AN OPEN SEASON 217 



fierce fellows in the canons and caves of the 

 sea bottoms. They laughed. And twice I 

 asked captains who had sailed around the world 

 about their escapes from sharks and those giant 

 spiders of the sea. They also laughed. Then, 

 one day I called on a retired captain who had been 

 a pearl hunter, a diver, an explorer of sea bottoms, 

 and a hunter after the gold in sunken ships. 

 "It may be true," he said, "that sharks and 

 octopuses occasionally devour or drown someone, 

 but I have not seen them do it, and I think that 

 these stories, as Mark Twain said of the report 

 of his own death, are 'greatly exaggerated'." 



I have had many a hunt for ghosts, for frogs 

 that made warts, and for ostriches that hid their 

 heads in the sand; for ground-hogs who carried 

 thermometers, furs, snowshoes, snow-glasses, 

 foot-warmers, and extra heavy sleeping bags for 

 all kinds of weather; but never has any one of 

 these performed for me. 



And then there are skunks, not bad fellows, 

 always brushed and clean. They have given me 

 more surprises than any wild fellow that I think 

 of. In Arizona I was expecting every night to 

 be bitten by a hydrophobia skunk, but every 

 morning I was surprised to find that I had not 

 yet gone mad, and during the day I was sur- 

 prised not to find someone running amuck who 

 had been vaccinated by them. 



