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