ANECDOTE OF A BIGHORN 137

ing over the narrow cornice of rock, while his hind-
quarters lay towards me. Elated with my success, I
was hotly eager to know the size of the head, so,
whipping out my tape-measure, and not noticing any-
thing else, I stretched over the body, and using both
hands, had succeeded in encircling one of the massive
horns with the ribbon, when I suddenly felt myself
heaved up ; and before I had time to regain a kneeling
position the ram was on his legs, flinging me back
like a feather. Luckily, he threw me so that I kept
my equilibrium. My rifle I had left behind, at the
place I had shot from; and my knife I, of course,
could not use, owing to the rapidity of the whole
thing, and the precarious nature of the ground. The
ram stood for half a minute, as if paralysed, and then,
with a rapid and very peculiar motion of his body,
which I had never noticed before, made off along the
ledge, my measuring-tape fluttering in a loose coil
round his right horn’ In Mexico the bighorn is
hunted with dogs. It is rapidly becoming extinct.
Where herds of hundreds were at one time seen, it is
now a rare experience to find fifty together. The
Kamtschatkan sheep, O. mévécola, is much like the
bighorn, but has rounded ears instead of pointed ones,
and has no dark stripe down the back.

In the Mongolian argali, O. amon, and the
Tibetan nyan, O. Hodgsonz, the horns are much more
wrinkled on the anterior surface. The wild sheep of
the Pamirs, Marco Polo’s sheep, O. Podz, lives in the
Asiatic highlands at an average of twelve thousand feet
above the sea. Its horns are narrower than those just
noticed, and turn more outwards, and they are longer,