River, Gros Ventre, and Uintah, water is found in abundance, and, as a
rule, there is plenty of timber. I think I have more often found sheep
in the timber, or below timber line, than at higher altitudes, although
sometimes I have located the finest rams far above the last scrubby
pine.

"The largest bunch of sheep that I have seen was in the fall of 1893. I
estimated the band at 75 to 100. In that bunch there were no rams, and
they remained in sight for quite a long time; so that I had a good
opportunity to estimate them.

"I do not profess to know where the majority of these sheep winter, but,
undoubtedly, a great number winter on the table-lands before mentioned,
where a rich growth of grass furnishes an abundance of feed. At this
altitude the wind blows so hard and continuously, and the snow is so
light and dry, that there would be no time during the whole winter when
the snow would lie on the ground long enough to starve sheep to death.
Several small bunches of sheep winter on the Big Gros Ventre
River. These, I think, are the same sheep that are found in summer time
on the Gros Ventre range. I have occasionally killed sheep that were
scabby, but I have no positive knowledge that this disease has killed
any number of sheep. In the fall of 1894 I discovered eleven large ram
skulls in one place, and since that time found four more near by. My
first impression was that the eleven were killed by a snowslide, as they
were at the foot of one of those places where snowslides occur, but
finding the other four within a mile, and in a place where a snowslide
could not have killed them, it rather dispelled my first theory. As
mountain sheep can travel over snow drifts nearly as well as a caribou,
I do not believe that they were stranded in a snowstorm and perished,
and no hunter would have killed so great a number and left such
magnificent heads. The scab theory is about the only solution left. The
sheep are not hunted very much here, and I believe their greatest enemy
is the mountain lion.

"There is one isolated bunch of mountain sheep on the Colorado Desert,
situated in Fremont and Sweetwater counties, Wyo., which seems to be
holding its own against many range riders, meat and specimen hunters, as
well as coyotes. They are very light in color, much more so than their
cousins found higher up in the mountains, and locally they are called
ibex, or white goats. The country they live in is very similar to the
bad lands of