ON THE EXTINCTION OF THE MASTODON
The recent visit of King Ptush to our wild districts in search of a
fresh hunting-ground for himself and his son, Prince Ptutt, brought
about a very serious condition of affairs in respect to the mastodon,
or what some persons refer to as the Antediluvians. This most
distinguished personage, wearying of the affairs of state in his own
land, gave over the reins of government for a while to his Grand
Vizier, and on behalf of the Nimrodian Institution, a Museum of
Natural and Unnatural History in his own capital city, came hither to
study the fauna and flora of our district, and incidentally to take
back with him a variety of stuffed specimens of our more conspicuous
wild beasts for exhibition purposes. Entirely unaware of His Majesty's
unerring aim in hitting large surfaces at short range, we welcomed him
cordially to our midst, and rather unwisely presented him with the
freedom of the jungle, a ceremony which carried with it the privilege
of bagging anything he could hit with his slungshot, in season or out
of it. The results of His Majesty's visit were appalling, for he had
not been with us more than six weeks before his enthusiasm getting the
better of his sportsmanship he turned the jungle into a zoological
shambles, from which it is never likely to recover. On his first day's
outing, to our dismay he brought down thirty-seven ring-tailed
ornithorhyncusses, eighteen pterodactyls, three brace of dodo, and a
domesticated diplodocus, and then assured us that he didn't know what
could be the matter with his aim that he had missed so many. The next
day he rose early, and while the rest of his suite were sleeping went
out unattended, returning before breakfast was over with a tally-card
showing a killing of thirteen dinosaurs, twenty-seven megatheriums,
and about six tons of chlamy-dophori, not to mention a mammoth
jack-rabbit that some idiot had told him was the only specimen in the
world of the monodelphian mollycoddle. The situation became very
embarrassing to us because we were on excellent terms with King Ptush
and his subjects, and we did not wish to do anything to offend either
of them, but here was a case where in the interests of our own fauna
something had to be done. Going on at the rate in which he had begun
it was easy to see that unless somebody got out an injunction
restraining him from shooting between meals it would not be many days
before there wasn't a prehistoric beast left in the whole country. It
was a mighty ticklish position for all of us. If we withdrew the
freedom of the jungle His Majesty might go home in a huff and declare
war against us, and with Noah's Ark as the sum total of our navy, and
that built in a ten-acre lot thirty miles from the coast, and no army
of any sort standing or sitting, we could hardly afford a complication
of that kind. Our wisest counsellors were called together to consider
the situation, but they were all men given to many words and lovers of
disputation, so that what with the framing of the original resolution,
and the time consumed in debating the amendments offered thereto, it
was quite three months before any definite conclusion was reached, and
it was then found when the resolution came up to its final vote that
it had nothing whatever to do with the subject the conference was
called to discuss, but had been transformed into an Act providing for
an increased duty on guinea-pigs imported from Sumatra. From that day
to this I have had little belief in that kind of popular government
which provides for the election of public servants whose chief end and
aim seems to be to thwart the public will.
[Illustration: EXTRA!!]
It was then that my fellow-citizens, availing themselves of a certain
diplomacy of method which I was said to possess, called upon me to
undertake a personal interview with King Ptush, and to see what could
be done to stay his voracious appetite for the slaying of our
mammalia. Always ready to serve my fellows in their hour of need, I
undertook the mission, and appeared bright and early one morning at
his encampment, unannounced, thinking it better to seem to happen in
upon him in a neighborly fashion than to make a national affair of my
mission by coming formally and with official pomp into his presence.
