This is an excerpt from an article that originally appeared in the August 1910 issue of Outing magazine.
The very name of mountain goat makes you see the towering crests of peaks searching the sky, wrapped in clouds, the drifting snow swirling in veiled sheets from the bare and wind-blown rocks.
For weeks we had toiled in the search with never so much as a trail to reward us. Then one morning we found a goat staring out into the infinite space from the top of a towering peak. If you have hunted in the mountains, you will know of the difficulties to be surmounted in a successful stalk, but we achieved our point after the severest kind of work, and there at last, within easy range, stood the object of all our toil. Not a large one, but a goat, nevertheless.
“Are you ready, Henry?” I asked.
Henry looked up in surprise, but answered, “Yes,” very earnestly.
I raised my rifle and, after sighting on the animal, pointed the muzzle upward into the air and fired. How the echoes rolled and reverberated and crashed down into the infinite, dizzying depths of the world where the billy was swiftly making his escape. I have never seen a sadder, more hapless face than what Henry wore.
“What in the hell did you do that for?” he asked.
“I wanted to see him go,” I answered.
“Well, by golly, you watch him then, for you’ll never see him go again.”
What artist ever hopes to be fully understood.
Moose Hunters by Oliver Kemp – Courtesy Coeur D’Alene Art Auction
