e this jump without breaking her slender legs, yet she repeated
it again and again, until she had come down about to my level and had
passed out of sight. Nor was this ewe the only one that was coming
down. From a number of points on the precipice round about I could hear
rocks rolling and sheep calling, and before very long eight or ten ewes
and four or five lambs had come together in the little basin, and
presently marched almost straight up to where I lay hid. There was meat
in the camp, and so no reason for shooting at these innocents. Later
when I returned to camp, one of the packers informed me that for an hour
or two before a yearling ram had been feeding in the meadow with the
pack animals, close to the camp.

The sheep now commonly shows himself to be the keenest and wariest of
North American big game. Yet we may readily credit the stories told us
by older men of his former simplicity and innocence, since even to-day
we sometimes see these characteristics displayed. I remember riding up a
narrow valley walled in on both sides by vertical cliffs and at its head
by a rock wall which was partly broken down, and through which we hoped
to find a way into the next valley to the northward. As we rode along,
a mile or more from the cliff at the valley's head, I saw one or two
sheep passing over it, and a few minutes later was electrified by
hearing my companion say: "Oh, look at the sheep! Look at the sheep!
Look at the sheep!" And there, charging down the valley directly toward
us, came a bunch of thirty or forty sheep in a close body, running as if
something very terrifying were close behind them, and paying not the
slightest attention to the two horsemen before them. I rolled off my
horse and loaded my gun. The sheep came within twenty-five or thirty
steps and a little to one side, and passed us like the wind, but they
left behind one of their number, which kept us in fresh meat for several
days thereafter.

The first shot I fired at this band gave me a surprise. I drew my sight
fine on the point of the breast of the leading animal and pulled the
trigger, but instead of the explosion which should have followed I heard
the hammer fall on the firing-pin. There was a slow hissing sound, a
little puff at the muzzle of the rifle, and I distinctly heard the
leaden ball fall to the ground just in front of me. In a moment I had
reloaded and had killed the sheep before it had passed far beyond me;
but for a few seconds I c