re difficult the going became
and more than once we were forced to pause on a ledge to rest and regain
our breath.

On one ledge I got my first really close view of a bighorn sheep, and I
became so excited that nothing would do but I must stalk him, despite
Big Pete's assurance that the wily old ram would not let me get within
gun shot of him in such an exposed area.

I crawled, and wriggled, and twisted over rock and boulders for what to
me seemed miles, but always the sheep kept just out of accurate shooting
distance ahead of me. It was an exasperating chase, but one cannot live
in the mountains for any length of time without paying more or less
attention to geology; the mountaineer soon learns that stratified rock,
that is rock arranged like layer cake, resting in a horizontal position
on its natural bed, makes travel over its top comparatively easy, but
when by the subsidence or upheaval of the earth's crust huge masses of
stone have been tilted up edgewise, it is an entirely different
proposition.

In this latter case the erosion, or the wearing away, caused by
trickling water, frost and snow, sharpens the edge of the rock, as a
grindstone does the edge of an ax, and traveling along one of these
ridges presents almost the same difficulties that travel along the edge
of an upturned ax would do to a microscopic man.

But when a sportsman, for the first time in his life, has succeeded in
creeping within range of a grand bighorn ram, and his bullet, speeding
true, has badly wounded the game, hardships are forgotten, and if, on
account of the miraculous vitality of the mountain sheep, there is
danger of losing the quarry, all the inborn instinct of the predaceous
beast in man's nature is aroused, and danger is a consideration not to
be taken in account.

A hawk in pursuit of a barnyard fowl will follow it into the open door
of the farmhouse; the hound in pursuit of the fox cares not for the
approaching locomotive--being possessed by the instinct to kill--nothing
is of importance to them but the capture of the game in sight. A man
following a buck is governed by a like singleness of purpose.

For this reason I was scrambling along the knife-like edge of the ridge,
with death in the steep treacherous slide rock on one side, death in the
steep green glacier ice on the other side, and torture and wounds under
my feet.

But the fever of the chase had possession of me. I had tasted blood and
felt the fierce joy of th