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
"Along the Gardiner River, inside the northern boundary of the
Yellowstone Park, there are always a number of sheep in winter, and they
become very tame, having learned by experience that people passing to
and fro will not injure them. Men driving up the road from Mammoth Hot
Springs to Gardiner, constantly see these sheep, which manifest the
utmost indifference to those who are passing them. Sometimes they stand
close enough to the road for a driver to reach them with his whip. One
winter the surgeon at the post, driving along, came upon a sheep
standing in the road, and as it did not move, he had to stop his team
for it. He did not dare to drive his horse close up to it. Finally the
ram jumped out to one side of the road, and the surgeon drove on. He
said he could have touched it with his whip."
One winter when Mr. Hofer made an extended snowshoe trip through the
Park, he passed very close to sheep. It appeared to him that they fear
man less along the wagon roads than when he is out on the benches and in
the mountains. They seem to care little for man, but if a mountain lion
appears in the neighborhood, the sheep are no longer seen. Just where
they go is uncertain, but it is believed that they cross the Yellowstone
River by swimming.
In winter, and especially late in the winter, sheep frequent southern
and southwestern exposures, and spend much of their time there. I have
seen places on the St. Marys Lake, in northern Montana, where there were
cartloads of droppings, apparently the accumulation of many years, and
have seen the same thing in the cliffs along the Yellowstone River. On
the rocks here there were many beds among the cliffs and ledges. Often
such beds are behind a rock, not a high one, but one that the sheep
could look over. In places such as this the animals are very difficult
to detect.
Although the wild sheep was formerly, to a considerable extent, an
inhabitant of the western edge of the prairies of the high dry plains,
it is so no longer. The settling of the country has made this
impossible, but long before its permanent occupancy the frequent passage
through it by hunters had resulted in the destruction of the sheep or
had driven it more or less permanently to those heights where, in times
of danger, it had always sought refuge.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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