Part 9

The visions of this band, as it scattered in twos and threes after crossing my gulch, would incline me to guess there must have been from fifteen to twenty of them--all rams. Their sex is quite certain; the most intense impression that was given to my unstrung perceptions is of their huge curving horns and their solemn eyes. It is hateful to think that some of them were hurt and so went off to limp, or to die; and I am thankful to have but very few memories of wanton shooting, and some consoling ones of temptations resisted. These rams mostly escaped the indiscriminate blasts from my rifle; of this I am sure. I saw them, high and low, near and far, scuttling into safety over the steep ridges, or down into unseen cañons; and upon presently searching the vicinity, we found but one trace of blood. As for the buck-fever, it was the first seizure that I ever had, and it has proved the last. Why it should have held off in previous years and come down upon me in 1888, who shall say? You will wonder as much as I do that a silver-tip bear did not give me the slightest touch of it in July, 1887. A bear is more important game than a sheep; this grizzly was the first I had ever seen, and I was less experienced. Excitability is a matter of temperament that varies infinitely; but this scarcely explains why, with a bear to shoot, no cucumber could have been cooler than I was one year, and why the next, with these rams, I seem to have been a useless imbecile. The unexpected apparition of so many animals does not account for it, because when I raised myself to look over the ridge before my first shot that brought them into sight, I was shaking thoroughly.

These proceedings did not, at any rate, impair appetite. With the flavor of elk, deer, antelope, bear, and even porcupine, we were familiar; but wild mutton was still a great novelty, and we found it the most palatable of all. I say “we found it” and not “it was,” because I have found a lump of dough sponged round a tin plate full of bacon grease so very delicious! The romance of wild game so mixes with its taste that we carve a venison steak with unction and respect. Yet I have come almost to think that our good old friend roast beef is more savory than anything we can find in the woods. If it is merely the pleasure of the table that you seek, take a good walk every day in the park, or even just up and down town, and the meats from your kitchen (if your lot is blest with a kitchen) will be superior to all the meats of camp.

I become, as I look back, surer than ever that our Indians knew not much more than we did ourselves about the habits of the mountain sheep, and that they did as little reasoning as we did. On the day preceding this, what had been our experience? To run into bands of ewes and lambs. If the women and children were thus off by themselves in the month of August, it was no great jump to conclude that the men must be keeping each other company somewhere else. When we spied that ram down the gulch sunning himself, we should have tried to ascertain whether or not he was alone. As a matter of natural history, the summer season does find the _Ovis canadensis_, as well as many other of the ruminants, thus separated by sex; and the chances are that if you meet a ewe she is not far from more, and that a ram had better not be presumed solitary until his individual habit has been so proved. You are not likely to find ewes and rams together till the rutting season,[14] in December. I have read in some book, or books, that the lambs are dropped in March, but I think this is a somewhat early date, or, rather, that many come in April, and that it is scarcely correct to limit their season to the single month. The lambs, from the time of their birth on into the late fall, follow their careful mothers--receive, in fact, a half-year’s bringing up. And I had, one day in September, 1896, the singular good fortune to watch a mamma with her child for a period even longer than my observation of the ram at Livingston.

The Tetons lie just south of the Yellowstone Park, and directly upon the borders of Wyoming and Idaho. Any recent map might seem to prove this geography inaccurate, because, as I understand it, a late extension of the timber reservation reaches below these mountains, and most wisely includes both them and Jackson’s Lake with the whole piece of country eastward to the Continental Divide. Of all places in the Rocky Mountains that I know, it is the most beautiful; and, as it lies too high for man to build and prosper in, its trees and waters should be kept from man’s irresponsible destruction; those forests feed the great river system of the Columbia and Snake. But I have been a poacher, according to the recent map. In 1896, however, the line was north of me by a few miles; and the day before I saw the ewe and the lamb, I had shot a ewe. It is, I believe, considered unsportsmanlike to do this; I have never seen the sportsman yet, though, who would not cheerfully bring home a ewe to an empty larder. Our larder was empty, even of fish, which had been plentiful until we had climbed up here among the Tetons, where the brooks ran too small for fish.

My object this second day was to find, if I could, a ram; and it proved one of those occasions (sadly rare in my experience) when, being disappointed of one’s wish, something actually better descends from the gods, bringing consolation. It was a climb less severe than those of which I have already written, for our camp among the Tetons was close to the fourth story; less, I should suppose, than a thousand feet above our tent, the mountain grew bare of trees. Upward from this, it was not a long walk to snow.

When first I saw the mother and child, I already had them at a great disadvantage; they were, to be sure, where I had not expected them to be, but I was where they had not expected me to be; and thus I became aware of them a long distance below me, actually coming up to me by the trail I had come myself. Trail, you must understand, does not here mean a path beaten by men, or even by game, but simply the pleasantest way of getting up this part of the mountain. The mother had been taking her child upon a visit to the third story, had been away down among the pine woods and open places, where brooks ran and grass grew with several sorts of flowers and ripe berries; and now she was returning to the heights of her own especial world. Alas for my camera! it was irretrievably in camp. I laid my useless rifle down, for from me neither of these lives should receive any hurt; and with the next best thing to a camera--my field-glasses--I got ready for a survey of this family as prolonged and thorough as they should allow. But field-glasses are a poor second best in such a case; a few pictures of this lady and her offspring “at home” would have told you more than my words have any hope of conveying.

