ntedly, now and then glancing at the animals. In a few
moments he would announce what was about to happen, and he was
seldom wrong.

Therefore, when he descended to the bottom of the valley we accepted
his dictum without a protest. At the creek bed Harry and his young
hunter left us to follow a deep ravine which led upward a little to
the left, while Na-mon-gin and I climbed to the crest by way of a
precipitous ridge.

Not fifteen minutes after we parted, Harry's rifle banged three
times in quick succession, the reports rolling out from the gorge in
majestic waves of sound. A moment later the old Mongol saw three
sheep silhouetted for an instant against the sky as they scrambled
across the ridge. Then a voice floated faintly up to me from out the
canyon.

"I've got a f-i-n-e r-a-m," it said, "a b-e-a-u-t-y," and even at
that distance I could hear its happy ring.

"Good for Harry," I thought. "He certainly deserved it after his
work of last night;" for on the way home his hunter had seen an
enormous ram climbing a mountain side and they had followed it to
the summit only to lose its trail in the gathering darkness. Harry
had stumbled into camp, half dead with fatigue, but with his
enthusiasm undiminished.

When Na-mon-gin and I had reached the highest peak and found a trail
which led along the mountain side just below the crest, we kept
steadily on, now and then stopping to scan the grassy ravines and
valleys which radiated from the ridge like the ribs of a giant fan.
At half past eleven, as we rounded a rocky shoulder, I saw four
sheep feeding in the bottom of a gorge far below us.

Quite unconscious of our presence, they worked out of the ravine
across a low spur and into a deep gorge where the grass still showed
a tinge of green. As the last one disappeared, we dashed down the
slope and came up just above the sheep. With my glasses I could see
that the leader carried a fair pair of horns, but that the other
three rams were small, as _argali_ go.

Lying flat, I pushed my rifle over the crest and aimed at the
biggest ram. Three or four tiny grass stems were directly in my line
of sight, and fearing that they might deflect my bullet, I drew back
and shifted my position a few feet to the right.

One of the sheep must have seen the movement, although we were
directly above them, and instantly all were off. In four jumps they
had disappeared around a bowlder, giving me time for only a hurried
shot at the last on