212 WILD NEIGHBORS CHAP, 
in favorable weather, or even more, if we may 
trust many accounts; and the minutest particle 
sprayed upon one’s clothes will make them 
entirely unwearable. Its persistence is equally 
remarkable and embarrassing. No amount of 
washing or disinfection, short of destroying the 
fibre of the cloth, suffices to eradicate the taint. 
Burying them for any practicable time is of no 
use, for even if the garments seem at first to be 
free, heat will bring back strong reminders of the 
wearer’s unsavory experience. Where chloride of 
lime can be used, the smell can be destroyed, but 
otherwise time alone will rid one of its presence. 
The Indians of the Upper Columbia valley, 
by the way, tell a quaint legend of the origin 
of this savory characteristic of our subject. A 
few miles below the mouth of the Spokane River, 
the banks become rocky walls and are strangely 
broken. ‘The rocks take all imaginable forms, 
showing up as pinnacles, terraces, perpendicular 
bluffs, devils’-slides, and giants’ causeways, —the 
whole forming one of the most beautiful, grand- 
est sights in the universe.’””’ Among these is a 
grayish-white cone, about five hundred feet high, 
which is a noted landmark, and concerning which 
the Indians have a legend, of which the skunk 
is the hero. It has been written down in his 
report upon the navigation of the Upper Colum- 
bia, made to the War. Department by Lieutenant 
Thomas W. Symons, U.S.A., as follows: 
