106 WESTERN INCIDENTS.

out of their doors and chatter an incoherent welcome;
but the salutation which awaited them was not of a kind
calculated to encourage a protracted acquaintance of even
this unsatisfactory nature, and all civilities were therefore
soon at an end.

The huntists of the party soon spread themselves over
several acres of the town, in the hope of securing a few
specimens as mere matter of curiosity. Several hundred
shots were fired; and, if the accounts of our brave hunt-
ists may be credited, at least one half that number had
been killed; but by some strange fatality or illusion, on
arriving at the spot where the ball was seen to strike
them, they were not there. Only one was brought to the
train, and he, after being subjected to the critical exami-
nation of all the excursionists, was turned over to the
cook ; and the last that was seen of him, he was rapidly
_ disappearing before the steady gaze of Professor Ayer,
who protested meantime that, “it had come to a pretty
pass, if this grand excursion was reduced to such a strait
that its guests were obliged to subsist on prairie-dog.”

These prairie-dog cities are a great curiosity in their
way. They generally occupy the most dry and elevated
table lands of the Plains. The Union Pacific Railroad
passes through or near many of them.

The harmless little animals are somewhat the nature,
and about one-half the size of the common ground hog
or woodchuck. They burrow in the ground, and evi-
dently subsist, without water, upon grass and roots in
the near vicinity of their town, as they are never seen
far away from it.

Tradition, as well as more modern authority, insists
that their apartments are occupied conjointly with owls
and rattlesnakes ; but of the truth of this, deponent pre-
fers remaining silent, remarking only, that he has seen,