Roughing it De Luxe | Page 9

vivid personality that I feel he is entitled to a new
chapter. The Hydrophobic Skunk will be continued in our next.

RABID AND HIS FRIENDS
[Illustration]
Rabid and His Friends
THE Hydrophobic Skunk resides at the extreme bottom of the Grand
Cañon and, next to a Southern Republican who never asked for a
Federal office, is the rarest of living creatures. He is so rare that nobody
ever saw him--that is, nobody except a native. I met plenty of tourists
who had seen people who had seen him, but never a tourist who had
seen him with his own eyes. In addition to being rare, he is highly
gifted.

I think almost anybody will agree with me that the common, ordinary
skunk has been most richly dowered by Nature. To adorn a skunk with
any extra qualifications seems as great a waste of the raw material as
painting the lily or gilding refined gold. He is already amply equipped
for outdoor pursuits. Nobody intentionally shoves him round;
everybody gives him as much room as he seems to need. He commands
respect--nay, more than that, respect and veneration--wherever he goes.
Joy-riders never run him down and foot passengers avoid crowding him
into a corner. You would think Nature had done amply well by the
skunk; but no--the Hydrophobic Skunk comes along and upsets all
these calculations. Besides carrying the traveling credentials of an
ordinary skunk, he is rabid in the most rabidissimus form. He is not
mad just part of the time, like one's relatives by marriage--and not mad
most of the time, like the old-fashioned railroad ticket agent--but mad
all the time--incurably, enthusiastically and unanimously mad! He is
mad and he is glad of it.
We made the acquaintance of the Hydrophobic Skunk when we rode
down Hermit Trail. The casual visitor to the Grand Cañon first of all
takes the rim drive; then he essays Bright Angel Trail, which is
sufficiently scary for his purposes until he gets used to it; and after that
he grows more adventurous and tackles Hermit Trail, which is a marvel
of corkscrew convolutions, gimleting its way down this red abdominal
wound of a cañon to the very gizzard of the world.
Alongside the Hermit, traveling the Bright Angel is the same as
gathering the myrtles with Mary; but the civil engineers who worked
out the scheme of the Hermit and made it wide and navigable for
ordinary folks were bright young men. They laid a wall along its outer
side all the way from the top to the bottom. Now this wall is made of
loose stones racked up together without cement, and it is nowhere more
than a foot or a foot and a half high. If your mule ever slipped--which
he never does--or if you rolled off on your own hook--which has not
happened to date--that puny little wall would hardly stop you--might
not even cause you to hesitate. But some way, intervening between you
and a thousand feet or so of uninterrupted fresh air, it gives a
tremendous sense of security. Life is largely a state of mind, anyhow, I

reckon.
As a necessary preliminary to going down Hermit Trail you take a
buckboard ride of ten miles--ten wonderful miles! Almost immediately
the road quits the rocky, bare parapet of the gorge and winds off
through the noble, big forest that is a part of the Government reserve.
Jays that are twice as large and three times as vocal as the Eastern
variety weave blue threads in the green background of the pines; and if
there is snow upon the ground its billowy white surface is crossed and
criss-crossed with the dainty tracks of coyotes, and sometimes with the
broad, furry marks of the wildcat's pads. The air is a blessing and the
sunshine is a benediction.
Away off yonder, through a break in the conifers, you see one lone and
lofty peak with a cap of snow upon its top. The snow fills the deeper
ravines that furrow its side downward from the summit so that at this
distance it looks as though it were clutched in a vast white owl's claw;
and generally there is a wispy cloud caught on it like a white shirt on a
poor man's Monday washpole. Or, huddled together in a nest formation
like so many speckled eggs, you see the clutch of little mottled
mountains for which nobody seems to have a name. If these mountains
were in Scotland, Sir Walter Scott and Bobby Burns would have
written about them and they would be world-famous, and tourists from
America would come and climb their slopes, and stand upon their tops,
and sop up romance through all their pores. But being in Arizona,
dwarfed by the heaven-reaching ranges and groups that wall them in