70 THE MOUNTAIN GOAT

bluffs you will often see, especially in the summer months,
some of them choose a hill-side or a ridge where there is
some iron-stained gravel or dry dusty soil in which they
will paw out beds and lie down. Such beds are not
regular resting-places (when they intend to take a proper
nap they usually go to a bluff or snow-bed where they
think they are safe), and they will not lie still in them
for long, but every once in a while get up and do more
pawing, often raising quite a cloud of dust. When this
operation is repeated the position in which they lie down
is changed. From the fuss and trouble they take over
these beds you might think they were hard to please about
them and that they could not get them to meet their
fancy. To me, however, it seems that the real reason is
that they are well aware that the whiteness of their coats
is too conspicuous unless they are on snow, and that
frequent applications of dust or lying in brown gravel will
tone down the whiteness and make them less noticeable.
At any rate this is what often happens, as sometimes they
become so discoloured that they are not nearly so easy to
spot. This trick of discolouring the coat is also a common
practice among the white sheep, much more so in fact than
among goats, most of whom rely on the bluffs for safety.

If you make a careful stalk of a deer or sheep or almost
any other species of game and then jump up suddenly
when you are close to them, they will dash off in blind
panic, probably in the direction they are headed, with
no other object in their minds but speed. Not so a goat ;
he does not get rattled, he will pause unless you are almost
within reach of him; you are something he has never
seen before, but he feels sure you cannot catch him, so
he takes time to think out his best course of action. You
can fire a volley of shots, shout, and even rush at them,
but you cannot make them lose their heads and run the
wrong way. They may hurry a little more than they
care about, but they most certainly will not make any
mistakes, such as attempting to climb cliffs beyond their
power, or jumping over bluffs, as both deer and sheep have
been known to do.