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He stood on tiptoe, and, settling back, quietly motioned me to move up beside him. Just then a gust of wind swept across the hilltop and into the ravine. There was a rush of feet, a clatter of sliding rock, and three argali dashed into view on the opposite slope. They stopped two hundred yards away. My hunter was frantically whispering, "One more. Don't shoot. Don't shoot."
Instantly the sheep were on the move, running directly toward us. They seemed to be as large as elephants, for never before had I been as close to a living argali. Just as the animals mounted the crest of a rocky ledge, not more than fifty yards away, Na-mon-gin whistled sharply, and the sheep stopped as though turned to stone. "Now," he whispered, "shoot."
For its Hall of Asiatic Life, the American Museum of Natural History needed a group of argali. Moreover, we wanted a ram which would fairly represent the species, and that meant a very big one. The Reverend Harry R. Caldwell, with whom I had hunted tiger in south China, volunteered to get them with me.
The ahsahta, argali, or bighorn, on the contrary, has short hair like a deer, and resembles it in shape, but has the head and horns of a sheep, and its flesh is said to be delicious mutton. The Indians consider it more sweet and delicate than any other kind of venison.
The climb up the other side was decidedly stiff, and it was nearly an hour before we were peering into the ravine where the sheep had disappeared. They were not there, and the hunter said they had gone either up or down the valley he could not tell which way. We went up first, but no sheep. Then we crossed to the ridge where we had first seen the argali and cautiously looked over a ledge of rocks.
Meanwhile the argali had gone farther up the mountainside and taken stand there in a row like so many soldiers, turning to gaze at us. Even at this distance I could clearly distinguish their muscular bodies with their majestic heads and stalwart horns. Picking up our prey, we overtook the Mongol who had gone on ahead and continued our way.
The sea otter is common upon the coasts of Kamschatka; and this is also an object of the chase its skin being among the costliest of "peltries." The great argali, or wild sheep, and the reindeer, furnish them both with flesh and skins; but one of the chief objects of the chase is that great quadruped for which our young hunters had come all the way to Kamschatka, the bear.
In accordance with this view, Cuvier conjectures that since central Asia seems to be the region where the sheep first appeared, and from which it has been distributed, the argali may have been distributed over this continent from Asia by crossing Bering Strait on ice.
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.
They are the last survivors of great herds which once roamed the mountains of north China. In size, as well as ancestry, the members of this group are the grandfathers of all the sheep. The largest ram of our Rocky Mountains is a pygmy compared with a full-grown argali.
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