The lower trail of the pass was quite well defined and we made famous progress, but the higher we climbed the more difficult the going became and more than once we were forced to pause on a ledge to rest and regain our breath.
On one ledge I got my first really close view of a bighorn sheep, and I became so excited that nothing would do but I must stalk him, despite Big Pete’s assurance that the wily old ram would not let me get within gun shot of him in such an exposed area.
I crawled, and wriggled, and twisted over rock and boulders for what to me seemed miles, but always the sheep kept just out of accurate shooting distance ahead of me. It was an exasperating chase, but one cannot live in the mountains for any length of time without paying more or less attention to geology; the mountaineer soon learns that stratified rock, that is rock arranged like layer cake, resting in a horizontal position on its natural bed, makes travel over its top comparatively easy, but when by the subsidence or upheaval of the earth’s crust huge masses of stone have been tilted up edgewise, it is an entirely different proposition.
In this latter case the erosion, or the wearing away, caused by trickling water, frost and snow, sharpens the edge of the rock, as a grindstone does the edge of an ax, and traveling along one of these ridges presents almost the same difficulties that travel along the edge of an upturned ax would do to a microscopic man.
But when a sportsman, for the first time in his life, has succeeded in creeping within range of a grand bighorn ram, and his bullet, speeding true, has badly wounded the game, hardships are forgotten, and if, on account of the miraculous vitality of the mountain sheep, there is danger of losing the quarry, all the inborn instinct of the predaceous beast in man’s nature is aroused, and danger is a consideration not to be taken in account.
A hawk in pursuit of a barnyard fowl will follow it into the open door of the farmhouse; the hound in pursuit of the fox cares not for the approaching locomotive—being possessed by the instinct to kill—nothing is of importance to them but the capture of the game in sight. A man following a buck is governed by a like singleness of purpose.