Chapter 22: The White Chamois

The dwarfs and chamois have always been good friends. This is chiefly because they are so much like each other, in being small. The short dwarfs look like little men. They have beards, and wear caps and clothes, but they are hardly as high as a yard stick, and measure up, only to the heads of quite small boys. In weight, some of them scarcely reach up to a calf. Occasionally, you find a little fellow that could be packed in a band box, or carried in a suit case. As for the baby dwarfs, one of them could be wrapped up in a napkin, and be dropped into a man’s overcoat pocket.

Now the chamois is like the dwarf in this, that he is too small to be a goat, and not big enough to be a deer. He is a funny fellow to look at. His horns are only as long as from your elbow to your hand, and are turned around and backwards at the ends, so that they look like a pair of big, black fish hooks. He has a yellow head, with a dark band on it, and on each cheek is a strip of black, as if he were held in, with bridles and bit. His coat of hair is brown, but his funny little tail is also black, and, oh, how bright his eyes are!

But when it comes to leaping, from rock to rock, the chamois is the Johnny Jump Up, among all animals, for he will skip over a chasm fifteen feet wide. Then, he will land on a tiny ledge of rock, so narrow that one could hardly imagine a cat could hold itself on. Putting his hind legs first, it gets a good footing, and then bounds forward.

These creatures are so agile, that one almost expects to see the strongest of them climb up trees, by hooking their horns on the branches, but they do not. They cut many capers, but not this one. The wonderful thing is that the females, as well as the males, have horns also.

These chamois ladies, and the little folks of the family, that is, the doe and fawn, generally live down among the lower forests, while the daddies and strong young bucks stay, most of the time, up among the high rocks and peaks. They all eat the lovely flowers, grasses, mosses and aromatic herbs, that have a hot taste, and which keep them warm inside.