THE VENOMOUS DOODLE BUG

ODYSSEY ON THE COLORADO RIVER

Knew we were approaching the father of all canyons: the Grand.

The Little Colorado River enters Nankoweap Canyon at the point where Marble Canyon ends and the Grand Canyon starts.

Once in the Grand Canyon, new beauties unfolded before our eyes every hour of the day. The most unusual waterfall 1 have ever seen is at Vasey's Paradise. Water pours out of a 30inch hole in the solid rock wall of the canyon and tumbles down into the river 125 feet below.

All else had faded from our minds. We were in a masterpiece of nature. The long slanting rays of a setting sun added to the glory and softness of the colors of the canyon as we made our camp at the foot of Tanner Trail under the Hopi Tower.

The next morning, we were off for Phantom Ranch at the bottom of the Canyon. We had no rapids for several miles, but then they came in quick succession: first Unkar, then Mile 75, and then the dreaded Hance Rapid.

Our rapids so far had been in broad parts of canyon bottoms, allowing us to walk around them, but when we came into the Inner Gorge and to the head of Sockdologer, the picture changed. We had to ride this one if we wanted to or not. In this narrow crack in the very bottom of the Grand Canyon, the hard slick walls rose vertically from the water's edge. We bounced from rock to rock instead of missing them as we had done before.

We reached the ranch late in the afternoon and rested there for three days.

We continued in the Granite Gorge, and the rapids, instead of diminishing in their fury, grew more alive as if to play with us harder than ever during our last few days on the river. This narrow avenue of rock through which we were going was a spectacular and beautiful sight. The black of metamorphic schists is shot through with pink and coral streamers of granite.

Here on both sides of us were remnants of a mountain range once higher than the Alps but now worn down to about a thousand feet.

Not all of our route ran through granite. As the canyon swung to the north around Explorer's Monument, we left the granite and entered tapeats sandstone. Here the traveling was delightful in long sluicelike stretches of water. When the river once again turned south, we entered granite, and once more we were bouncing down rock-strewn rapids.

In this section, we met with Tapeats Creek and Deer Creek, which ended by plunging from its four-foot-wide canyon down a hundred feet to the cool pool below.

At noon one day, we came to the mouth of Havasu Canyon, out of which came the blue waters of Havasu Creek. We attempted to walk the nine miles up this deep canyon to the Havasupai Indian Reservation but soon gave up and returned to the river.

Only a few days remained now until our journey would end.

The most remarkable thing to me all the way through the Grand Canyon was that at no place did I have the feeling that we were in the world's largest canyon. Where we were able to see both rims, they would seem so far away that they looked like mountains. In fact, my impression all along, except when we were in the deepest gorges, was that we were going through a wide, deep valley.

As we approached Separation Canyon and Separation Rapids on our last day on the river, it seemed strange to me that a place so named 70 years ago by Major Powell to mark the spot where three of his party separated from him should now mark the separation point of the muddy Colorado and Lake Mead.

The river seemed so at ease there that it was like a tired giant resting after the hundreds of miles he had run. All the water we had been over and through now rested behind Boulder Dam. It was like our journey all the happiness, the work, the play, the hardships, and the beauties of both scenery and friendship, were forever stored behind the dam of our memories.

That evening I thanked the good providence that had allowed me to make this trip, then I said goodbye to the Colorado... glad that I had seen its wonders.

They are the product of a diseased mind, and they're invadin' the country worse than the black widow spider. Of course, their bite is not fatal to anything except your pocketbook, but if you happen to become inoculated with the doodle bug fever you are a goner, no foolin'.

There's no use in me tryin' to give you a description of the varmint except that the pesky critter was invented to dupe the unwary gold hunter into buying one or hiring the services of one of their dreamy-eyed trainers, and that they come in all shapes and sizes, from four pieces of ordinary copper gas line stuffed with who knows what, and used similar to the old Spanish divinin' rods, to the full-grown doodle bug made from the oil cup swiped from a horizontal engine when the grease ball wasn't lookin', the latter suspended from the end of a shade roller spring which should dangle from the hand of the trainer until it starts to sway and then stretch out in the direction of the mother lode.

