Mountain Sheep Meat
Phoebe Sibilio
To witness a sheep band gliding effortlessly across a vertical rock face, or a pair of equally matched rams crashing heads with the brutal force of two Volkswagens makes it impossible for onlookers not to be left awe-inspired. The pursuit of these regal creatures has enthralled me for the entirety of my life.
Combine onion, pear, ginger, garlic, mirin and soy sauce in a blender and blend until smooth. In a glass bowl, pour the mixture to completely cover the meat. Cover and let marinate in the fridge for 4 hours.
Thread the meat pieces onto a wooden skewer, trying to keep them as evenly sizes as possible. Fire up your grill of choice on medium-high and grill skewers for 1.5-2 mins per side, being careful not to overcook.
Mountain goats and Dall sheep are land-based animals. Land-based animals are less likely to build up high levels of contaminants than marine animals (like beluga or ringed seal). Mountain goats and Dall sheep eat plants and are low on the food chain. Animals that do not eat other animals also tend to have low levels of contaminants.
Mountain goats and Dall sheep have been sampled for contaminants in the NWT. Their meat consistently shows low levels of contaminants (metals and radionuclides). Kidneys may have higher levels of cadmium, however, the cadmium levels that have been measured in mountain goats and Dall sheep are well below levels of concern. To minimize exposure to cadmium, it is much more effective to quit smoking and to avoid second-hand smoke.
The meat of both mountain goat and Dall sheep is an excellent source of protein. Protein is used to build and repair all parts of the body. It is also a good source of iron. Iron is used to make healthy blood.
Black Welsh Mountain Sheep are run as a USA Maternals breed by NSIP. This is an index that is focused on dual purpose and maternal sheep. We are in the same group as Polypays. An index takes the EBVs for specific traits, adds a weighting factor and calculates a single final value for the animal. Although indexes are useful it is often important to look at specific trait EBVs especially with rare breeds where you need to maximize genetic diversity.
In our selection criteria the indexes I use are the USA Maternals and the Self Replacing Carcass(SRC). The SRC index is the closest to the Welsh Index used by Welsh Mountain breeders who record purebred sheep with Signet in the UK. I also look specifically at the birthweight, maternal weaning weight, yearling weight, adult weight and lambing ease EBVs.
Since then we have increased the carcass weights on lambs by 4.35 pounds and on yearlings by 1.96 pounds. Our yields on carcass to retail meat cuts is typically 65% and we sell our meat at an average over the whole sheep of $12.00/lb since some is sold wholesale and some retail. By using NSIP we have increased our income by an average of $33.93/lamb or $15.29/yearling.
NSIP charges a yearly flock fee based on how many ewes you breed. Our yearly fee was $200.00 for the 55 ewes we bred in 2014 for 2015 lambs. There is also a one time database fee for every lamb on which you send in anything past the birth weight data. This fee is $2.85/lamb and once you pay it you can continue to send in data on that sheep for its whole lifetime.
For 2015 we had 50 ewes produce a total of 72 live lambs. 1 lamb was killed by predators so we have 71 lambs on which we will collect data. That will cost us $202.35 for this year. Our total costs will be $5.67 for each lamb this year. Even with that cost we are still looking at and average additional income of $28.26 for any lambs we butcher and $9.62 for yearlings. As we continue to improve our flock I expect those numbers to get better.
One afternoon in the late fall many years ago, another sheep hunter and I, along with our outfitter, a guide, our cook, and our horse wrangler, were pushing our little pack outfit down a snowy trail along the side of a big canyon in the Canadian Rockies. That day we had fought our way through deep windblown drifts over the last high pass that separated us from lower country, from a good trail, and eventually the railroad. All of us had been walking and leading our horses since morning, fighting cold and snow and fatigue. We were all desperately weary and light headed from hunger.
But we were over the hump now, through the drifts. Below us we could see the heavy dark spruce of a river valley, the winding silver of a still unfrozen stream, and grassy yellow meadows where our famished horses could get to grass without pawing for it.
Then faintly and from a distance I thought I could hear the click of billiard balls. A curious illusion! I dismissed it. Then again I heard the crack of ivory against ivory. . .and again. . .The noise seemed to come from above us and to the right.
Finally I turned to our cook, who was just behind me and who had once been a great sheep guide before arthritis and a hernia had slowed him up. "Have you heard anything funny?" I asked. "Something sort of like rocks striking." "I thought I did," he said, "and I was just going to ask you. It's bighorn rams fighting around here somewhere."
