The year was probably 1272 when Venetian traveler Marco Polo first encountered the wild sheep with the fantastically curling horns that, more than 700 years later, still bears his name. This meeting almost certainly took place in the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia, a range of high valleys and rocky ridges that lead from present-day Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan into western China. For Marco Polo, this “roof of the world” offered a potential trade route to the Orient. For today’s naturalists and sportsmen, the Pamirs, plus a small slice of northeastern Pakistan, define the range of the most coveted of the world’s wild sheep, the Marco Polo argali.
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