Life on the Rocks: A Portrait of the American Mountain Goat

Chapter One: Beginnings

From American Indians, the Corps of Discovery first heard about a white beast that dwelt among the peaks. They marveled at the shaggy hide purchased from Chinookan Indians along the Columbia River. In 1805 Captain William Clark even glimpsed a live one, albeit at a great distance, near what now is the Idaho-Montana border. In 1778 Captain James Cook recorded the earliest hint of the creature’s existence. During stops at British Columbia and Alaskan villages on his around-the-world voyage, he was struck by the spun wool garments worn by the natives. When the Indians pointed out white animals perched high on the rocks as the source of the garments’ wool, Cook called them polar bears. Others have confused the animal with mountain sheep, which also occupy the continent’s western mountains. Indeed the English translation of the mountain goat’s taxonomic genus, Oreamnos, suggests as much—lamb of the mountains. Still others reckoned the beast bearing a shoulder hump and simple black horns as a new variety of a familiar species. In 1798, Alexander McKenzie described the animal he spotted in the mountains near the McKenzie River as a white buffalo. Although albino bison do exist, McKenzie’s arctic animal was likely the mountain goat. CHAPTER ONE Beginnings DOI: 10.5876_9781607322924.c001 Just as fascinating and incomparable as the mountain goat are the topography and geology of the realm the animal inhabits. (Photo by author) Curious yet cautious, a goat peers over a lichen-encrusted rock. (Photo by author) From Alaska’s Kenai Fiords to Washington’s Mount Shuksan (this photo), ice, rock, and stunning scenery typify the domain of the mountain goat. (Photo by author) 8 B E G I N N I N G S It’s not hard to imagine how the early explorers, trappers, and fortune-seekers might find the notion of a white buffalo roaming the mountaintops as much reality as phantom or fable. Some 25–50 million bison once roamed the continent and were well known to most who ventured west. Even in fiction, the taxonomy of this stout-shouldered creature was enigmatic. A passage from The Big Sky, Pulitzer prize-winning author A. B. Guthrie’s yarn about the mountain men of Montana, describes the mountain goat this way: It ain’t a buffler proper, nor a white antelope, neither, though you hear the name put to it and a sight of others. They keep to the high peaks, they do, the tip top of mountains , in the clouds and snow. . . . Not many’s seen a live one. A man has to climb some for that. Native people of North America’s First Nations, of course, had known the animal for centuries. Some hunted them for food, ceremonial items, and clothing. But well into the twentieth century, these wilderness cliff-walkers were relatively untouched by the westward march of Euro-Americans. It was an animal more of myth and mystery than avarice, and thus it escaped the tsunami of exploitation suffered by the more easily targeted bison, pronghorn, deer, elk, and the goat’s mountain cousin the bighorn sheep. Along with its closest relatives that inhabit European and Asian peaks, the mountain goat completes a distinct taxonomic grouping, the Rupicaprini Tribe (Rupes = rock, capra = goat), within the sheep, goat, antelope, and cattle family (the Bovidae). The rupicaprids are regarded as goat-antelopes, possessing traits of both true goats and antelopes but are neither. Characteristic of the mountain goat and its relations—and distinguishing those species from other members of the Bovidae family—are their thin-boned and fragile skulls, and short, dagger-like horns that look similar in both sexes. The mountain goat’s rupicaprid relatives are the mysterious gorals and serows of Asia, and the chamois of Europe. The total number of species depends upon which taxonomist you ask, but there may be as many as four species of goral and between three and six species of serows (see Walker’s Mammals of the World and Mammal Species of the World for species accounts). Most authorities agree on two species of chamois—Rupicapra pyrenaica of the Pyrenees and Apennine Mountains of France, Spain, and Italy, and the more abundant Rupicapra rupicapra of the Alps, the Balkans, Asia Minor, and the Caucasus. The gorals (all of the genus Naemorhedus) are the most primitive rupicaprids and...