NOT STUPID ANIMALS 69

sheep, and that there must be some other reason which
has not been discovered.

The greatest mortality among goats is, I believe, usually
through snow slides, and numbers of them must meet
their fate from this cause every spring. The places where
goats must seek their food when vegetation first starts
are the very spots where they would be in danger of being
caught by a snow slide. Time after time I have come
across the remains of goats that must have been killed
in this way, and have been told numbers of times of the
same thing.

The goat is generally considered to be stupid and
uninteresting, neither valuable for sport nor food. Person-
ally I have not only found the meat to be of exceptionally
fine flavour, if it is not too tough to eat and has been
properly butchered, but also to me they are most interesting
to watch. Nor are they by any means as stupid as they
look, as you would soon find out if you tried to stalk one
in a district where they have been at all hunted. They
are one of the few animals that never get panic-stricken ;
they keep cool and level-headed even under the most
trying circumstances. That a goat is easy to stalk is not
due to the fact that he is a fool, but because his natural
enemies are so small in number and he has not acquired
a knowledge of the superior intelligence of man, and
especially the deadliness of modern rifles. Possibly the
goats may have acquired just as great an hereditary fear
of man as any other species of game, but they consider
themselves in a safe place, as they would be from any
beast of prey—and from man, too, ifrifles were eliminated.
Time after time I have walked, or rather climbed, down
wind and in full sight to within a short distance of goats
and they have not moved, but in every such case they
happened to be lying on bluffs where they rightly knew
I could not reach them without getting a nasty poke from
their sharp horns.’ But try to approach a goat when he
is away from the bluffs, and if he gets your wind or catches
sight of you he is soon ambling off.

If you watch goats that have wandered off from the