Distinctly Montana Magazine

W W W. D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA NA . C O M 13 Nearly thirty years have passed since I began a scientific study of mountain goats and fell in love with their top-of-the-world home. When people ask which areas I enjoyed most among those that I have been to my answer is: the places where mountain goats dwell. Besides I owe a debt to these shaggy white climbers that winter near the continent's crest. Whatever skills I have for backcountry fieldwork and observation, I developed in their company. In North America there is one large animal that belongs almost entirely to the realm of towering rock and unmelting snow. Press- ing hard against the upper limit of life's possibilities, it exists higher and steeper throughout the year than any other big beast on the continent. It is possibly the best and most complete mountain- eer that ever existed on any continent. Oreamnos americanus is its scientific name. e process of creation is more clearly on display than usual toward the uppermost edge of the life zone, from the way frost and gravity transform colossal stone ramparts into the first, thin layers of soil to the way extreme conditions constantly test animals, leav- ing the fittest to reproduce their kind. Watching the crucial give and take between mountain goats and their vertical environment made the concepts of adaptation and natural selection as real as a move down an ice-cloaked rock face. e white goat occupies an ecological position somewhat similar to that of the mammals at the top of the food chain: the big preda- tors. Having few effective enemies, the large carnivores also must partially regulate their own numbers. Mountain goats grow and reproduce more slowly than most hooved game species. Mountain goat females almost never have been found to breed before two-and-a-half years of age, even under optimum conditions. Fighting among mountain goats plainly is a ritualized affair. Haphazard battling would be next to suicidal for the sharp-horned goats since a singular puncture anywhere could lead to serious infection, and a thrust into the chest or thin-walled belly could mean quick death. Mountain goats, however, tuck their chin down and then jerk up with a prod, a stab, a piercing hook. e mountain goat's system of fighting therefore orients weapons away from the head, while substituting intense threats for actual contact. Each behavior pattern conveys a certain amount of information by itself. e function of the present-threat being to intimidate, it speaks the superior's language: taut and inflated, assured, ready for H IKING A TRAIL LONG THE CONTINENTAL DIVIDE IN MONTANA'S GLACIER NATIONAL PARK A FEW DAYS AGO. I MET A FEMALE MOUNTAIN GOAT AND HER MONTH-OLD BABY COMING THE OTHER WAY. I stepped off into a clump of stunted fir trees. e pair passed quite close, the little one keeping a wide eye on me all the while, as it trotted at its mother's heels. Two miles farther along, a male goat occupied the trail. I sidehilled around that animal through an avalanche chute crowded with yellow glacier lilies and red Indian paintbrush. is was turning into my kind of hike, making room for mountain goats being my idea of a fine way to spend a day, maybe even an ideal way. Excerpts taken from A Beast the Color of Winter, The Mountain Goat Observed by Douglas H. Chadwick by DOUGLAS H. CHADWICK RICK SHEREMETA Mountain Goat Nanny and her Kid traversing rocky terrain above Hidden Lake in Glacier National Park.

• Cover