THE MOUNTAIN SHEEP: HIS WAYS
By Owen Wister
ROCKY MOUNTAIN SHEEP
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.