Both British Columbia and Alberta have even yet fine herds of big-horn, and we can count three large game preserves in which they are protected.  They are Goat Mountain Park (East Kootenay district, between the Elk and Bull Rivers); the Rocky Mountains Park, near Banff, and Waterton Lakes Park, in the southwestern corner of Alberta.

In view of the number of men who desire to hunt them, the bag limit on big-horn rams in British Columbia and Alberta still is too liberal, by half.  One ram per year for one man is quite enough; quite as much so as one moose is the limit everywhere.  To-day “a big, old ram” is regarded by sportsmen as a much more desirable and creditable trophy than a moose; because moose-killing is easy, and the bagging of an old mountain ram in real mountains requires five times as much effort and skill.

The splendid high and rugged mountains of British Columbia and Alberta form an ideal home for the big-horn (and mountain goat), and it would be an international calamity for that region to be denuded of its splendid big game.  With resolute intent and judicial treatment that region can remain a rich and valuable hunting ground for five hundred years to come.  Under falsely “liberal” laws, it can be shot into a state of complete desolation within ten years, or even less.

OTHER MOUNTAIN SHEEP.—­In northern British Columbia, north of Iskoot Lake, there lies a tremendous region, extending to the Arctic Ocean, and comprehending the whole area between the Rocky Mountain continental divide and the waters of the Pacific.  Over the southern end of this great wilderness ranges the black mountain sheep, and throughout the remainder, with many sheepless intervals, is scattered the white mountain sheep.

Owing to the immensity of this wilderness, the well-nigh total lack of railroads and also of navigable waters, excepting the Yukon, it will not be thoroughly “opened up” for a quarter of a century.  The few resolute and pneumonia-proof sportsmen who can wade into the country, pulling boats through icy-cold mountain streams, are not going to devastate those millions of mountains of their big game.  The few head of game which sportsmen can and will take out of the great northwestern wilderness during the next twenty-five years will hardly be missed from the grand total, even though a few easily-accessible localities are shot out.  It is the deadly resident trappers, hunters and prospectors who must be feared!  And again,—­who can control them?  Can any wilderness government on earth make it possible?  Therefore, in time, even the great wilderness will be denuded of big game.  This is absolutely fixed and certain; for within much less than another century, every square rod of it will have been gone over by prospectors, lumbermen, trappers and skin-hunters, and raked again and again with fine-toothed combs.  A railway line to Dawson, the Copper River and Cook Inlet is to-day merely the next thing to expect, after Canada’s present railway program has been wrought out.