I never saw people in less haste. From beginning to end they treated the whole mountain as you would treat your library (dining room were, perhaps, nearer the mark) upon an idle morning between regular meals. No well-to-do matron, with her day’s housekeeping finished, could have looked out of the window more serenely than this ewe surveyed her neighborhood. The two had now arrived at what, in their opinion, was a suitable place for stopping. “Their” opinion is not correct; it was, I soon unmistakably made out, the mamma who--far more than the average American mother as American mothers go now--decided what was good and proper for her child. This lamb was being brought up as strictly as if it were English. They had just completed a somewhat long and unrelieved ascent,--so I had, at any rate, previously found it. This upper region of the mountain rose above the tree belt in three well-marked terraces which were rimmed by walls of rock extremely symmetrical. Each terrace made a platform fairly level and fairly wide, upon which one was glad to linger for a while before ascending the slant to the next terrace wall. I was seated at the edge of the top terrace, a floor of stones and grass and very thick little spruce and juniper bushes; the mamma had just attained the terrace next below me, and up the wall after her had climbed and scrambled the little lamb with (I was diverted to notice) almost as much difficulty as I had found at that spot myself. The mamma knew a good deal more about climbing than the lamb and I did.

There this couple stood in full view some few hundred feet--about three hundred, I should think--below me; and here sat I at my ease, like a person looking over a comfortable balcony, observing them through my glass. There was a certain mirth in the thought how different would have been the mamma’s deportment had she become aware that herself, her child, and her privacy were all in the presence of a party who was taking notes. But she, throughout, never became aware of this, and I sat the witness of a domestic hour full of discipline, encouragement, and instruction. The glasses brought them to a nearness not unlike peeping through the keyhole; I could see the color of their eyes. The lady’s expression could easily have passed for critical. After throwing a glance round the terrace, her action to the lamb was fairly similar to remarking, “Yes, there are no improper persons here; you may play about if you wish.”

Some such thing happened between them, for, after waiting for the scrambling lamb to come up with her on the level and stand beside her, she appeared to dismiss it from her thoughts. She moved over the terrace, grazing a little, walking a little, stopping, enjoying the fine day, while her good child amused itself by itself. I feared but one thing,--that the wind might take to blowing capriciously, and give their noses warning that a heathen stranger was in the neighborhood. But the happy wind flowed gentle and changeless along the heights of the mountains. I have not more enjoyed anything in the open air than that sitting on the terrace watching those creatures whose innocent blood my hands were not going to shed.

After a proper period of relaxation, the mother judged it time to go on. There was nothing haphazard in her action; of that I am convinced. How she did it, how she intimated to the lamb that they couldn’t stop here any longer, I don’t pretend to know. I do, however, know that it was no mere wandering upward herself, confident the lamb would follow; because presently (as I shall describe) she quite definitely made the lamb stay behind. She now began mounting the hill right toward me, not fast but steadily, waiting now and then, precisely as other parents wait, for her toddling child to come up with her. Here and there were bushes of some close stiff leaf, that she walked through easily, but which were too many for the toddling child. The lamb would sometimes get into the middle of one of these and find itself unable to push through; after one or two little efforts, it would back out and go round some other way, and then I would see it making haste to where its mother stood waiting. Upon one of these occasions the mother received it with a manner that seemed almost to say: “Good gracious, at your age I found no trouble with a thing of that kind!” They drew, by degrees, so near me that I put away my glasses. There was a time when they were not fifty feet below me and I could hear their little steps; and once the ewe sneezed in the most natural manner. While I was wondering what on earth they would do when they found themselves stepping upon the terrace into my lap, the ewe saw a way she liked better. Had she gone to my left as I watched her, and so reached my level, the wind would have infallibly betrayed me; but she turned the other way and went along beneath the terrace wall to a patch of the bushes high enough to make severe work for the lamb. While she was doing this, I hastened to a new position. Where I had been sitting she was bound to see me as soon as she climbed twenty feet higher, and I accordingly sought a propitious cover, and found it in a clump of evergreens. She got to the wall where she could make one leap of it. It was done in a flash, and resembled nothing that any well-to-do matron could perform; but once at the top, she was again the complete matron. She scanned the new ground critically and with apparent satisfaction at first. I stole the glasses to my eyes and saw her closed lips wearing quite the bland expression of a lady’s that I know when she has entered a room to make a call, and finds the wall-paper and furniture reflect, on the whole, favorably upon the lady of the house. Meanwhile, the poor little lamb was vainly springing at the wall; the jump was too high for it. Its front hoofs just grazed the edge, and back it would tumble to try again. Finally it bleated; but the mother deemed this not a moment for indulgence. She gave not the slightest attention to the cry for assistance. There was nothing dangerous about the place, no unreasonable hardship in getting the best of the wall; and by her own processes, whether you term them thought or instinct, she left her child to meet one of the natural difficulties of life, and so gain self-reliance.

