Several years ago I had the pleasure of joining a party about to start
out along the banks of Bitter creek on a hunting expedition. The leader
of the party was a young man who had recently escaped from college with
a large amount of knowledge which he desired to experiment with on the
people of the far west. He had heard that there was an ichthyosaurus up
somewhere along the west side of Bitter creek, and he wanted us to go
along and help him to find it.
I had been in the west some eight or nine years then and I had never
seen an ichthyosaurus myself, but I thought the young man must know his
business, so I got out my Winchester and went along with the group.
We tramped over the pale, ashy, glaring, staring stretch of desolation,
through burning, quivering days of monotony and sage brush and alkali
water and aching eyes and parched and bleeding lips and nostrils cut
through and eaten by the sharp alkaline air, mentally depressed and
physically worn out, but cheered on and braced up by the light and
joyous manner of the ever-hopeful James Trilobite Eton of Concord.
James Trilobite Eton of Concord never moaned, never gigged back or shed
a hot, remorseful tear in this powdery, hungry waste of gray, parched
ruin. No regret came forth from his lips in the midst of this mighty
cemetery, this ghastly potter's field for all that nature had ever
reared that was too poor to bear its own funeral expenses.
Now and then a lean, soiled gray coyote, without sufficient moral
courage to look a dead mule in the hind foot, slipped across the horizon
like a dirty phantom and faded into the hot and tremulous atmosphere. We
scorned such game as that and trudged on, cheered by the hope that
seemed to spring eternal in the breast of James Trilobite Eton of
Concord.
Four days we wallowed through the unchanging desolation. Four nights we
went through the motions of slumbering on the arid bosom of the wasted
earth. On the fifth day James Trilobite Eton said we were now getting
near the point where we would find what we sought. On we pressed through
the keen, rough blades of the seldom bunch-grass, over the shifting,
yellow sand and the greenish gray of the bad-land soil which never does
anything but sit around through the accumulating centuries and hold the
world together, a kind of powdery poison that delights to creep into the
nostrils of the pilgrim and steal away his brains, or when moistened by
a little snow to accumulate around the feet of the pilgrim or on the
feet of the pilgrim's mule till he has the most of an unsurveyed "forty"
on each foot, and the casual observer is cheered by the novel sight of
one homestead striving to jump another.
Toward evening James Trilobite Eton gave a wild shriek of joy and ran to
us from the bed of an old creek, where he had found an ichthyosaurus.
The animal was dead! Not only that, but it had been dead a long, long
time!
James Milton Sherrod said that "if a college education was of no more
use to a man than that he, for one, allowed that his boy would have to
grope through life with an academical education, and very little of
_it_."
I uncocked my gun and went back to camp a sadder and madder man, and,
though years have come and gone, I am still irritable when I think of
the five days we tramped along Bitter creek searching for an animal
that was no longer alive, and our guide knew it before he started.
I ventured to say to J. Trilobite Eton that night as we all sat together
in the gloaming discussing whether he should be taken home with us in
the capacity of a guide or as a remains, that it seemed to me a man
ought to have better sense than to wear his young life away trying to
have fun with his superiors in that way.
"Why, blame it all," says James, "what did you expect? You ought to know
yourself that that animal is extinct!"
"Extinck!" says James Milton Sherrod, in shrill, angry tones. "I should
say he was extinck. That's what we're kickin' about. What gallded me was
that you should of waited till the old cuss was extinck before you come
to us like a man and told us about it. You pull us through the sand for
a week and blister our heels and condemb near kill us, and all the time
you know that the blame brute is layin' there in the hot sun gittin'
more and more extinck every minute. Fun is fun, and I like a little
nonsense now and then just as well as you do, but I'll be eternally
banished to Bitter creek if I think it's square or right or white to
play it on your friends this kind of a way.
"You claim that the animal has been dead goin' on five thousand years,
or some such thing as that, and try to get out of it that way, but long
as you knew it and we didn't it shows that you're a low cuss not to
speak of it.
"What difference does it make to us, I say, whether this brute was or
was not dead and swelled up like a pizen'd steer long before Nore got
his zoologickle show together? We didn't know it. We haven't seen the
Salt Lake papers for weeks. You use your edjecation to fool people with.
My opinion is that the day is not far distant when you will wake up and
find yourself in the bottom of an untimely grave.
"You bring us a hundred and fifty miles to look at an old bone pile all
tramped into the ground and then say that the animal is extinck. That's
a great way to talk to an old man like me, a man old enough to be your
grandfather. Probly you cacklate that it is a rare treat for an
old-timer like me to waller through from Green River to the Yallerstone
and then hear a young kangaroo with a moth-eaten eyebrow under his nose
burst forth into a rollicking laugh and say that the animal we've been
trailin' for five days is extinck.
"I just want to say to you, James Trilobite Eton, and I say it for your
good and I say it with no prejudice against you, for I want to see you
succeed, that if this ever happens agin and you are the party to blame
you will wake up with a wild start on the follerin' day and find
yourself a good deal extincker than this here old busted lizard is."
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