Early on that November morning Mr. Jeff Milton and I left our chilly lair in a lava ravine, and most foolishly left both our rifles at our camp. Hobbling along on foot we led a pack mule over half a mile of rough and terrible lava to a dead sheep. There we quickly skinned the animal, packed the skin and a horned head upon the upper deck of our mule, and started back to camp, leading our assistant. Half way back we looked westward across an eighth of a mile of rough, black lava, and saw standing on a low point a fine big-horn ram. He stood in a statuesque attitude, facing us, and fixedly gazing at us. He was trying to make out what we were, and to determine why a perfectly good pair of sheep horns should grow out of the back of a sorrel mule! Ethically he had a right to be puzzled. Mr. Milton and I were greatly annoyed by the absence of our rifles; and he proposed that we should leave the mule where he stood, go back to our camp, get our guns, and kill the sheep. Now, even then I was quite well up on the subject of curiosity in wild animals, and I knew to a minute what to count upon as the standing period of sheep, goat or deer. As gently as possible I informed Milton that _no_ sheep would ever stand and look at a sorrel mule for the length of time it would take us to foot it over that lava to camp, and return. But my companion was optimistic, and even skeptical. "Maybe he will, now!" he persisted. "Let's try it. I think he may wait for us." Much against my judgment, and feeling secretly rebellious at the folly of it all, I agreed to his plan,--solely to be "a good sport," and to play his game. But _I_ knew that the effort would be futile, as well as exhausting. Jeff tied the mule, for the sheep to contemplate. We went and got those rifles. We were gone fully twenty minutes. When we again reached the habitat of the mule, _that ram was still there!_ Apparently he had not moved a muscle, nor stirred a foot, nor even batted an eye. Talk about curiosity in a wild animal! He was a living statue of it. He continued to hold his pose on his lava point while we stalked him under cover of a hillock of lava, and shot him,--almost half an hour after we first saw him. He had been overwhelmingly puzzled by the uncanny sight of a pair of curling horns like his own, growing out of the back of a long-eared sorrel mule which he felt had no zoological right to wear them. He did his level best to think it out; he became a museum specimen in consequence, and he has gone down in history as the Curiosity Ram.