a year later; and for vertical effects the Washakie Needle remains, as they say, “good enough” for me. We struggled to it through a land of jumping-off places, a high, bald, bristling clot of mountains that, just beyond the southeast corner of the Yellowstone Park, come from several directions to meet and tie themselves into this rich tangle of peaks, ledges, and descents. You really never did see such a place! and my memory of it is made lurid by an adventure with a thunder-storm which cannot be chronicled here because it happened on one of the days when we found elk, but most lamentably missed our sheep. Missing a sheep, let me say, is of all missing the most thorough that I know.

Encouragement, false encouragement, had come to us after our very first night in camp by the Washakie Needle. The next night we had wild mutton for supper. That initial day, Wednesday, August twenty-ninth, brought us this sweet luck, sweet not alone in its promise of more (for the country was evidently full of sheep), but almost equally because of late, during our perilous journey, we had come down to bacon. Now, to be a hunting party, to be in the Shoshone Mountains in August, 1888, and to be eating bacon, was to be humiliated; only our hard travelling that allowed no attending to other business could excuse such a bill of fare; hence did our pride and our stomachs hail this wild mutton. There was not much of him to hail: he was a young ram; and between six of us, after bacon … need I say more?

It had been my intention, until this very paragraph, to skip what happened next day. But I am growing confidential; these shall be the confessions of a bad shot. I have read in books and in periodicals so many pages where none but good shots were ever fired; I have listened--merciful heaven!--to the tales of my sportsman friends; and, reader, unless you are not at all like me, you have read such pages too, have listened to such stories too, and you have found a monotony creep over these triumphs of other people,--the hair’s-breadth climb, the noiseless approach, the long-range shot, one hundred yards, two hundred, five hundred, with sights not adjusted but elevation merely guessed at, and the inevitably unerring result; and in the midst of all this asphyxiating skill, you have sometimes longed for one pure, fresh breath of failure--have you not? Well, at all events you shall read of mine; and, besides variety, there is a second good reason for this; you could not better learn the ways of the mountain sheep, which, so far as I know them, I am attempting to tell you.

Four of us were so foolish as to set out together upon this evil morning; two parties, that is, of the guide and the guided. There is never any gain in doing this, and almost always loss. The attention which you should be giving to your business is divided by conversation, or by waiting for some member of the party who has fallen behind; and no matter how silent you keep yourselves, four people are sure at some wrong moment to prove conspicuous; better hunt alone, unless circumstances make it wise that there should be two of you--steep country does make this wise--but assuredly never go after game in fours, as we two white men and two Indians went now. We labored and we labored and we finally were upon the top instead of at the bottom of something. It was no more than a ridge, not high, that everywhere dropped off into our own valley or the next one; but two sweating hours had gone in getting merely here, and here our eight eyes discerned sheep, quite a band of them. Not, however, before the sheep had discerned us four wily hunters. We did not know this then, because they stayed still where they seemed to be grazing. It was a great way off in a straight line through the air, for the sheep were small dots upon the mountain; and there was no straight line for us to reach them by. We labored and we labored down to a new bottom and upward on a new slope, and made a most elaborate “sneak,” crouching, and stopping, and generally manœuvring among stones, gravel, and harsh tufts of growth; so did we come with splendid caution upon where the sheep had been, and, lifting our heads, beheld the vacuum that they had left, and themselves contemplating us from the extreme top of the mountain. I am sure that you know how it feels to have your foot step into space at what you thought was the bottom of the staircase. There is a gasp of very particular sensation connected with this, and that is what I had now, followed at once by the no less distasteful retrospect of myself with my half-cocked rifle, crawling carefully for yards upon my belly, while the sheep watched me doing it. There they were on the top of this new mountain, away far above us, and we four hunters proceeded to go on wrong, as we had begun. I have forgotten to mention that, among our other follies, we had brought horses. Never do such a thing! If you are not in training good enough to hunt mountain sheep on your own legs, wait and climb about for a few days until you have got your breath. What my horse did for me on this precious day was this: our hills were too steep for him to carry me up, so I led him; they were too steep for him to carry me down, so I led him; and betweenwhiles, when I was stalking sheep, I naturally had to leave him behind, and naturally had to go back for him when the stalk was over. You will have by this time but a middling opinion of my common sense; but please bear in mind that Shoshone Indians invariably hunt with horses, and that in those days I was still too much one of the “guided” to be equal to dictating to any Indian what trail we should go, and in what manner we should hunt. This entire hunt of 1888, from the distant Tetons and the waters of Snake River over to the Washakie Needle and Owl Creek, is a tale of struggle between ourselves and our red-skinned guides; we were beginning to know the mountains, to crave exploration, to try the unbeaten path; and for an Indian (though you would never suspect it until you suffered from it) the unbeaten path is the one that he never wishes to try and will do all things to escape--even to deserting you and going home.

