“Have a look through the binoculars,” urged Ralph, borrowing the professor’s glasses which he was far too busy with his rock specimens to use. Indeed, he hailed Ralph’s excited announcement with only mild interest, being at that moment entering in his note-book a voluminous account of his discovery of some metamorphic rock in a region where none was thought previously to exist.
The glasses revealed the objects as mountain goats beyond a doubt. They were big, white fellows with high, humped shoulders and delicate hind quarters and black hoofs and horns. They looked not unlike miniature bisons, although of course the resemblance was only superficial.
While they still gazed at the moving objects on the snow-capped ridge, Mountain Jim suddenly uttered a sharp exclamation.
“Look close now,” said he, “for you’ll see something worth looking at in a minute or two, or I miss my guess.”
The goats were at the summit of what appeared to be an absolutely precipitous rock wall. From where they watched it did not appear that a fly could have found foothold on its surface. The goats had paused. Ralph drew in a deep breath.
“Gracious! I do believe they are going to try to get down it,” he exclaimed.
“And that ain’t all,” declared Mountain Jim. “They’re going to succeed, too. Watch ’em.”
The leader of the goats gave a leap that must have been fully twenty feet to a ridge which was hardly perceptible even through the glasses. He stood poised there for a second and then made a breath-catching plunge off into space. The place on the ledge that he had just vacated was immediately occupied by one of his followers, while he himself found footing on nothing, so far as the boys could see. It was a thrilling performance to watch the goats as they made their way down that rock-face to the feeding grounds. Sometimes the leader would take a leap that would make the performance of a flying squirrel seem tame by comparison. And his followers, among them some ewes, were by no means behind him in feats of agility.
“I’ve seen ’em come down a gully that looked like a chimney with one side out,” said Mountain Jim as he watched. “Old hunters say that when they miss their footing they save their heads from being caved in by landing on their horns, but I don’t take any stock in that.”