ABOVE TIMBER LINE
Should you wish with your own eyes to look upon this odd and much-debated creature, it is (to name some of his territories) in the Saw Tooth Range in Idaho, and among the peaks northward from Lake Chelan, the Okanogan and Methow rivers, all three in Washington, and also upon many mountains near the coast in British Columbia that, if you climb high and hard enough, you are almost sure to find him; and you would be perfectly certain to find him in the Zoölogical Gardens at Philadelphia to-day April twenty, 1903. But it may be that by the time you shall read this the summer heat of Philadelphia will have ended his existence there; and this is the only place in our country (or in any country at present writing) where he is in captivity. Of his natural habitat and the interesting questions that it raises, I shall presently speak; let me at once dismiss the question of his species, now finally known as Oreamnus montanus.
He is not a goat at all. We have fallen to speaking of him so in English because for a good number of years it has been the name he has gone by where he lives; but he is an antelope, and his nearest relative is the chamois, whose quite peculiar way of walking his own gait closely resembles. The chamois I have never hunted, but have often watched the singular hunching and truculent movement of the goat, as with head lowered (you might suppose for a charge) he slowly and heavily proceeds along his chosen vertiginous paths of rock and snow. He is a mountain antelope; and his various Latin names, and the confusion, both popular and scientific, of which he was the subject through most of the nineteenth century, are curious and interesting matters. He was doubtless in zoölogic truth an emigrant, having walked from frozen Asia to frozen America across that great old Aleutian Isthmus between two frozen oceans, adjacent seas unmerged as yet by Behring Strait. With other newcomers he replaced the original dwellers of the soil, the American rhinoceros and any number more of old inhabitants with whom the climate had ceased to agree. After landing upon our continent away up in the north the goat and sheep spread themselves widely; but the goat not half nor a quarter so widely as the sheep. The more we compare these similar creatures, the more singular seem their contrasts.
If they were fellow-travellers and twin arrivals, if they did come over the Aleutian bridge together, it is either because there was only one bridge and both had to use it, or else they fell out on the way, and reached here not on speaking terms. The first hypothesis is the one to which I incline: they had to use the same trail because there was only one. Sheep and goat do not seem to me to live on good terms. I should not venture this observation were it based upon my individual experience alone. What my campings have gradually led me to notice is this: you don’t find sheep and goat on the same hill as you find elk and deer in the same wood. Considering that both animals like steep places, like rocks, like very high rocks; and also that their respective habitats coincide in certain regions,—in British Columbia, for instance, and in Washington, and, I think one might fairly add, in Idaho,—I dare by no means make the sweeping assertion that sheep and goat have never been found, or are never to be found, frequenting the same pasture; I don’t know this, and all of us do know that negatives are difficult of proof. But I have camped high in Washington, with goats in profusion all around, and the whole country looking precisely like a sheep country, yet never the sign of a sheep anywhere to be seen. People said, “Plenty of sheep over there,” and they would point to some clearly visible heights. And next, people came from not thirty miles away, having seen and killed sheep. It was the same latitude, the same altitude, the same season, the same everything. What is to be drawn from this? That it was an accidental year, and just happened so for the few weeks that I was there? This is the conclusion that you might draw, as I then did; and you would be wrong, as I then was. For I returned there six years later, and it was still the case, and had been the case meanwhile, saving only that goats and sheep and all wild animals, wherever their chosen abode was, had been growing scarcer and shyer, and were approaching that extinction which we deal to all helpless things that do not minister to our own comfort and survival. During those intervening years I had hunted sheep in a country which for all the world looked as if a goat might come round the corner at any moment. But no goat ever did; and yet, had I ridden down those mountains, and over a space of plains to the westward, and up the very first mountains I should then have met, there would then have been all the goat I wanted, and not (I have been told) a single sheep!
Thinking these things over, I began to wonder if some particular kind of food (since climate it could absolutely not be) was the cause of this flocking apart. Was there, perchance, some little herb which a goat must have and a sheep didn’t like? Well, if that be so, no botanist has so far told me its name; while on the other hand, very recently, I have had news of a sportsman who was hunting in some mountains of British Columbia where sheep and goat were both readily to be found, and whose experience was like mine, only more marked and significant. He had stood upon one mountain where there were goat, and looked across to an adjacent one where he could plainly see sheep. Now on his mountain there was not a single sheep; he must go to the other for them; but over there he must expect no goat. He found this so, and he was assured that it was always so: the animals did not seem to trespass upon each other’s premises.
These few facts that I have here gathered seem to me worthy of recording, and perhaps enough to warrant a presumption; but insufficient for an assertion. Until others shall have on their part added similar observations, I would lay down no rule that a chronic hostility separates Ovis and Oreamnus. Perhaps such a rule has been laid down, but if it be printed anywhere, I have not met it; nor have I had the fortune (after consulting the books) to meet any accounts of goat which essentially add to what has been said already by Audubon; and that is somewhat meagre. Many pictures there are, much better than his old-fashioned plates, but further solid information is uncommonly scarce. Even the latest and most official authorities, when you test their pages by an intimate searching for a piece of comprehensive and definite information, do not give you that information.