"Gopher" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a nuisance about the houses where it is as omnivorous an eater as is its far-removed cousin, the house rat. The gopher is one of the mammals whose mark is more often seen than the creature itself. It lives like the mole in underground burrows, coming to the surface only to push up the dirt ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... Did I hear any mangy son-of-a-coyote guess he didn't believe no such guarantee? No, an' I guess he best not. I'm a man of peace, as all knows in this yer city, but I'd hate to try an' shut out a blizzard in winter by stuffin' that gopher's perforated carkis under the doorjamb when I was thro' with it. I say right here we're out to save carkises—I mean souls. An', say, fellers, jest think. Gettin' your souls saved for a few measly ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... not, however, have suited fastidious palates, because the little squirrel-like gophers which abounded everywhere, burrowing near by, fell into the well by scores, and we had no leisure to fish them out. Neither is there any mistaking the flavor of gopher extract. Meantime it grew hotter and drier, and I had to admit to myself that the crop might have been better, while Harry, to hide his misgivings, talked cheerfully about higher prices, until at last the ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... of dese hard-boiled wife-beaters, huh? Just a mean old woman-Jessie! If I don't lay a hearing on you, God's a gopher! Now what made ...
— Three Plays - Lawing and Jawing; Forty Yards; Woofing • Zora Neale Hurston
... once sat on a barberry twig, And turned at the crank of a thingum-a-jig. Needles for hornets, nippers for ants, For the bumblebee baby a new pair of pants, For the grizzled old gopher a hat and a wig, The beetle ground out of ...
— The Peter Patter Book of Nursery Rhymes • Leroy F. Jackson
... amusement to all. In the novel domains they now traversed the small dog's excitable nature led him to investigate everything that seemed suspicious, but he was so cowardly, in spite of this, that once when Patsy let him down to chase a gopher or prairie dog—they were not sure which—the animal turned at bay and sent Mumbles retreating with his stubby tail between his legs. His comradeship for Wampus surprised them all. The Canadian would talk seriously to the dog and tell it long stories ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... get back, and we have no time to wander round the homestead that day. Next morning you are up and out early to investigate something for yourself. I know quite well what it is, for you talked "gopher" ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... failed even to start; 40 percent failed from weak growth the first year or two; 10 percent from failure to maintain later growth; 16 percent were winter killed, and 3 or 4 percent died from rodent or similar (mole, gopher, deer, bear) injury. It is evident that by far the greatest losses were suffered within the first two years—not less than seventy percent. Probably more. It would seem that two years of intensive care should not be too burdensome a stint for a reward ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various
... Achates[Lat][obs3], pal, buddy, alter ego. [criminal law] confederate; accomplice; complice; accessory, accessory after the fact; particeps criminis[Lat]; socius criminis[Lat]. aide-de-camp, secretary, clerk, associate, marshal; right-hand, right- hand man, Friday, girl Friday, man Friday, gopher, gofer; candle-holder, bottle-holder; handmaid; servant &c. 746; puppet, cat's-paw, jackal|!. tool, dupe, stooge, ame damnee[Fr]; satellite, adherent. votary; sectarian, secretary; seconder, backer, upholder, abettor, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth. Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch. And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... she went on lamely. "I suppose a gopher peering from its hole in the ground would disturb ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... within reach of the North Carolina Cherokee or the Lake Superior Chippewa. Here is a list of their meats: Of flesh, at any time venison, often opossum, sometimes rabbit and squirrel, occasionally bear, and a land terrapin, called the "gopher," and pork whenever they wish it. Of wild fowl, duck, quail, and turkey in abundance. Of home reared fowl, chickens, more than they are willing to use. Of fish, they can catch myriads of the many kinds which teem in the inland waters of Florida, especially of the large bass, called ...
