ahead; there was always one in the
rear, on guard, as it were, until they had crossed the valley to a steep
ridge on the next mountain. As they went, they stopped every little
while and stood for some time looking back.

"Knowing the habits of the animal, I felt sure that something had driven
them off the mountain. They looked back as if to see whether anything
was following, or perhaps to look again at what had frightened them. I
thought it was a mountain lion. Soon afterward I took my snowshoes and
went up that way and found the track of a mountain lion. From the size
of the track it seemed as if the animal must have been enormous. On
soft snow, though, tracks spread and look big, and besides that, these
cats commonly spread out their toes. There was no mistake about its
being a mountain lion, for I could see where the tail had struck the
soft snow and made holes in it.

"Mountain lions were around there a good deal, and E. De Long, who had a
cabin a little further up in the valley, told me that three times in his
experience of hunting up there he had come on a place where a mountain
lion had just killed a sheep. In each case he found the sheep in nearly
the same place, and in each case the sheep was freshly killed, and he
dressed it and took it home.

"This seemed to be a favorite place for the lions to kill sheep. They
are great hands to kill sheep in about the same place. Far up on the
Boulder--way up near the head--Col. Pickett and I found nineteen or
twenty skulls of sheep by one rock. There was a wonderful lot of
them. They had been killed at various times, and in a place where they
never could have been killed by snowslides. It was under a very high
rock, fifteen feet perpendicular on one side, and in the valley a game
trail passed close under this side. On the other side the rock was not
so high, but sloped off to the side of the hill. A lion could easily lie
there without being seen, but could himself see both ways. The game
trail was so close that he could jump right down on to it. The number of
skulls that we saw here was so remarkable that Col. Pickett and I
counted them; there were more than eighteen.

"The skulls were most of them old--killed a good while before. None of
them had the shells of the horns. They were old skulls, and the oldest
were almost in fragments, very much weathered. It was the accumulation
of a number of years, probably ten or fifteen. To my mind it showed
clearly that this was