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.
UNDER A HOT SKY—(Ovis nelsoni)
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.