We stopped the outfit then to rest and to look around. While our weary horses sagged under their packs, heads down, and one even lay down to rest in the snow, old Charlie, the cook, and I climbed up on a little point beside the trail. It took the veteran sheep hunter but a moment to find them in his worn old Zeiss 10X binocular, a glass which had been given him by a German baron the day he led that foreign nobleman, a famous international big-game hunter of the World War I days, to a great old monarch with broomed and battered horns. "There they are, the sons of guns!" he told me, "right up under that black cliff in the snow. A couple are fighting. They just came together. Hear them?"
And again I heard that billiard-ball sound. I got them in my own glass. Two great brown rams were settling their differences. A half-dozen more stood around watching like school kids witnessing a recess brawl. Scattered over the hillslope picking daintily at small brush and plants that poked above the snow were about twenty ewes, lambs, and yearlings. They didn't even deign to watch the battle.
The two rams would walk stiffly away from each other, then they would whirl quickly and hurl themselves up and at each other with such fierce energy that the impact would throw them backward. After a few passes these two grew tired, turned their backs and walked away. Another pair took up the war. One ram walked over to a ewe, butted her roughly with his massive horns, smelled her, then walked away with stiff-legged disgust.
"Just starting the rut," old Charlie said. "They're at it early this year. Guess it means a bad winter. They'll fight and raise hell and chivvy the ewes for a month or more. Then the old rams will be thin and scrawny and some of the old timers won't make it through the winter. . .Hey, take a look at that old bastard on the right. He's turned his head so you can see his horns good. Boy, look at him! If that head won't beat 40 inches I'll eat it. . ."
I could have watched those rams for hours, but evening was coming on and a bitter frost was rolling down the canyon from the snow fields and glaciers above. Just before we went around a point which would hide them I stopped for a last look. All were still there. All the rams had good shootable heads mostly of the close-curl type characteristic of the bighorn. The one old Charlie had picked out with his unerring sheep-hunter's eye was indeed a dandy, massive, heavy, with a curl of well over 40 inches, and then and there I began to regret that a couple of weeks before I had settled for a very good but lesser ram.
Then our outfitter, who led the packstring, called out to us impatiently. "Come on, you birds. It's getting late and I'm cold!" Regretfully old Charlie and I tucked our binoculars inside our down jackets, slid down through the snow to the horses, and took off. It was bitter cold and almost dark when we got down to wood and grass and water where we could make camp. In a few minutes the packs were off, the panniers and saddle pile protected from possible snow and rain by the pack covers, and the horses were tearing off mouthfuls of grass between jumps as they clumped off in their hobbles, their bells jangling. Presently the cook tent was up and blue smoke spiraled out of the stove pipe.
While the Indian horse wrangler was putting up the dude tent I sat down on a pannier and turned my binocular back on the pass from which we had just come. "Still looking for sheep?" Jim, the outfitter asked. "You and old Charlie are sheep happy. I thought I wasn't going to get you down off that hill until you'd froze your tails off !"
I have been sheep happy for forty years. Hunting sheep, watching sheep, thinking about sheep, worrying about sheep have long been preoccupations of mine. I would rather watch a couple of old rams battling it out than see the best musical on Broadway. I would rather get my glass on an old ram with heavy, massive horns than to get a look at Miss America in a bikini.
They are found in rougher country. Hunting them is harder work because whereas a horse can usually do most of the climbing for Stone and Dall, a hunt for the bighorn requires a good deal of climbing and a hunt for desert sheep (or at least where I've hunted them) is ALL foot work. The bighorns, because they have been hunted harder, are usually smarter than the northern sheep.
The North American sheep are all world trophies of the very top class and of these the burly brown bighorn of the Rocky Mountains with heavy massive horns, broomed, battered, nipped in close to the face and rubbed off so the points are wide and blunt, chipped from years of battering his horns against those of other big rams is one of the most difficult of all the world's trophies to come by.
But the classification of the bighorn as the continent's top trophy applies only to the heads of old rams from 10 to 14 years old. The horns of the wild sheep continue to grow as long as he lives, but they grow slowly during his final years. There are several types of sheep horns. Some come out away from the face in a wide, shallow spiral, a type much more common among the "thinhorns" (the Dalls and the Stones) than among the bighorns. Another type is what I call the "droopy" in which the horns come down far below the point of the jaw and never come back to the bridge of the nose. This is a rare type I have seen only in desert bighorns and some rams from Wyoming.
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