If my surmise be true, and sheep and goat are apt to be upon strained relations, I think we may be certain which of the two has regulated the affair. I will hazard the guess that in single combat the goat could ruin the sheep before the sheep was fully aware of what had befallen him. Hunters can picture such an encounter, which probably would be brief if grand. The gallant old sheep would stand, aim, bound to the attack and leap in the air, expecting to dash his forehead and curling horns against the face and horns of the goat. But the goat—ah! that’s not the goat’s way. It would have happened so quickly as not to be made out; but there the poor ram would lie, ripped open. The goat does nothing so picturesque and unpractical as jumping in the air. He lowers his sullen head, one shrewd thrust and jerk-back with his deadly sharp horns, and the business is despatched. And the goat looks it, too. His appearance suggests immediately that you had better look out for him if you happen to be a ram with beautiful useless horns—useless, that is, against any such apparatus as the goat carries. One day I stood watching a good specimen billy-Oreamnus. The nanny, less conspicuous, lay in the shade on some flat ground, asleep. But the billy sat hunched on the peak of a built-up pyramid of rocks. It was in the Zoölogical Gardens at Philadelphia where this pair, taken into captivity in 1901, have grown and thrived, but have not bred. The billy shows his formidable nature; no strangers can go near him; he would disembowel them in a jiffy; even his keeper has to be wary. At the top of his pile of rocks sat the captive, hunched, as I have said, and truculent and lowering, in spite of his stillness. His eye had that gaze which so wonderfully remains with wild animals who are prisoned from the great free natural spaces that belong to them, whose birthright is a liberty of no sparrow-and-robin size, but a colossal liberty, the range of the primal world, where fences and statutes are not. Our delightfully conventional intelligence is familiar with this look in the eyes of the lion and the eagle because the poets have called our attention to it, have said pretty things about it; but if you have the unusual gift of making your own observations, you will find it in many other animals, including certain types of man. As for this goat, no goat sitting on a rock at Harlem could stare like him; he might have been sitting on the top of the Cascade Mountains, surveying huge gulfs, and (possibly) meditating how improving it would be to disembowel a ram.
As I watched him, an odd thought revisited me: how Asiatic he looked, for some obscure reason! I remembered thinking this same thing when I had shot my first goat eleven years before. Asiatic? Yes; and I cannot at all explain why, unless it be that one has seen pictures of animals which hail from somewhere like Tibet, and which bear some resemblance to the Oreamnus. I know that no other of our Western big game strike me in this way; buffalo, elk, deer, antelope, sheep,—all these have always seemed to me to look indigenous, to belong to our North American soil. But this goat is a figure that it surprises me to meet among the haunts of my own language; his idiom should be Mongolian!
He’s white, all white, and shaggy, and twice as large as any goat you ever saw. His white hair hangs long all over him, like a Spitz dog’s or an Angora cat’s; but it is stiff and coarse, not silky, and against its shaggy white mass the blackness of his hoofs, and horns, and nose, looks particularly black. His legs are thick, his neck is thick, everything about him is thick, saving only his thin black horns. They’re generally about six inches long, they spread very slightly, and they curve slightly backward. At their base they are a little rough, but as they rise they cylindrically smooth and taper to an ugly point. His hoofs are heavy, broad, and blunt. The track they make is huge, and precisely the reverse of the sheep’s; it is a capital V, pointing backward. The sheep’s track is a V also, but pointing forward. By his clumsy-looking hoofs, and his thick-set and apparently unwieldy legs, it would seem as though this goat had best keep his level, as though he might seldom go up two steps of even a porch without accident; a set of legs and hoofs could scarce be instanced of seemingly less avail for a mountaineer. So, at least, I should argue, recalling the various sharp apparatus which we need ourselves. One does not see how these heavy animals can leap and cling. But let me transcribe uncorrected some sentences from my hunting journal of November, 1892, pencilled in flippant spirit after a day’s pursuit of the goat.
“They … chose places to lie down where falling off was the easiest thing you could do.… The individual tracks we have passed always choose the inclined plane where they have a choice between that and the level.… I suppose these animals sometimes must fall, though they have a projecting heel of horn to their hoof which is wonderfully adapted to their vertical habits. But if they do fall, it probably amuses them. Their hair is more impenetrably thick than any hair I have seen, and beneath this is the hide thicker than buffalo. If they play games together, it is probably to push each other over a precipice, and the goat that takes longest to walk up again loses the game.”
You can see from these lines what a tide of resentment flows between them. I remember that hard but successful day very well; and it furnished some facts about size and weight and so on, which were all recorded on the spot, and which give some good details well to know.
