He caught Bart by the shoulder, and pointed to a tremendous slope, a quarter of a mile away, where, in the clear pure air, the lad could see a flock of about twenty sheep evidently watching them.
“They’re the shyest, artfullest things as ever was,” whispered Joses. “Down softly, and let’s back away; we must circumvent them, and get behind ’em for a shot.”
“Too late,” said Bart; and he was right, for suddenly the whole herd went off at a tremendous pace along a slope that seemed to be quite a precipice, and the next moment they were gone.
“That’s up for to-day,” said Joses, shouldering his rifle. “We may go back and try and pick up a bird or two. To-morrow we’ll come strong, and p’r’aps get a shot at the sheep, as we know they are here.”
They were fortunate enough to shoot a few grouse on their way back, and next morning at daybreak, Bart and the four men started after the sheep, the Doctor preferring to stay by the waggon and examine some of the rocks.
As the party climbed upwards towards the slope where the sheep had been seen on the previous day, Joses was full of stories about the shy nature of these animals.
“They’ll lead you right away into the wildest places,” he said, “and then, when you think you’ve got them, they go over some steep cut, and you never see ’em again. Some people say they jump head first down on to the rocks, and lets themselves fall on their horns, which is made big on purpose, and then bounces up again, but I don’t believe it, for if they did, they’d break their necks. All the same, though, they do jump down some wonderful steep places and run up others that look like walls. Here, what’s Sam making signals for! Go softly.”
They crept up to their companion, and found that he had
sighted a flock of eleven sheep on a slope quite a couple of miles away, and but for the assurance of Joses that it was all right, and that they were sheep, Bart would have said it was a patch of a light colour on the mountain.