I was much interested in watching a ewe, which was coming down a steep slope of slide rock.  There was apparently no trail, or if there was one, she did not use it, but picked her way down to the head of the slope of slide rock, stood there for a few moments, and then, after bleating once or twice, sprang well out into the air and alighted on the slide rock, it seemed to me, twenty-five feet below where she had been.  A little cloud of dust arose and she appeared to be buried to her knees in the slide rock.  I could not see how it was possible for her to have made this jump without breaking her slender legs, yet she repeated it again and again, until she had come down about to my level and had passed out of sight.  Nor was this ewe the only one that was coming down.  From a number of points on the precipice round about I could hear rocks rolling and sheep calling, and before very long eight or ten ewes and four or five lambs had come together in the little basin, and presently marched almost straight up to where I lay hid.  There was meat in the camp, and so no reason for shooting at these innocents.  Later when I returned to camp, one of the packers informed me that for an hour or two before a yearling ram had been feeding in the meadow with the pack animals, close to the camp.

The sheep now commonly shows himself to be the keenest and wariest of North American big game.  Yet we may readily credit the stories told us by older men of his former simplicity and innocence, since even to-day we sometimes see these characteristics displayed.  I remember riding up a narrow valley walled in on both sides by vertical cliffs and at its head by a rock wall which was partly broken down, and through which we hoped to find a way into the next valley to the northward.  As we rode along, a mile or more from the cliff at the valley’s head, I saw one or two sheep passing over it, and a few minutes later was electrified by hearing my companion say:  “Oh, look at the sheep!  Look at the sheep!  Look at the sheep!” And there, charging down the valley directly toward us, came a bunch of thirty or forty sheep in a close body, running as if something very terrifying were close behind them, and paying not the slightest attention to the two horsemen before them.  I rolled off my horse and loaded my gun.  The sheep came within twenty-five or thirty steps and a little to one side, and passed us like the wind, but they left behind one of their number, which kept us in fresh meat for several days thereafter.

The first shot I fired at this band gave me a surprise.  I drew my sight fine on the point of the breast of the leading animal and pulled the trigger, but instead of the explosion which should have followed I heard the hammer fall on the firing-pin.  There was a slow hissing sound, a little puff at the muzzle of the rifle, and I distinctly heard the leaden ball fall to the ground just in front of me.  In a moment I had reloaded and had killed the sheep before it had passed far beyond me; but for a few seconds I could not comprehend what had happened.  Then it came back to me that a few days before I had made from half a dozen cartridges a weight to attach to a fish line for the purpose of sounding the depth of a lake.  Evidently a lubricating wad had been imperfect, and dampness had reached the powder.