The food of the mountain goat consists principally, in summer, of the leaves of the alder and of various mountain shrubs, and in winter of mosses and lichens that grow on the rocks.
_Aplocerus Montanus_ is much more closely allied to the antelope than to the domestic goat, and has few characteristics in common with the latter genus. He is an agile, fearless climber, and appears to delight in scaling the tallest, grandest, and most rugged crags and cliffs to be found in the ranges which he inhabits, not so much in quest of his favorite food, for this grows abundantly lower down, but apparently from a mere spirit of daring; from a desire to breathe the rarest and purest atmosphere obtainable, and to view the grandest scenery under the sun without having his vision in the least obstructed by intervening objects. These forbidding and almost inaccessible crags are the favorite, and nearly the exclusive, haunts of this strange creature, and the hunter who follows it thither must indeed be a daring mountaineer. The goat is frequently found at altitudes of 10,000 to 14,000 feet, where the atmosphere is so rare as to render it difficult indeed for man to climb, yet this fearless creature nimbly leaps from crag to crag, over deep yawning chasms, with no more fear than the domestic lamb feels when bounding over the greensward in an Eastern farmyard.
The hunter literally takes his life in his hand when pursuing the goat, for he must pass over many places where a misstep or a slip of a few inches would plunge him over a precipice, where he would fall thousands of feet, or be hurled into some narrow and deep fissure in the rocks whence escape would be impossible.
Over such rugged and perilous ground he may climb, hour after hour, until he has passed the highest ranges of the elk, the mountain sheep, and all the other game, for the mountain goat, "the American chamois," as he has been aptly termed, ranges higher than any of them. He may toil on until he is far above timber line, and is working his way over and around vast drifts and beds of perpetual snow and ice. Finally he sights his game--a fine handsome specimen--standing fearlessly on some jutting crag, deliberately feeding on some tender lichens or, perhaps, peering proudly out over the lower world. The hunter now changes his course until he can conceal himself behind some neighboring rock, and then crawls stealthily and cautiously up to within rifle range of the game. Then, peering cautiously from behind his cover, he takes careful aim and fires. He is a dead shot and the rifle ball pierces the heart of the quarry, but to his dismay it makes a convulsive bound and down it goes over the precipice, rebounding from crag to crag, until it finally reaches a resting place hundreds of feet below. It may go to where he can never reach it, or may land where he can recover it on his return down the mountain side; but if the latter, it may be torn to fragments and scattered here and there until the hide is useless, the horns are broken off, the skull crushed so that the head is unfit to mount, and the flesh so bruised and mangled that he can scarcely save enough of it to make him a dinner.