team
for it. He did not dare to drive his horse close up to it. Finally the
ram jumped out to one side of the road, and the surgeon drove on. He
said he could have touched it with his whip."

One winter when Mr. Hofer made an extended snowshoe trip through the
Park, he passed very close to sheep. It appeared to him that they fear
man less along the wagon roads than when he is out on the benches and in
the mountains. They seem to care little for man, but if a mountain lion
appears in the neighborhood, the sheep are no longer seen. Just where
they go is uncertain, but it is believed that they cross the Yellowstone
River by swimming.

In winter, and especially late in the winter, sheep frequent southern
and southwestern exposures, and spend much of their time there. I have
seen places on the St. Marys Lake, in northern Montana, where there were
cartloads of droppings, apparently the accumulation of many years, and
have seen the same thing in the cliffs along the Yellowstone River. On
the rocks here there were many beds among the cliffs and ledges. Often
such beds are behind a rock, not a high one, but one that the sheep
could look over. In places such as this the animals are very difficult
to detect.

Although the wild sheep was formerly, to a considerable extent, an
inhabitant of the western edge of the prairies of the high dry plains,
it is so no longer. The settling of the country has made this
impossible, but long before its permanent occupancy the frequent passage
through it by hunters had resulted in the destruction of the sheep or
had driven it more or less permanently to those heights where, in times
of danger, it had always sought refuge.

To the east of the principal range of the wild sheep in America to-day
there are still a few of its old haunts not in the mountains which are
so arid or so rough, or where the water is so bad that as yet they have
not to any great extent been invaded by the white man. Again to the
south and southwest, in portions of Arizona, Old Mexico, and Lower
California, there rise out of frightful deserts buttes and mountain
ranges inhabited by different forms of sheep. In that country water is
extremely scarce, and the few water holes that exist are visited by the
sheep only at long intervals. There are many men who believe that the
sheep do not drink at all, but it is chiefly at these water holes that
the sheep of the desert are killed.

At the present day the chief haunts of the m