As I watched him, an odd thought revisited me: how Asiatic he looked, for some obscure reason! I remembered thinking this same thing when I had shot my first goat eleven years before. Asiatic? Yes; and I cannot at all explain why, unless it be that one has seen pictures of animals which hail from somewhere like Tibet, and which bear some resemblance to the _Oreamnus_. I know that no other of our Western big game strike me in this way; buffalo, elk, deer, antelope, sheep,--all these have always seemed to me to look indigenous, to belong to our North American soil. But this goat is a figure that it surprises me to meet among the haunts of my own language; his idiom should be Mongolian!
He’s white, all white, and shaggy, and twice as large as any goat you ever saw. His white hair hangs long all over him, like a Spitz dog’s or an Angora cat’s; but it is stiff and coarse, not silky, and against its shaggy white mass the blackness of his hoofs, and horns, and nose, looks particularly black. His legs are thick, his neck is thick, everything about him is thick, saving only his thin black horns. They’re generally about six inches long, they spread very slightly, and they curve slightly backward. At their base they are a little rough, but as they rise they cylindrically smooth and taper to an ugly point. His hoofs are heavy, broad, and blunt. The track they make is huge, and precisely the reverse of the sheep’s; it is a capital V, pointing backward. The sheep’s track is a V also, but pointing forward. By his clumsy-looking hoofs, and his thick-set and apparently unwieldy legs, it would seem as though this goat had best keep his level, as though he might seldom go up two steps of even a porch without accident; a set of legs and hoofs could scarce be instanced of seemingly less avail for a mountaineer. So, at least, I should argue, recalling the various sharp apparatus which we need ourselves. One does not see how these heavy animals can leap and cling. But let me transcribe uncorrected some sentences from my hunting journal of November, 1892, pencilled in flippant spirit after a day’s pursuit of the goat.
“They … chose places to lie down where falling off was the easiest thing you could do.… The individual tracks we have passed always choose the inclined plane where they have a choice between that and the level.… I suppose these animals sometimes must fall, though they have a projecting heel of horn to their hoof which is wonderfully adapted to their vertical habits. But if they do fall, it probably amuses them. Their hair is more impenetrably thick than any hair I have seen, and beneath this is the hide thicker than buffalo. If they play games together, it is probably to push each other over a precipice, and the goat that takes longest to walk up again loses the game.”