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Updated: May 27, 2025
"Where shall we go?" quavered Dorothy, sitting on a log with the dingue in her lap. One thing was certain; this mammoth-ridden land was no place for women, and I told her so. We placed the dingue in a basket and tied it around the leading mule's neck. Immediately the dingue, alarmed, began dingling like a cow-bell.
Before I had satisfied myself that neither William nor the mules were observing us, Professor Van Twiller rose to her feet and took a short step backward. "Let's set traps for a dingue," she said, "will you?" I looked at the big tree, undecided. "Come on," she said; "I'll show you how." And away we went into the woods, she leading, her kilts flashing through the golden half-light.
It was a well-executed wood-cut, showing a dingue in the foreground and, to give scale, a mammoth in the middle distance. "Yes," I replied, "that is the dingue." "I've seen one," he observed, calmly. I smiled and explained that the dingue had been extinct for some thousands of years. "Oh, I guess not," he replied, with cool optimism. Then he placed a grimy forefinger on the mammoth.
Now I had not the faintest notion how to trap the dingue, but Professor Van Twiller asserted that it formerly fed on the tender tips of the spruce, quoting Darwin as her authority. So we gathered a bushel of spruce-tips, piled them on the bank of a little stream, then built a miniature stockade around the bait, a foot high.
This wild melody had been improvised by the group of painters, but revised and corrected by poet friends. Here it is: Oh! Peintres de la Dam' jolie, De vos pinceaux arretez la folie! Il faut descendr' des escabeaux, Vous nettoyer et vous faire tres beaux! Digue, dingue, donne! L'heure sonne. Digue, dingue, di.... C'est midi!
I shall never forget that scene in the forest the gray arch of the heavens swimming in mist through which the sun peered shiftily, the tall pines wavering through the fog, the preoccupied mules marching single file, the foggy bell-note of the gentle dingue in its swinging basket, and Dorothy, limp kilts dripping with dew, plodding through the white dusk.
"Doubtless," she said, enthusiastically, "a dingue will come out of the lake to-night to feed on our spruce-tips. Then," she added, "we've got him." "True!" I said, earnestly, and pressed her fingers very gently. Her face was turned a little away; I don't remember what she said; I don't remember that she said anything. A faint rose-tint stole over her cheek.
Is the dingue extinct? Probably. And yet the aborigines of British America maintain the contrary.
"After that," I continued, "you went through the rent in the mountains?" "Sure." "And you saw a dingue and a creature that resembled a mammoth?" "Sure," he repeated, sulkily. "And you saw something else?" I always asked this question; it fascinated me to see the sullen fright flicker in William's eyes, and the mechanical backward glance, as though what he had seen might still be behind him.
Now, having promised to avoid originality and confine myself to facts, I shall tell what I have to tell concerning the dingue, the mammoth, and something else. For some weeks it had been rumored that Professor Farrago, president of the Bronx Park Zoological Society, would resign, to accept an enormous salary as manager of Barnum & Bailey's circus.
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