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.”
By breakfast we were bearing up a little, making much of the fact that, after all, the sheep we had seen were only ewes and lambs. This would not have caused us to spare them, to be sure; we were out of fresh meat when we saw them; and though the head and horns of a ewe do not make a noble trophy for the sportsman, they represent hard work, and are decidedly better than nothing at all when you are a beginner, and hungry.
We took another course, making for mountains on the side of the valley opposite from yesterday’s route. My Indian was not hopeful. “Too much shoot,” he remarked. “Run away.” But presently we passed very fresh tracks, and began one of those ascents where you are continually sure that the next top is the real top. We had come looking for the sheep at a season when he is living mostly upon the roof of his house. He, with the goat, inhabits, it may be fairly said, the tallest mansion of all our ruminants; indeed, you may put the whole case thus:—
Our Rocky Mountains are a four-story building. The bottom is the sage-brush and cotton-wood, the second is pines and quaking-asp, the third is willow bushes, wet meadows, and moraines, and the fourth is bald rocks and snow-fields. The house begins about five thousand feet high, and runs to fourteen thousand. We have nothing to do with the prairie-dog and others that live in the cellar; it is the antelope to which the first floor belongs, and also the white-tail deer, which, however, gets up a little into the second. The elk, the black-tail, and the mule-deer possess second and third stories in common, while the fourth is the exclusive territory of the sheep and the goat. But here is the difference; these latter (the sheep, certainly) descend to all the other stories if the season drives or the humor suits them; they go from roof to ground, while the other animals seldom, save when hunted, are to be met above or below their assigned levels. I have met a sheep on Wind River in July where the sage-brush was growing, and another on a wooded foot-hill just above Jackson’s Lake.
This day we went to the fourth story by a staircase dear to the heart of a sheep. I mounted through an uncanny domain where all about me stood little pillars of round stones baked together in mud, and planted on end, each supporting a single rock of another color set upon them transversely; shafts of necromancy they would have seemed in the age of witches, altars which might flame by night while some kind of small, naked beings with teeth held rites over the traveller’s crushed body, for from one’s feet here the little stones rolled down to right and left into depths invisible. You who have not seen cannot imagine how here and there in the Rocky Mountains these masonries of nature suggest the work not of men but demons. Silence drew around me as I passed upward through the weird dwarf Stonehenge; and on top we found ourselves looking down the other side at a gray stump which presently moved. The glasses showed us the stump’s legs and fine curling horns; and our hearts, which had been for some time heavy at the poor luck, grew light. Only, how to get at him?
SURPRISED (White Sheep—Ovis dalli)
We had almost given up the game when we spied the ram; we had come so far for so long; and we now had been sitting upon—almost straddling—this ultimate ridge, with the Indian every little while lugubriously repeating, “No sheep.” The ram had not a suspicion of us, and presently lay down in the sun near the bottom of a rocky gulch. The whole of the gulch we could not see, not even when we had crawled down a side of the mountain, an endless surface of rolling stones with scanty patches of grass and an occasional steadfast rock. This descent seemed the most taxing effort yet. It was nearly always (and sometimes quite) impossible to stir a foot or a hand, or shift any fraction of my weight, without starting a rippling stream of stones that chuckled and bounced and gathered noise as they flowed downward, and finally sprang into a rocky chasm which gave out hollow roars. I often felt certain these sounds must reach the ram; but they were only next door to him, so to speak, and separated by the tilted wall of mountain which divided his gulch from the one down the side of which I was so very gradually making my way. I don’t believe the whole distance could have been more than three hundred yards; yet I was nearly thirty minutes accomplishing it with the help of the grass tufts and every other fixture that came within available reach in this sliding sea of stones. I at length arrived where I wanted to be, and a truly unkind thing happened: I was taken with “buck-fever”! It didn’t prevent my finally getting a shot in; but here is the whole adventure.