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS CLASSICS

Of course, I'm admittin' that there is a high-priced contraption, all rigged up with wires and radio outfit, which our engineers use in locatin' ore bodies deep in the old copper mines. But I'm not quarrelin' with that outfit. They must be good or they would be thrown out. The ones I'm writin' about are the pocket models such as the one the writer and Foxtail Johnston used in locatin' the petrified rainbow up Grand Canyon way. The native habitat of the doodle bugs is Los Angeles and environs, but they are gradually creeping their slimy way through the greasewoods into Arizona. One particularly vicious specimen attached itself to me a few years ago.

I admit he snagged me in a near-vital spot, and I had quite a time shuckin' him, but I finally did after a most thrilling incident which I will chronicle here. Since then various others have got to me with varied results. I'll set them down also, so you can judge whether I'm plumb loco or just havin' a little fun at my own expense mostly. When I was a kid back in Michigan, I used to hunt rabbits with a hound dog and a ferret, and it never entered my mind that I'd ever chase gold with a doodle bug as a helper until one day, at the foot of the Superstitions, a wary-eyed pilgrim popped out of the mesquite with a doodad swingin' from his hand which looked like David's sling-shot. I didn't know whether to cut down on him or let him live and suffer. This one was from Arkansaw, and believe me he had the much-touted Arkansaw mule trader beat both ways from the ace.

I don't expect I'll ever live this down, but time is sort of takin' the edge off of what happened in the next few minutes. We set out across Tex Barkley's pasture, hopes high as the doodle bug in the hands of its trainer started a slow, sort of wobbly, swinging toward Weavers Needle. Course, I'd always kinda had a hunch that the Dutchman's mine was in that vicinity, so I fell for this bug like a walnut divin' for earth after a heavy frost.

The closer we got to the foot of the ridge, goin' north, the harder the doodle bug worked. By the time we had crawled through the pasture fence, the thing was swingin' up to plumb horizontal and was draggin' the king of the doodle bugs off his feet, except when we were goin' downhill and the gravity was, or seemed to be, greater.

I was gettin' worried, and I could see that the cussed thing was sorta gettin' out of hand, so to speak, so I kept as close as I could to the point of the wedge that was sweepin' everything out of the way in our mad rush toward the hillside and riches. We was just clearin' the top of a sharp little ridge when my new-found friend let out a yelp and swung his head around to give me the most agonized look I ever saw on the face of a man. It was then I noticed that his feet was plumb off the ground, and he started sailin' off across space out of control. I missed his hind feet by a few inches as he sailed into the air, but undaunted in my effort to save him, I took out after the squirmin', kickin', yellin' cyclone, and just as I was out of wind and givin' up all hope of savin' him from I didn't know what, he sailed into and snagged himself in a clump of catclaw brush on a ridge a little higher than the one we'd just left.

I made a flyin' tackle and hooked him just as his Levi's gave way. We were safe for the moment, but the attraction of that vast body of ore was so much stronger in our new position, I seen that we were not going to be able to hang on much longer. I hated to tell him to let go of the doodle bug, but also I did not relish the idea of having our brains beaten out on the rocks as we would be dragged along. Fear for my own life finally got the best of me, and I yelled: "Leggo the darned thing!"

"I can't," sez he. It was then I saw that he'd got the thing did up to his wrist with a clove hitch.

"Help! Help!" I bawled as loud as I could. There was a slim chance that Tex would be workin' my burros out of his pasture where they usually hung out when I couldn't find them. Not a hoofbeat did I hear comin' to our rescue. Then I thought of my old Colt. I snatched it out with my right hand while I clung for dear life to my friend's hind leg with my left, and blazed away. Those three shots brought results. I could hear a scurry of shod hooves, and then Tex came bargin' out of the brush, rope swingin'. He snagged one of my feet then threw me hispiggin' string and suggested that I tie our human balloon up to a mesquite that was handy to his feet. I did so and was just easin' to my feet to meet Tex's grin when I heard a tearin' sound behind me. There went my hopes, sailin' into space again, the doodle bug leadin' by the length of the shade roller spring attached to his wrist. The stump had pulled out of the ground due to the attraction of that doodle bug for the Dutchman's mine.

Tex dug spurs into his horse and raced uphill as fast as his cayuse could pelt, coiling his rope as he flew across the scenery. If the doodle bug king hadn't caught at times in the treetops on his way over the mountain, Tex would never have reached the divide in time to have roped our friend as he just cleared the ridge. It took three dallies to hold our Zeppelin, and Tex could not haul him in, so they had to wait until I could clamber up the hill and lay to on the lass rope with my 200 pounds. The added weight was just too