So, as a hunter will follow the deer, through thickets and over rocks, forgetting hunger and cold and thirst in his anxiety to get a glimpse of his game, that he may add its antlers to his list of trophies, we fossil hunters, Professor Mudge’s party and my own, sought our prey over miles and miles of barren chalk beds, cheerfully enduring countless discomforts.
Urged on by enthusiasm and the desire to secure finer and finer material, I went over every inch of the acres of exposed chalk along these ravines and creeks, hoping each moment to find stretched before my delighted eyes a complete skeleton of one of those old sea serpents described by Cope, or a specimen of that wonderful _Pteranodon_, or toothless flying reptile, whose wing expanse was twenty feet or more.
All day, from the first streak of light until the last level ray forced me to leave the work, I toiled on, forgetting the heat and the miserable thirst and the alkali water, forgetting everything but the one great object of my life—to secure from the crumbling strata of this old ocean bed the fossil remains of the fauna of Cretaceous Times.
The incessant labor, however, had a weakening effect upon my system so that I fell a victim to malaria, and when a violent attack of shaking ague came on, I felt as if fate were indeed against me.
I remember how, one day, when I was in the midst of a shaking fit, I found a beautiful specimen of a Kansas mosasaur. _Clidastes tortor_ Cope named it, because an additional set of articulations in the backbone enabled it to coil. Its head lay in the center, with the column around it, and the four paddles stretched out on either side. It was covered by only a few inches of disintegrated chalk.
Forgetting my sickness, I shouted to the surrounding wilderness, “Thank God! Thank God!” And I did well to thank the Creator, as I slowly brushed away the powdered chalk and revealed the beauties of this reptile of the Age of Reptiles. Its snake-like tail and flexible movements caused it to appear to Cope a veritable serpent, so that he put it in his new sub-order _Pythonomorpha_.
I well remember the terrible journey over the rough sod to the station with this specimen. I was seized with another attack of ague, and as I jolted about in the bottom of the wagon, I thought that my head would surely burst. Little I cared, though, so that I got my beloved fossil to the Professor.