“I went around to station my man where he could get a rest for his rifle, and when I had done this, I went around above to make the sheep get up to drive him out, so that the man could shoot him.  After I got well up the gulch, above him, the sheep could see me plainly, and I could see his eyes.  I hesitated about making him get up, thinking perhaps it was somebody’s tame sheep, but we were the first ones up there that spring, and of course it was not a tame sheep.  If we had not been out of meat I would not have disturbed the animal.  I walked toward it to make it get up, but it would not, and still lay there.  When I was within thirty feet of it I took up a stone and threw it, and called at him.  The sheep stood up and looked at me.  I said, ‘Go on, now,’ and he started in the direction I wished him to take.  When he came in sight, the man fired two or three shots at him, but did not hurt him, and the sheep again lay down in sight of camp.  Afterward I fired at him about 300 yards up the side of the mountain, but I did not touch him.  However, he was disturbed by the shooting, and moved away.

“It is often difficult to find a reason for the way sheep act.  It is possible that this young ram, which was in the Sunlight Mining District, had seen many miners, and that they had not disturbed him, and that so he had lost his fear of man.  He was not at all afraid of horses, perhaps because he was accustomed to seeing miners’ horses; or he may have taken them for elk.  I do not see why our wind did not alarm him.  At all events, for some reason, this one showed no fear.

“Along the Gardiner River, inside the northern boundary of the Yellowstone Park, there are always a number of sheep in winter, and they become very tame, having learned by experience that people passing to and fro will not injure them.  Men driving up the road from Mammoth Hot Springs to Gardiner, constantly see these sheep, which manifest the utmost indifference to those who are passing them.  Sometimes they stand close enough to the road for a driver to reach them with his whip.  One winter the surgeon at the post, driving along, came upon a sheep standing in the road, and as it did not move, he had to stop his team for it.  He did not dare to drive his horse close up to it.  Finally the ram jumped out to one side of the road, and the surgeon drove on.  He said he could have touched it with his whip.”

One winter when Mr. Hofer made an extended snowshoe trip through the Park, he passed very close to sheep.  It appeared to him that they fear man less along the wagon roads than when he is out on the benches and in the mountains.  They seem to care little for man, but if a mountain lion appears in the neighborhood, the sheep are no longer seen.  Just where they go is uncertain, but it is believed that they cross the Yellowstone River by swimming.