It was my duty to search every square inch of the dust-covered slope between the ledges for fossil bones. After much unsuccessful effort, I came to a place at the head of a gorge, where a perpendicular escarpment dropped downward for a thousand feet. The upper ledge of sandstone had broken loose for a space of thirty feet, and this huge mass of rock, four feet thick, carrying with it the loose dirt and polishing the underlying surface as it thundered down the slope, had struck the lower ledge with such force that it too had broken loose and plunged downward into the abyss. A grove of pine trees at the base of the cliff had been crushed to the earth by this avalanche. To my view the remaining trees, which I knew to be about fifty feet high, appeared like seedlings, and the vast mass of rock like a cobblestone.
I concluded that I should have no difficulty in crawling across the smooth space, for I reasoned that if I began to slip, I could drive the sharp end of my pick into the soft rock and thus stop myself. So, climbing up the slope through the loose earth to the base of the upper ledge, I started to cross. When I was halfway over I began to slip, and confidently raising my pick, struck the rock with all my might. God grant that I may never again feel such horror as I felt then, when the pick, upon which I had depended for safety, rebounded as if it had been polished steel, as useless in my hands as a bit of straw. I struck frantically again and yet again, but all the time I was sliding down with ever-increasing rapidity toward the edge of the abyss, safety on either side and certain and awful death below.
I remember that I gave up all hope of escape, and that after the first shock I felt no fear of death; but the few moments of my slide seemed hours, measured by the rapidity with which my mind worked. Everything, it seemed to me, that I had ever done or thought spread itself out before my mind’s eye as vividly as the wonderful panorama of the cliffs and canyons upon which I had been gazing a few moments before. All the scenes of my life, from childhood up, were re-enacted here with the same emotions of pleasure or pain. I saw distinctly the people I had known, many of them long forgotten. My mother seemed to stand out more prominently than anyone else, and I wondered what she would think when she heard that I had been dashed to pieces. I even planned how, when I did not return to camp, Cope would set out to find me, following my footsteps into the loose dirt until he reached the slide, and I wondered how he would ever get down into the canyon, and how much of my body would be left for burial.
To this day I do not know how I escaped. I suddenly found myself lying on the ledge, on the side I had left a moment before. Probably some part of my clothing, covered with dust as it was, had acted as a brake upon the polished surface. I lay for an hour with trembling knees, too weak to make my way back to camp.
This experience of mine is another instance of the fact that the human brain forgets nothing, and will yield up everything when the right kind of stimulus is applied.
The excitement of our work and the danger with it seemed to make us reckless of life, Professor Cope even more so than the rest of us, although he was at that time United States Paleontologist, and worth a million dollars. I remember one night he was following a buffalo trail to the river, when suddenly his horse stopped and refused to go further. Without dismounting to find out the cause, he plunged his spurs into the animal, and it sprang into the air. Mr. Isaac, who was behind, followed. The next day they were surprised to find that they had crossed a gorge ten feet wide, and that but for the keen sight and the strength of their horses, they would have been dashed to pieces a hundred feet below.
Cope’s indefatigability, too, was a constant source of wonder to us. We were in excellent training, after our strenuous outdoor life in the Kansas chalk beds, while he had just been working fourteen hours a day in his study and the lithographer’s shop, completing a large Government monograph, writing his own manuscript, and reading his own proof. When we first met him at Omaha, he was so weak that he reeled from side to side as he walked; yet here he climbed the highest cliffs and walked along the most dangerous ledges, working without intermission from daylight until dark.
Every night when we returned to camp, we found that the cook had spent the whole day in cooking. Exhausted and thirsty,—we had no water to drink during the day (all the water in the Bad Lands being like a dense solution of Epsom salts),—we sat down to a supper of cakes and pies and other palatable, but indigestible food. Then, when we went to bed, the Professor would soon have a severe attack of nightmare. Every animal of which we had found traces during the day played with him at night, tossing him into the air, kicking him, trampling upon him.
When I waked him, he would thank me cordially and lie down to another attack. Sometimes he would lose half the night in this exhausting slumber. But the next morning he would lead the party, and be the last to give up at night. I have never known a more wonderful example of the will’s power over the body.
His memory and his imagination, too, were extraordinary. He used to talk to me by the hour, arranging the living and dead animals of the earth in systematic order, giving countless scientific names and their definitions. I forgot the names as soon as I heard them, but the loving tribute which he paid to the wonders of creation has had a lasting and helpful effect upon me. If I ever had any feelings of disgust or fear toward any of God’s creatures, I lost them upon a knowledge of the animals as revealed to me by this master naturalist, who saw beauty even in lizards and snakes. He believed, and taught me to believe, that it is a crime to destroy life wantonly, any life. Of course the first law of nature is self-preservation; we must, in order to live, kill our enemies and protect our friends; but this superstitious fear which men and, even more, women have of snakes, lizards, and bugs, how cruel it is! Why should they rejoice when some poor little garter-snake, which has gone as a friend into the cellar walk to destroy rats and mice, is dragged out and cut to pieces? My heart bleeds when I think of the brutal way in which people take life, something they can never give back, and with the great Cope, I cry out against this crime, which is exterminating some of our most beautiful and useful friends. No man can say he loves us, when he wantonly destroys our work; no man loves God who wantonly destroys His creatures.