The wild sheep is another admirable alpine rover, but comparatively rare in the Oregon mountains, choosing rather the drier ridges to the southward on the Cascades and to the eastward among the spurs of the Rocky Mountain chain.

Deer give beautiful animation to the forests, harmonizing finely in their color and movements with the gray and brown shafts of the trees and the swaying of the branches as they stand in groups at rest, or move gracefully and noiselessly over the mossy ground about the edges of beaver meadows and flowery glades, daintily culling the leaves and tips of the mints and aromatic bushes on which they feed.  There are three species, the black-tailed, white-tailed, and mule deer; the last being restricted in its range to the open woods and plains to the eastward of the Cascades.  They are nowhere very numerous now, killing for food, for hides, or for mere wanton sport, having well-nigh exterminated them in the more accessible regions, while elsewhere they are too often at the mercy of the wolves.

Gliding about in their shady forest homes, keeping well out of sight, there is a multitude of sleek fur-clad animals living and enjoying their clean, beautiful lives.  How beautiful and interesting they are is about as difficult for busy mortals to find out as if their homes were beyond sight in the sky.  Hence the stories of every wild hunter and trapper are eagerly listened to as being possibly true, or partly so, however thickly clothed in successive folds of exaggeration and fancy.  Unsatisfying as these accounts must be, a tourist’s frightened rush and scramble through the woods yields far less than the hunter’s wildest stories, while in writing we can do but little more than to give a few names, as they come to mind,—­beaver, squirrel, coon, fox, marten, fisher, otter, ermine, wildcat,—­only this instead of full descriptions of the bright-eyed furry throng, their snug home nests, their fears and fights and loves, how they get their food, rear their young, escape their enemies, and keep themselves warm and well and exquisitely clean through all the pitiless weather.

For many years before the settlement of the country the fur of the beaver brought a high price, and therefore it was pursued with weariless ardor.  Not even in the quest for gold has a more ruthless, desperate energy been developed.  It was in those early beaver-days that the striking class of adventurers called “free trappers” made their appearance.  Bold, enterprising men, eager to make money, and inclined at the same time to relish the license of a savage life, would set forth with a few traps and a gun and a hunting knife, content at first to venture only a short distance up the beaver streams nearest to the settlements, and where the Indians were not likely to molest them.  There they would set their traps, while the buffalo, antelope, deer, etc., furnished a royal supply of food.  In a few months their pack animals would be laden with thousands of dollars’ worth of fur.