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THE VICTIMS OF A PRACTICAL JOKE TRAMP FIVE DAYS ALONG BITTER CREEK IN SEARCH OF AN ANIMAL THAT HAD BEEN DEAD 5,000 YEARS

BILL NYE

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."