Do you think this fanciful? That is because you have not sufficiently thought about such things. The mamma did undoubtedly not use the words “self-reliance” or “natural difficulties of life”; but if she had not her sheep equivalent for what these words import, her species would a long while ago have perished off the earth. The mountain sheep is a master at the art of self-preservation; its eye is tenfold keener than man’s, because it has to be, and so is its foot ten or twenty fold more agile; every sense is developed to an extreme alertness. It measures foothold more justly than we do, because it has had to flee from dangers that do not beset us. That the maternal instinct (which these mothers retain until their young can shift for themselves) should fail in a matter so immediate as the needs of its young to understand rock climbing, is a notion more unreasonable than that it should be constantly attentive to this point. But--better than any talk of mine--the next step taken by the ewe will show how much she was climbing this mountain with an eye to her offspring.

The lamb had bleated and brought no sign from her. She continued standing, or moving a few feet onward in my direction. This means that she was coming up a quite gentle slant, and that thirty yards more would land her at my evergreen bush. She came nearer than thirty yards and abruptly stopped. She had suddenly not liked the looks of my evergreen. Behind her on one side, the last steep ascent of the mountain rose barer and barer of all growth to its stony, invisible summit which a curve of the final ridge hid from view. Behind her, down the quiet slant of the terrace, was the wall where she had left the lamb. She now backed a few stiff steps, keeping her eye upon the evergreen. Her uncertainty about it, and the ladylike reserve of her shut lips, caused me to choke with laughter. To catch a wild animal going through a (what we call) entirely human proceeding has always been to me a delightful experience; and from now to the end this sheep’s course was as human as possible. I had been so engaged with watching her during the last few minutes that I had forgotten the lamb. The lamb had somehow got up the wall and was approaching. Its mamma now turned and moderately hastened down the slope to it. What was said between them I don’t know; but the child came no farther in my suspicious direction; it stayed behind among some little bushes, and the mother returned to scrutinize my hiding-place. She looked straight at me, straight into my eyes it seemed, and her curiosity and indecision again choked me with laughter. She came even nearer than she had come before. How much of me she saw I cannot tell, but probably my hair and forehead; she at any rate concluded that this was no suitable place. She turned as I have seen ladies turn from a smoking-car, and with no haste sought her child again. How she managed their next move passes my comprehension; I imagined that every foot of the mountain ascent near me was in my full view. But it was not. Quite unexpectedly I now became aware of the two, trotting over the shoulder of the ridge above me, with already two or three times the distance between us that had been just now. If I had wished to follow them, it would have been useless, and I had seen enough. When I was ready, I made for the summit myself. The side which I had so far come up was the south side, and a little further climbing took me over the narrow shoulder to the north, where I was soon walking in long patches of snow. Across these in front of me went the tracks of the mamma and her lamb, the sage and gentle guide with the little novice who was learning the mountains and their dangers; across these patches I followed them for several miles, because my way happened to be theirs. No doubt they saw me sometimes; but I never saw them again. I hope no harm ever came to them; for I like to think of these two, these members of an innocent and charming race that we are making away with, as remaining unvexed by our noise and destruction, remaining serene in the freedom that lives among their pinnacles of solitude.

AMERICAN BIGHORN

(OVIS CANADENSIS[15])

The bighorn of the American continent, inclusive of its local races (frequently regarded as distinct species), is a large sheep, distinguished from the Asiatic argalis, among other features, by the comparative smoothness of the horns, in which the outer front angle is prominent, and the inner one rounded off, and also by the smaller size of the face glands. There is a well-marked whitish patch on the rump, but the amount of white on the under parts and legs shows considerable local variation. In the typical Rocky Mountain race (_O. canadensis typica_) the ears are long and pointed, with short hair, and the horns, which are very heavy, diverge but little outwards, and generally have the tips broken. The Californian _O. canadensis nelsoni_ is a paler southern race. On the other hand, in _O. canadensis stonei_ of the northwest territories the color of the back is very dark, and the white on the belly and legs sharply defined. And both in this race and the light-colored _O. canadensis dalli_ of Alaska the horns are lighter, more divergent, and sharper pointed, while the ears tend to become shorter, blunter, and more hairy. Height at shoulder about 3 feet 2 inches; weight about 350 pounds.

The horns of the ewes are very small in comparison to those of the rams, seldom measuring more than 15 inches on the curve from base to tip. Large male horns are now difficult to obtain, and of late years it is seldom that those of fresh-killed specimens are seen exceeding 38 inches on the curve from tip to tip. American sportsmen are keen to obtain horns of large basal girth; but these, as will be seen from the following table, rarely exceed 16 inches. The Maclaine of Lochbuie possesses a specimen whose girth, according to his own measurement, is 19 inches.

_Distribution._--North America, from the Rocky Mountains southward to Sonora, northern Mexico, and California, and northward to Alaska and the shores of Bering Sea. The Alaskan race, for at least some portion of the year, is snow-white.

MEASUREMENTS OF HORNS