We hunters now set our legs to new laboring, and presently were again weltering in sweat, and could look down into a third valley similar to the two we had so painfully quitted. Down at the bottom of this new gash in the hills went a little stream like all the others, and beyond bristled interminably the knife-like intersections of the mountains. We had placed our sheep behind a little rise along the summit, and between this and ourselves some three hundred yards still intervened. We were, of course, much above where any trees grew, and the ground was of that stony sort with short growth and no great rocks immediately near; a high, lumpy pasture of mounds and hollows, wet with snows but lately melted, hailed upon often, rained on but seldom. Lower down, this pasture country (which made the top of all but the highest and severest mountains) fell away in descents of gravel and sheer plunges of rock. To get closer to our sheep we now discovered we must go down some of this hill we had just come up; they were on the watch, but were fortunately watching the wrong place, and we all sat down in happy pride for a consultation. The other side of the hill had turned out suddenly to be a precipice, a regular jumping-off one, that went a long way and ended in a crumble of shifting stones, and then took a jump or two more and so reached the water at the distant bottom. This side was our only possible course, and we took another look at the sheep. They had given up watching, and in joy we started for them quickly. We had so skilfully chosen the ground for our approach that we were screened by a succession of little rises and hollows which lay between us and the sheep. This time, this time, there was to be no crawling up to find a vacuum, no raising your head to discover the departed sheep taking a bird’s-eye view of you! What the hearts of the other hunters did, I don’t know, but my heart thumped with vindictive elation as we sped crouching among the little intervening hollows, perfectly hidden from the sheep and drawing close to them at last. Only one more rise and hollow lay between us and where they were pasturing; and over that rise we hastened straight into the laps of some twenty sheep we had known nothing about; they were all lying down. Neither had they known anything about us; the surprise was mutual. All round me I saw them rise, as it were, like one man and take to diving over the precipice. Bewilderment closed over me like a flood; all my senses melted into one blurred pie of perception in which I was aware only of hind legs and hopping. Frightful language was pouring from me, but I didn’t hear what it was; all was a swirl and scatter of men and sheep. Not one of us hunters was ready with his gun or his intelligence. We indiscriminately stampeded to the edge, and there went the sheep, hustling down over the stones, sliding, springing, and dissolving away. And now, suddenly, when it was of no use at all, we remembered that we carried rifles, and like a chorus in a comic opera we stood on the brow of the mountain, concertedly working the levers, firing our Winchesters into space.

It’s all fifteen years ago; yet as I read over my relentless camp-diary, I blush in spite of laughter; it’s hot work staring truth in the face! And now comes the last feeble pop of the ridiculous. We turned our heads, and beheld the sheep we had come for, the sheep we had climbed two mountains for, the sheep we had at length got within a hundred yards of, just disappearing over a final ridge so far away that there remained to them no color, and only one dimension--length. They looked like a handful of toothpicks. They naturally had not been idle while we were so busy; while we were losing our heads, they had kept theirs; and during that brief fusillade of ours--the whole preposterous affair could not have filled more than three minutes--they had put such a stretch of ups and downs between us, that going after them any more was not to be thought of.

We stood at the empty top of the mountain with our ruined day. There was not a live animal in sight anywhere. Those that jumped into the valley were lost among the pines, and warned about us beyond retrieve. We had banged away at such a rate up here that a wide circle of sheep must be apprised of our neighborhood. Why had we done it? For just the same reason that a number of brave persons ran away suddenly at Bull Run as if perdition were at their heels. Surprise, I take it, is at the bottom of the most unaccountable acts of men. And if you wonder why our two Indians were surprised, I can only answer with a theory of mine that Indians who hunt on horseback have small knowledge of mountain sheep. Antelope, deer, white-tail and black, and even elk, can be, and are constantly thus hunted by the Indians; but when it comes to climbing where the horses cannot go, I suspect that his rider seldom goes either. Looking back, I see now that this whole excursion was conducted ignorantly, and that our guides (both of them excellent hunters of other game) neglected the very first principle here, namely, to get to the top of the mountains and hunt down.

We returned our long way to camp, and the elk that one of us shot at sundown made no atonement for our melancholy farce. My diary concludes, “So ended Thursday, August 30, a most instructive day, full of weather, wind, and experience.”