"The beast was thirty long and twenty high," he answered, "and its tusks
scaled over six times three feet. I couldn't believe, myself, at the
time, for all that it had just happened. But if my senses had played me,
there was the broken gun and the hole in the brush. And there was--or,
rather, there was not--Klooch and the pups. O man, it makes me hot all
over now when I think of it Klooch! Another Eve! The mother of a new
race! And a rampaging, ranting, old bull mammoth, like a second flood,
wiping them, root and branch, off the face of the earth! Do you wonder
that the blood-soaked earth cried out to high God? Or that I grabbed the
hand-axe and took the trail?"

"The hand-axe?" I exclaimed, startled out of myself by the picture. "The
hand-axe, and a big bull mammoth, thirty feet long, twenty feet--"

Nimrod joined me in my merriment, chuckling gleefully. "Wouldn't it kill
you?" he cried. "Wasn't it a beaver's dream? Many's the time I've
laughed about it since, but at the time it was no laughing matter, I was
that danged mad, what of the gun and Klooch. Think of it, O man! A
brand-new, unclassified, uncopyrighted breed, and wiped out before ever
it opened its eyes or took out its intention papers! Well, so be it.
Life's full of disappointments, and rightly so. Meat is best after a
famine, and a bed soft after a hard trail.

"As I was saying, I took out after the beast with the hand-axe, and hung
to its heels down the valley; but when he circled back toward the head, I
was left winded at the lower end. Speaking of grub, I might as well stop
long enough to explain a couple of points. Up thereabouts, in the midst
of the mountains, is an almighty curious formation. There is no end of
little valleys, each like the other much as peas in a pod, and all neatly
tucked away with straight, rocky walls rising on all sides. And at the