To begin with, there is that “projecting heel of horn” to the goat’s hoof. We cannot imagine how he manages to make such a slight thing (not over a quarter of an inch) catch his weight. He weighs anywhere from one hundred and eighty to three hundred pounds. I had no means that day on top of the Cascade Mountains to ascertain how much the male I had killed might weigh, but he was very much of a load for two of us to move. His hide (not the hair but the leather) on his rump was as thick as the sole of my boot. My boot was made for climbing mountains, and the sole was filled with hobnails; the hide was as thick as such a sole, and when balanced against things in camp whose weight we knew,—such as flour and sugar bags,—it alone weighed thirty pounds! We carried home, beside the head and hide, the web-tallow, and this was three-quarters of an inch thick. Hunters will know what ample supply this means in animals much larger than the goat. This specimen was, my most companionable guide told me, of good but not supreme size. We carried home none of the meat. The flesh of the grown-up goat cannot be eaten with much pleasure; but later, for the sake of a complete set of specimens, I shot a kid; and the flesh of this we ate with entire satisfaction for our Thanksgiving dinner. And this brings me to the next point.
“These wild goat,” says my journal, “are twice the size and more of the ordinary goat, and if their hides kept clean and snow-white as they naturally are, they would be a splendid-looking animal.”
This was written two weeks before I was able to examine one that was in very truth snow-white; and lately, while looking through the books to find what they have to say that may fill out my imperfect knowledge, I have come more than once on the statement that the goat is not pure white, but has a tinge of yellow, or some shade, here and there, that dulls his total sheen. This I conceive to be error. Age, it is possible, may bring a few dark hairs to the white goat. But I should wish to be very sure about this before I asserted it. The sum of my experience is, that first I killed some plainly old male goats (they were off by themselves, no longer with the herd), and of these the coats were dingy; that presently I found a plainly younger male goat (he was lighter in weight and his horns and hoofs showed less wear), and his coat was spotless; and that finally I found the coat of a kid born that same year to be equally spotless. What is the inference—almost the conclusion? Is it not that in the older goats the color was discoloration, from causes external; that by nature the goat is perfectly white; and that the books have gone on reproducing an original mistake which grew from some writer’s having seen only goats that were weather-stained? Oh, the reproduction of error! The way one man’s inaccurate statement is blandly copied down by the next man, and verification shirked at every turn! Why will they do it, these little scientific folk? For the great ones never do. The great ones verify, or else, when they come to a hole in their knowledge, they frankly tell you that they don’t know. They paste no piece of paper over the hole, pretending it’s all solid underneath. But the small fry—the popular magazine size,—these unceasingly are pasting paper. And why? Because they’re not afraid of being found out. They know how few of their readers can discover the holes and poke their fingers through the paper. Don’t you believe me, reader? Does your kind heart repudiate with heat this aspersion? Perhaps—for instance—you’re not aware how some little writers go on deriving the name of a well-known St. Lawrence fish from two French words, masque allongée. I would tell you about it, only I did not discover their ludicrous blunder myself; but here’s a hole where I happened to poke my own finger through the paper. During ten years I used every official map of Wyoming that I could procure. First it was a territory, and next a state, but all the while the map-makers continued to draw Pacific Creek as flowing into Buffalo Fork. Now Pacific Creek is a thoroughfare between the two sides of the Continental Divide, and it does not flow into Buffalo Fork, but into Snake River. It was a really bad geographical mistake. Some original map-maker had traced his map on hearsay or guesswork, hadn’t gone down the creek to see for himself, and all his successors faithfully reproduced his ignorance. The people who knew better were merely Indians, prospectors, cowboys, or stray hunters like myself. We didn’t count; that wasn’t being found out!
Pacific Creek being wrong to a certainty, how then about Atlantic Creek, and Thoroughfare, and a good many more? Did these, also, flow one way officially, and actually another? How could I be sure until I had crossed mountains and found them for myself? And how should you, reader, enjoy being condemned to such maps in a country where Indians, and bears, and blizzards prevailed? You will scarce wonder that I grew to place upon those maps the same chastened reliance that I place to-day upon books which tell me that the goat is not strictly white, or that he lives in the Rocky Mountains. You might search a good many hundred miles of Rocky Mountains that have never seen a goat, but which the sheep has frequented since before the memory of man. Here again comes the contrast between the two: having come the same road from Kamchatka, their ranges upon this continent but partially coincide, and even where both animals are established and flourishing in the same zone, their localities within that zone are so capriciously separated as to baffle even the explanation that one drives the other out.
It would seem that they can stand equal cold; both are to be found in Alaska, as might be expected from the manner of their emigration. And beginning with Alaska (one authority, R. Lydekker, “The Royal Natural History,” London, 1898, the best authority I have found for coherence and completeness, names latitude 64° as the northern limit), we find goat and sheep alike plentifully distributed as we come south. But only for a certain distance. If the Northwest be plain like a picture in your mind’s eye, you can recall how in the far North the Cascades and Rockies are intermingled, and how, as we come down through British Columbia to our own soil, they gradually separate, slope apart, so that by the time they reach the latitude of Portland, Oregon, a wide, flat domain lies between them. Both have slanted inland; but while the Cascades are only some hundred and sixty miles from the Pacific coast, the Rockies are away over in Idaho and Montana, and continue to diverge until they sink among the hot sands of the mesquite and the yucca. Now, in Arizona, in the Colorado Cañon for instance, we still find the sheep, and can find him yet farther down in northwest Mexico. But no goat is so far south. The goat stops more than a thousand miles to the north. It seems clear, then, that goat and sheep will inhabit equal cold, but not equal heat.