At the hour of my arrival the great king was standing on the stump of
a red cedar, delivering a lecture to his entourage upon "The Whole
Duty of Man, With a Few Remarks About Everything Else." But even then
he was not neglectful of his opportunities as a Nimrod, for every now
and then he would punctuate his sentences with a shot at a casual bit
of fauna passing by, either on the earth or flying, never pausing in
his lecture, but nevertheless bringing to an untimely end thirty-eight
griffins, seven paralellopipedon, a gumshurhynicus, forty google-eyed
plutocratidæ, and a herd of June-bugs grazing in a neighboring
pasture--the latter wholly domesticated, by the way, and used by their
owner as spile-drivers for a dike he was building in apprehension of
Noah's predicted flood. It was then that I began to get some insight
into the character of this wonderful person, for as I sat there
listening to his discourse, delivered at the rate of five hundred
words a minute, and apparently covering seven or eight subjects not
necessarily corollary or collateral to each other, at once, and
watched him simultaneously bringing down with unerring aim this
tremendous bag of game, something of the man's intrinsic nature was
revealed to me. His strength, of which we had heard much from
travelers in his own land, lay in an almost scientific lack of
concentration, backed up by a vocabulary of tremendous scope, and a
condition of optical near-sightedness that enabled him to see but
obscurely further than the end of his nose. These attributes gave him
the power to discuss innumerable subjects coeternally, if not
coherently, using his vocabulary with such skill that his meaning
depended entirely upon the interpretation of his remarks by individual
hearers, while the limitations of vision caused him, on the sudden
appearance of masses of any sort, to shoot at them impulsively,
regardless of such minor details as consequences. As a result of these
gifts he was ever hitting something with either the arrows of speech
or the slungshot, which produced a public impression of ceaseless
activity and of material accomplishment. In addition to this it was
his wont to do all things smiling with an almost boyish manifestation
of pleasure, so that he endeared himself to the people and was
pronounced in some respects likeable even by his enemies.
When his lecture was over he descended from his improvised platform
and greeted me most cordially.
"Deeee-lighted!" was the exact word he used as he took my hand and
shook it until my arm worked indifferently well in its socket.
I was not aware that His Highness had ever heard of me before, but it
was not long before I was more than glad that I had come, for it
transpired that I was the one person in all creation that he had most
wished to meet, though for what particular purpose he did not make
clear. In any event, so cordial was his reception of me that for three
or four weeks I had not the heart to mention the particular object of
my mission, and even then I was not permitted to do so because at any
time when I felt that the psychological moment had been reached he
would talk of other things, his scientific lack of concentration of
which I have already spoken enabling him with much grace to be
reminded of an experience in the Transvaal by a chance allusion of my
own to the peculiar habits of the Antillean Sardine. In the meanwhile
the work of slaughter was going on apace, and whole species were
gradually becoming extinct. Exactly five weeks after my arrival the
last Diplodocus in the world breathed its last. Two days later the
world's visible supply of Pterodactyls passed into the realms of the
annihilated. The Dodo, the largest and sweetest song-bird I have ever
known, the only bird in all the primeval forests possessed of a
diaphragm capable of expressing harmonies of what for want of a better
term I may call a Wagnerian range, quickly followed suit, and in its
train, alas! went the others, Creosauri, Dicosauri, Thracheotomi,
Megacheropodæ, Manicuridæ, and the Willumjay, the latter a gigantic
parrot with a voice like silver that rang continuously through the
forests like a huge fire bell. At the end of the tenth week of my
mission a message was received from Noah.
"Dear Grandpa," he wrote: "Can't you do something to stave
off King Ptush? In making up my passenger-list I can't get
hold of enough mammals to fill an inside room. I have been
through the country with a fine-tooth comb, and as far as I
can find out there isn't a prehistoric beast left in
creation. If this thing goes on much longer I shall be
compelled to load up with a cargo of coon-cats, armadillos,
hippopotami and Plymouth rocks. Get a move on!
"NOAH."
My first impulse was to hand this letter without a word to His
Majesty, but on second thoughts I decided not to do this, since it
might involve me in a humiliating explanation of my grandson's foolish
obsession about the impending flood. I had too much pride to wish
King Ptush to know that I had a human brain-storm on the list of my
posterity, so I threw the brick upon which the letter was engraved
into a neighboring fish-pond, and resolved to get rid of His Majesty
by strategy. For three nights I pondered over my plan of operations,
and then the great method came to me like the dawning of the sun after
a night of abysmal darkness. I went to the royal tent and discovered
His Majesty hard at work chiseling out an article on "How I Brought
Down My First Proterosaurus" on a slab of granite he had brought with
him. As I approached he smiled broadly, and with a wave of his hand
called my attention to the previous day's bag. It covered a ten-acre
lot.
"There isn't sawdust enough in creation to stuff half of these
beasts," he remarked proudly. "I hardly know what I shall do about
that."
"Better bury them in the mud," I suggested, "and let them petrify."
He seemed pleased with the idea, and later put it into operation.
"Fossils are not so susceptible to moths," he observed as he gave
orders for their immersion in a Triassic mud-puddle of huge
proportions. "That was a good idea of yours, Methuselah."
"I have a better one than that," I returned, seeing at last an opening
for my strategic movement. "Why should a man of Your Majesty's prowess
waste his time on such insignificant creatures as these, when the
whole country is ringing with complaints of an animal a thousand times
as large, and that no one hereabouts has ever dared attempt to
pursue?"
