“Don’t the animals sometimes get caught in these slides, White Bull?” asked Joe.
“I don’t know,” replied Hugh. “Sometimes I’ve thought they do. One time I found a bunch of sheep bones at the foot of a cliff lying all mixed up together, and I had an idea that maybe they’d been caught in a snowslide and killed there. I heard, too, of a man that found half a dozen goats once in just such a place, and he thought they had been killed by a slide.
“In neither case had the animals been torn to pieces or skinned. Their hair and wool lay all about them. Still, I reckon these mountain animals are pretty well able to take care of themselves, and that they don’t often get into places where snowslides can harm them. Nowadays, most of the sheep live too high up to be caught by slides.”
“You say nowadays, Hugh, as if there had been a time when the sheep did not live high up. I have always thought that they were a mountain animal and always lived among the rocks,” said Jack.
“Hold on, son,” said Hugh. “I don’t know if I’ve ever talked with you about these things before, but even if I haven’t you’ve seen sheep down on the prairie yourself, where there were no mountains, living around among the Bad Land Bluffs just where the black-tailed deer or elk may be found, and where the buffalo often go. What about the first sheep that you ever killed? Was that in the mountains?”
“That’s so, Hugh; you are certainly right. Sheep don’t need the mountains.”
“No,” said Hugh, “they don’t. Of course, they always try to run to broken land when they’re scared, but that broken land need not necessarily be mountain land. I have seen sheep a good many times feeding out on the flat prairie and a long way from any hills; feeding with the antelope, in fact. Haven’t I ever told you old Hugh Monroe’s story about how the Piegans used to hunt sheep in old times?”
“I don’t know, Hugh,” replied Jack. “If you have I’ve forgotten it.”
“Well,” said Hugh, “all through the Piegan country there are great big buttes rising up out of the prairie, and in old times there used to be lots of sheep on all these buttes. They fed on the prairie down below, and then if they got scared for any reason, they’d run up on the rocks and get away. Old man Monroe says that in old times when he was a young man the Indians used to start out on horseback and go to one of these buttes where sheep lived and make a big circle around it. Then two or three of them would climb up on top of the butte and run the sheep off the top. Then they would go down to the prairie and the horsemen would chase them and kill them. They used to do this only occasionally, when they wanted mountain sheep hides for war shirts or women’s dresses.”
“Is it possible that the sheep here were ever so plentiful that they could be killed in that way, Hugh?” said Jack.