In winter, and especially late in the winter, sheep frequent southern and southwestern exposures, and spend much of their time there.  I have seen places on the St. Marys Lake, in northern Montana, where there were cartloads of droppings, apparently the accumulation of many years, and have seen the same thing in the cliffs along the Yellowstone River.  On the rocks here there were many beds among the cliffs and ledges.  Often such beds are behind a rock, not a high one, but one that the sheep could look over.  In places such as this the animals are very difficult to detect.

Although the wild sheep was formerly, to a considerable extent, an inhabitant of the western edge of the prairies of the high dry plains, it is so no longer.  The settling of the country has made this impossible, but long before its permanent occupancy the frequent passage through it by hunters had resulted in the destruction of the sheep or had driven it more or less permanently to those heights where, in times of danger, it had always sought refuge.

To the east of the principal range of the wild sheep in America to-day there are still a few of its old haunts not in the mountains which are so arid or so rough, or where the water is so bad that as yet they have not to any great extent been invaded by the white man.  Again to the south and southwest, in portions of Arizona, Old Mexico, and Lower California, there rise out of frightful deserts buttes and mountain ranges inhabited by different forms of sheep.  In that country water is extremely scarce, and the few water holes that exist are visited by the sheep only at long intervals.  There are many men who believe that the sheep do not drink at all, but it is chiefly at these water holes that the sheep of the desert are killed.

At the present day the chief haunts of the mountain sheep are the fresh Alpine meadows lying close to timber line, and fenced in by tall peaks; or the rounded grassy slopes which extend from timber line up to the region of perpetual snows.  Sitting on the point of some tall mountain the observer may look down on the green meadows, interspersed perhaps with little clumps of low willows which grow along the tiny watercourses whose sources are the snow banks far up the mountain side, and if patient in his watch and faithful in his search, he may detect with his glasses at first one or two, and gradually more and more, until at length perhaps ten, fifteen or thirty sheep may be counted, scattered over a considerable area of country.  Or, if he climbs higher yet, and overlooks the rounded shoulders which stretch up from the passes toward the highest pinnacles of all—­he will very likely see far below him, lying on the hill and commanding a view miles in extent in every direction, a group of nine, ten or a dozen sheep peacefully resting in the midday sun.  Those that he sees will be almost all of them ewes and young animals.  Perhaps there may be a young ram or two whose horns have already begun to curve backward, but for the most part they are females and young.