He was on the alert instantly.
"What animal do you refer to?" he demanded, his interest becoming so
deep that he put four pairs of eyeglasses upon his royal nose, so that
he could see me better.
"It belongs to the family of Rodents," I replied. "It is without any
exception the biggest rat in the history of our mammals. It is a
combination of the Castoridæ, the Chinchillidæ, the Dodgastidæ, and
the Lagomydian Leporidæ, with just a dash of the Dippydoodle on the
maternal side."
His Majesty gave a sigh of disappointment, and resumed his writing.
"I haven't come here to shoot rats," he observed coldly, removing the
three extra pairs of spectacles from his nose. "I am a huntsman, not a
trapper."
"Your Majesty does not understand that this is no ordinary rat," I
returned calmly. "If I may be permitted to continue, what would Your
Highness think of a rat that was several thousand feet higher than
the pyramids, that has lived continuously for thousands of years, and
is as fresh and green in spirit as on the day it was born? Suppose I
were to tell you that so great is its strength that I have myself seen
a whole herd of aboriginal elephants lying asleep upon its broad back?
What would you say if I told you that its epidermis is so thick that
if there were such a thing as a steam-drill in creation six hundred of
them could bore away at it night and day for as many years without
making any visible impression thereon?"
He again put down his chisel, and laid the hammer aside, as he ranged
the extra eyeglasses along the bridge of his nose.
"Colonel Methuselah," he said, incisively biting off his words, "if
you told me anything of the kind I should say that you are what
posterity will probably call a nature faker, and one of a
perniciously invidious sort."
"I can bring affidavits to prove it, Your Majesty," said I.
"It is strange that I have never heard of it before," he mused.
"We are not particularly proud of it," I explained. "One may boast of
the number of Discosauri one finds in one's hunting preserves, or the
marvelous fish in one's lakes, or the birds of wondrous plumage that
dwell in one's forests, but none ever ventures to speak of the number
or quality of rats that infest the locality."
"You say it overtops a pyramid?" he demanded.
"I do," I replied. "The exact estimate of its height is sixteen
thousand nine hundred and sixty-four feet!"
"Great Snakes!" he cried. "Why, he must be a perfect mountain!"
"He is," I replied. "He is so tall that summer and winter the top of
his head is covered with snow."
This was too much for King Ptush. He rose up immediately from his seat
and summoned his entourage.
"You will make ready for a strenuous afternoon," he said to them
sharply. "I am going after the biggest game that history records.
Colonel Methuselah has just told me of a quarry alongside of which all
that we have landed in the past months sinks into insignificance."
"You do well to call it a quarry," I cried. "There never was a
better--and it is only ten miles from here as the griffin flies."
The king's face flushed with joy at the prospect, but suddenly a look
of perplexity came into his eyes.
"By the way," he said, "how shall we bring him down--with a slungshot
or a catapult?"
[Illustration: Gr't. Gr't. Gr't. Grandfather Adam as a
disciplinarian.]
I laughed.
"No ordinary ammunition will serve Your Majesty's purpose here," I
said. "The only thing for you to do is to steal quietly up to him
while he sleeps. Surround him in the silence of some black night, and
build a barbed-wire fence around him. Once you succeed in doing this
he will not try to get away, and you can have him removed at Your
Majesty's pleasure."
"We go at once," cried the king, his enthusiasm aroused to the highest
pitch. "My friends," he added, drawing himself up to the full of his
soldierly height, "we go to capture the--the--the er--by the way,
Colonel, what do you call this creature?"
"The Ararat," I replied.
He repeated the word after me, sprang lightly into the saddle of
Griffin we had presented to him upon his arrival, and, followed by
his entourage, was off on the greatest hunt of his life. What happened
subsequently we never knew, for none of the party ever returned; but
what I do know is that my stratagem came too late.
A subsequent investigation of our preserves showed that all our
treasured mastodons from the Jurassic, Triassic, and other periods of
history, had been killed off, root, stock and branch, by our honored
guest, and poor Noah was reduced to the necessity of drumming up trade
among such commonplace creatures as the Rhinoceri, the Yak, the
Dromedary, and that vain but ornamental combination of fuss and
feathers known as the Hen.
The Ararat we still have with us, and as for me, I am inclined to
think that it will remain, flood or no flood, for any creature that
has successfully withstood a campaign against it by King Ptush cannot
be removed from the scene by anything short of a convulsion of
Nature.