“The skulls were most of them old—­killed a good while before.  None of them had the shells of the horns.  They were old skulls, and the oldest were almost in fragments, very much weathered.  It was the accumulation of a number of years, probably ten or fifteen.  To my mind it showed clearly that this was a favorite place for lions to lie for mountain sheep.  I have known of something similar to that in Cinnabar Basin, where I have seen a number of skulls scattered along the gulch.  There was a heavy trail there which led up to a valley where there is a pass by which we used to wind down to the Yellowstone and Tom Miner Creek and Trapper Creek.

“Lions are quite bad along the Yellowstone here, and sometimes in a hard winter they seem to be driven out of the mountains, and a considerable number have been killed on Gardiner River and Reese Creek.

“If mountain lions are after the sheep, the sheep leave the mountain they are on and go to another; they will not stay there, and will not return until something drives them back.”

SOME WAYS OF THE SHEEP.

Mr. Hofer said: 

“In old times it was sometimes possible to get a ‘stand’ on sheep, and, in my opinion, sheep often, even to-day, are the least suspicious of all the mountain animals.  A mountain sheep always seems to fear the thing that he sees under him.  If a man goes above him he does not seem to know what to do.  I could never understand why, when one is above him, he stands and looks.  I have sometimes been riding around in the mountains, and have come on sheep right below me.  I have often thrown stones at them, and sometimes it was quite a while before I could get them to start.  Finally, however, they would run off.  They acted as if they were dazed.

“On the other hand, when I carried the mail down in San Juan county, Colorado, in the winter of 1875-’76, going across from Animas Forks by way of the Grizzly Pass to Tellurium Fork, I was the only person in that section of the country all through the winter, and yet, although the sheep saw only me, and saw me every day, they always acted wild.  Sometimes a ram would see me and stand and look for a long time, and then presently all along the mountain side I would see sheep running as if they were alarmed.  On the other hand, if I met any of them on top of the mountain, they scarcely ever ran, they just stood and looked at me.

“Once, when on a hunting trip, I had my horses all picketed in sight, just above the basin where we were camped.  The boy that had the care of the horses had been up to change the picketed animals, and when he came in he said:  ’There’s a sheep up there close by the horses.  He saw me and was not afraid.’  We went out of the tent and presently I could see the sheep, a small one about four years old.  We went up toward it, and I saw the sheep moving about.  It went out to a little flat place on the slide rock, where the slide rock had pushed out a little further, making a little low butte, or flat-topped table; it was loose rock, with snow.  Here the sheep lay down.