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Updated: June 5, 2025
"That's right," said Alex, "those Injuns used to make big spoons out of the horns of the mountain-sheep all the Injuns along the Rockies always have done that. It seems strange to me that Mackenzie didn't know that, although at that he was still rather a new man in the north." "You never have been in here yourself, have you, Alex?" asked John.
They were the Indians who had iron spears, and knives, and things, so that he knew they had met white men off to the west. They had a big spoon which Mackenzie says was made out of a horn like the buffalo horn of the Copper Mine River. I suppose Mackenzie called the musk-ox buffalo, and very likely he never had seen a mountain-sheep."
Beyond, and far round and down to the left, opened up a slope of spruce and bare ridge, where a few cedars showed dark, and then came black, spear-tipped forest again, leading the eye to the magnificent panorama of endless range on range, purple in the distance. Wade found patches of grass where beds had been recently occupied. "Mountain-sheep, by cracky!" exclaimed the hunter.
A burro followed, laden heavily with pack, bed-roll, pick, frying-pan, and battered coffee-pot, yet stepping along sure-footedly as the mountain-sheep that first formed the trail ages ago, and whose petrified hoof-prints still remain to afford footing for the scarcely larger hoofs of the pack-animal.
There is no finer big-game country in the world than that around the interior slopes of the Alaskan range; there is no finer meat in the world than caribou and mountain-sheep. It is carrying coals to Newcastle to bring canned meat into this country nature's own larder stocked with her choicest supplies.
Deer sprang from the tall, reedy grass of the river bottoms; buffalo tramped by in ponderous columns, or dotted the swells of the distant prairie with their grazing thousands; antelope approached, with the curiosity of their species, to gaze at the passing horsemen, then fled like the wind; and as they neared the broken uplands towards the Yellowstone, they saw troops of elk and flocks of mountain-sheep.
There are many mountain-sheep in this section, but we saw none either time. We could see many fresh tracks where they had followed these ledges around, and had gone up the narrow side canyon. It was cold in the main canyon, and no doubt the sheep could be found on the plateaus, which were more open, and would get sun when the sun shone. This plateau was 2500 feet above us.
That is how we two came to be on our way from the railroad to hunt the elk and the mountain-sheep, and were pausing to fish where Buffalo Fork joins its waters with Snake River. In those days the antelope still ran there in hundreds, the Yellowstone Park was a new thing, and mankind lived very far away. Since meeting me with the horses in Idaho the Virginian had been silent, even for him.
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