MOUNTAIN SHEEP
Over the Rocky Mountain sheep there is a halo of glamour that is to every big-game hunter a veritable cloud by day and pillar of fire by night. Standing out conspicuously apart from all other American hoofed game, the big-horn thrills and challenges the gentleman sportsman as no other big game does at this time. (There are fashions, even in the hunting of big game!) A sportsman will go farther, spend more and endure more to get “a big ram” as a trophy of his manhood in the chase than for any other species. Why is it? It is because the old big-horn rams are found where the scenery is grandest and most inspiring; they are the keenest of eye, nose and ear of all our big game, and hunting them successfully means real mountaineering. In Africa a lady can kill a big elephant, but in the Rocky Mountains ladies do not kill big-horn rams with the rings of eight or ten years on their horns.
There are times when hunting the mountain goat becomes sport for men; but many a goat has been killed by an easy fluke. The old big-horn ram, with horns that are worth while, requires real hunting, and many a man has taken the long trail for one and gone back empty-handed.
I should be mighty sorry to see sheep-hunting become an extinct pastime; for ye gods! it is the acme of sport with big game! Elephant hunting (in India, at least) is tame in comparison. Colorado has proved, through 26 years of watchful waiting, that to any mountain sheep State, sheep can be brought back by protection. Twenty-six years ago the sheep of that State were reduced to a dangerously-small remnant, of only a few hundred head. Then the lid was put on, sheep-hunting was forbidden, and, strange to say, even the residents of the sheep mountains elected to observe the law, and also to help enforce it!
The result is a great triumph in protection, to which the commonwealth of Colorado points with pride. To-day that State contains a grand total of 7,482 sheep; and to-day the wild herds come down into the streets of Ouray to be admired, and feted, and fed on hay and photographed. And last September when an urgent official request came to the State Game Warden for permission to kill six of Colorado’s mountain sheep “for scientific purposes,” the proposal was declared impossible without precipitating a riot of the populace.
The true big-horn ranges all the way from Pinacate Peak, in northwestern Sonora, Old Mexico, northward about to Latitude 56 in British Columbia and western Alberta. On the hot, black lava slopes of Pinacate, fearfully lacking in vegetation, the sheep grow small. The species culminates in southwestern Alberta, from the Waterton Lakes up to Wilcox Pass. The biggest head ever shot by a gentleman sportsman, so far as I know, had horns with a circumference of 17¾ inches; and the lucky hunter was Mr. A. P. Proctor, the wild-animal sculptor.
In the United States there are eleven States that still contain wild examples of mountain sheep, but in some cases the total number to a State is painfully small. New Mexico contains only 23 head. Sheep hunting is totally prohibited in all our States save two,—Wyoming and Washington.
No, good reader, mountain sheep do not “jump off precipices and alight safely on their horns.” They never did; and they never will. Their necks are just as breakable as ours are.
Mountain Goat
In oddity and picturesqueness, the white mountain goat and the moose are rivals; and it is hard to say which species is entitled to the championship.