|I HAVE made a small collection of wild, western things during the past
seven years, and have put them together, hoping some day, when I get
feeble, to travel with the aggregation and erect a large monument of
kopecks for my executors, administrators and assigns forever.
Beginning with the skull of old Hi-lo-Jack-and-the-game, a Sioux
brave, the collection takes in my wonderful bird, known as the
Walk-up-the-creek, and another _vara avis_, with carnivorous bill and
web feet, which has astonished everyone except the taxidermist and
myself. An old grizzly bear hunter--who has plowed corn all his life and
don't know a coyote from a Maverick steer--looked at it last fall and
pronounced it a "kingfisher," said he had killed one like it a year ago.
Then I knew that he was a pilgrim and a stranger, and that he had bought
his buckskin coat and bead-trimmed moccasins at Niagara Falls, for the
bird is constructed of an eagle's head, a canvas back duck's bust and
feet, with the balance sage hen and baled hay.
Last fall I desired to add to my rare collection a large hornet's nest.
I had an embalmed tarantula and her porcelain-lined nest, and I desired
to add to these the gray and airy home of the hornet. I procured one of
the large size after cold weather and hung it in my cabinet by a string.
I forgot about it until this spring. When warm weather came, something
reminded me of it. I think it was a hornet. He jogged my memory in some
way and called my attention to it. Memory is not located where I
thought it was. It seemed as though whenever he touched me he awakened a
memory--a warm memory with a red place all around it.
Then some more hornets came and began to rake up old personalities.
I remember that one of them lit on my upper lip. He thought it was a
rosebud. When he went away it looked like a gladiola bulb. I wrapped a
wet sheet around it to take out the warmth and reduce the swelling so
that I could go through the folding doors and tell my wife about it.
Hornets lit ah over me and walked around on my person. I did not dare
to scrape them off because they are so sensitive. You have to be very
guarded in your conduct toward a hornet.
I remember once while I was watching the busy little hornet gathering
honey and June bugs from the bosom of a rose, years ago, I stirred him
up with a club, more as a practical joke than anything else, and he came
and lit in my sunny hair--that was when I wore my own hair and he walked
around through my gleaming tresses quite awhile, making tracks as large
as a watermelon all over my head. If he hadn't run out of tracks my head
would have looked like a load of summer squashes. I remember I had to
thump my head against the smoke-house in order to smash him, and I had
to comb him out with a fine comb, and wear a waste-paper basket two
weeks for a hat.
Much has been said of the hornet, but he has an odd, quaint way after
all, that is forever new.