American Big Game in Its Haunts: The Book of the Boone and Crockett Club
History
American Big Game in Its Haunts: The Book of the Boone and Crockett Club
Big game hunting -- United States
"This seemed to be a favorite place for the lions to kill sheep. They
are great hands to kill sheep in about the same place. Far up on the
Boulder--way up near the head--Col. Pickett and I found nineteen or
twenty skulls of sheep by one rock. There was a wonderful lot of
them. They had been killed at various times, and in a place where they
never could have been killed by snowslides. It was under a very high
rock, fifteen feet perpendicular on one side, and in the valley a game
trail passed close under this side. On the other side the rock was not
so high, but sloped off to the side of the hill. A lion could easily lie
there without being seen, but could himself see both ways. The game
trail was so close that he could jump right down on to it. The number of
skulls that we saw here was so remarkable that Col. Pickett and I
counted them; there were more than eighteen.
"The skulls were most of them old--killed a good while before. None of
them had the shells of the horns. They were old skulls, and the oldest
were almost in fragments, very much weathered. It was the accumulation
of a number of years, probably ten or fifteen. To my mind it showed
clearly that this was a favorite place for lions to lie for mountain
sheep. I have known of something similar to that in Cinnabar Basin,
where I have seen a number of skulls scattered along the gulch. There
was a heavy trail there which led up to a valley where there is a pass
by which we used to wind down to the Yellowstone and Tom Miner Creek and
Trapper Creek.
"Lions are quite bad along the Yellowstone here, and sometimes in a hard
winter they seem to be driven out of the mountains, and a considerable
number have been killed on Gardiner River and Reese Creek.
"If mountain lions are after the sheep, the sheep leave the mountain
they are on and go to another; they will not stay there, and will not
return until something drives them back."
SOME WAYS OF THE SHEEP.
Mr. Hofer said:
"In old times it was sometimes possible to get a 'stand' on sheep, and,
in my opinion, sheep often, even to-day, are the least suspicious of all
the mountain animals. A mountain sheep always seems to fear the thing
that he sees under him. If a man goes above him he does not seem to know
what to do. I could never understand why, when one is above him, he
stands and looks. I have sometimes been riding around in the mountains,
and have come on sheep right below me. I have often thrown stones at
them, and sometimes it was quite a while before I could get them to
start. Finally, however, they would run off. They acted as if they were
dazed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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