I lifted myself and looked over the edge into the next gulch. There was the ram, who saw me at the same moment, and rose. I probably missed him; for after my shot he continued to walk toward me in a leisurely manner, not fifty yards distant, I should think, down in his gulch. Whether I fired at him again or not, I can’t remember,—couldn’t remember that same evening when I tried to put the whole event faithfully down in my diary! Buck-fever is not the only reason for this uncertainty; for now, from behind every rock below me, horns rose up like tricks out of a trap-door, apparitions of horns everywhere, an invasion of mountain sheep. They came straight up to me,—this was the most upsetting part of it all. Not one did I see running down the gulch; they hadn’t made me out, or made anything out, save that some noise had disturbed them. They came up and up around me, passing me, steadily coming and going on over the mountain while my buck-fever raged. “I saw their big grave eyes and the different shades of their hair, and noticed their hoofs moving—but whether they came by fast or slow, or what number there were, I cannot remember at all.” Such are the actual words I wrote not more than six hours later, and I am glad to possess this searching record of that day and of my bygone state of mind; for with the best honesty in the world no man can from memory alone rebuild the minute edifice of truth that has been covered by the heap of fifteen gathering years. So I stood, crazy and inefficient, upon the mountains, and after a little no more sheep were there. A speck of conscious action remained with me, namely, that during the passage of the sheep I had held myself enough in control to get “a bead” on the broadside of two successively; I remembered following them along for a moment with my rifle before pulling the trigger. But these I never saw again, and know not where I hit them—if hit them I did. One trophy remains to show for this day. A ram that had been shot at some moment of the invasion returned to the gulch where I was, and stood at a short distance above me; and then I succeeded in placing one shot where I meant it to go.
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.