— The Seminole Indians of Florida • Clay MacCauley
... cut the conductor short with a grab at the other's arm that was like the shutting of a vise—and then bolted for his engine like a gopher for its hole. From down the track came the heavy, grumbling roar of a freight. Everybody flew then, and there was quick work done in the next half minute—and none too quickly done—the Limited was no more than on the siding when the fast freight rolled her long string ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... a dry summer—powerful dry," said the rancher, with a wink at his guests. "Zen, I think there's a bit of gopher poison in there yet, ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... way you are," replied Old Mother Nature. "It isn't a very close relationship, still you are related. All of you are Rodents. So are all the members of the Rat and Mouse family, the Beaver family, the Porcupine family, the Pocket Gopher family, the Pika family, ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... isle and shore the smoke of Indian teepees [a] rose; The hunter plied the silent oar; the forest lay in still repose. The moon-faced maid, in leafy glade, her warrior waited from the chase; The nut-brown, naked children played, and chased the gopher on the grass. The dappled fawn, on wooded lawn, peeped out upon the birch canoe, Swift-gliding in the gray of dawn along the silent waters blue. In yonder tree the great Wanm-dee [b] securely built her spacious nest; ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... morning she sewed a bit of gopher's fur on to his feather; and he ate a good breakfast of buffalo meat and tramped away over the prairie to the dancing ring. As soon as he came into the ring he turned into a gopher; but there were no gophers' holes there for him to hide ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... and belittled by old Rogers; content to go on his own idle, sunny way, playing with his small, chubby son, foraging the woods with a dozen small boys at his heels, working patiently over a broken gopher-trap or a rusty shotgun, for some small admirer. Worst of all, Barry had been intemperate, years ago, and there were people who believed that his occasional visits to San Francisco, now, were merely excuses for revels with ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... Association. These Indian boys had not money to give to the Sunday-school Society, but they saw a premium offered for killing gophers. They are a mischievous little animal, devouring a large amount of wheat, corn and other grain every year. The farmers pay two cents for each dead gopher. The proof that the gopher has been killed is his tail. Now these little Indian boys had been so interested in the story told of the work being done by the Sunday-school Society, that they spent their Saturday ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... was precisely the reason for the Guggenhammers and the big English concerns sending in their high-salaried experts. That was their scheme. That was why they had approached him for the sale of worked-out claims and tailings. They were content to let the small mine-owners gopher out what they could, for there would be millions ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... moments, placed this chair on deck just outside the starboard entrance to the engine room, loaded his pipe, laid his trusty monkey wrench across his knee and gave himself up to the contemplation of this riot we call life. He resembled a cat watching beside a gopher hole. By half-past three o'clock he had finished figuring out approximately the amount of money Mrs. Reardon would have in the Hibernia Bank at the end of five years—figuring on a monthly saving of fifty dollars and interest ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... Geographic variation in the pocket gopher, Cratogeomys castanops, in Coahuila, Mexico. By Robert J. Russell and Rollin H. Baker. Pp. 591-608. ...
— Birds from Coahuila, Mexico • Emil K. Urban
... riding, and his horse, stepping into a gopher hole, threw him. Frank was not seriously hurt, but the horse went lame, so that he could not be ridden. As this happened miles away from the house, and night was coming on, with a storm threatening, ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... slide," said Leo, after a time, "very old slide, not steep. Plenty gopher on that slide. Dig in dirt. Grizzlum he like eat gopher. Sometam he come there and dig gopher most all day. Maybe-so ketch 'um ...
— The Young Alaskans in the Rockies • Emerson Hough
... how I figure it," he was saying. "I had a little dough when I begun digging gopher holes in these here hills. Not much—say fifteen hundred, mebbe. I sure ain't got it now. Lost it in a hole in the ground. Well; I reckon I'll go on looking for ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... can go anywhere. It trails along the slope of shelving hills like a wild vine; it slides through gopher-hole tunnels as a thread slides through the eye of a needle; it utilizes water-courses; it turns ridiculously sharp corners in a style calculated to remind one of the days when he played "snap-the-whip" ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... fur-bearing smaller mammals of the north and north-west were wolves, foxes, lynxes, gluttons (wolverene), otters, martens (sables) and black fishing martens, mink (a kind of polecat), ermine-stoats, weasels, polar hares (Lepus timidus), beavers, musquash, lemming, gopher or pouched ground-squirrels, and the common red squirrel of North America. The grey squirrel and striped chipmunk are only found in ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... it up to them, and repeated several times the word "Noah." The Cossack grinned; but he was such a cheery, genial fellow that I think he would have grinned whatever I had said, and I cannot be sure that he took my meaning, and recognized the wood as a fragment of the true Ark. Whether it was really gopher wood, of which material the Ark was built, I will not undertake to say, but am willing to submit to the inspection of the curious the bit which I cut off with my ice-axe and brought away. Anyhow, it will be hard to prove that it is not gopher wood. And if there be ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... one and the atmosphere was very humid. After we had been on guard possibly an hour, John Officer and I riding in one direction on opposite sides of the herd, and The Rebel circling in the opposite, Officer's horse suddenly struck a gopher burrow with his front feet, and in a moment horse and rider were sprawling on the ground. The accident happened but a few rods from the sleeping herd, which instantly came to their feet as one steer, and were off like a flash. I was riding my ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... mother went in triumph to meet her progeny, and again showed the chambers in which they had been nursed to her now aging children! Their old homes were restored to their former inmates, and forthwith boards of cedar with shelves and beams of gopher wood are most skilfully planed; inscriptions of gold and ivory are designed for the several compartments, to which the volumes themselves are reverently brought and pleasantly arranged, so that no one hinders the entrance of another or injures its brother ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... geese, the calls of the ducks, the strange cries of the cranes as they soared with motionless wings high overhead, or rowed their way on with long slow strokes of their great wings, or danced their strange reels and cotillions in the twilight; and from the myriad voices of curlew, plover, gopher, bob-o-link, meadowlark, dick-cissel, killdeer and the rest—day-sounds and night-sounds, dawn-sounds and dusk-sounds—more inspiration than did the stolid Dutch boy plodding west across Iowa that spring of 1855, with his fortune ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... by over my head, making noises like someone snapping a bullwhip. I couldn't tell which direction they came from; I was too busy trying to stuff my feet into a gopher ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... field. The defenders had three heavy guns dismounted during the day, yet suffered little loss in men, for long before this nearly the whole garrison had accustomed themselves to take refuge in their caves and "gopher-holes" at the first sound of Union cannon, and to await its cessation as a signal to return to their posts at the parapet. They were not always so fortunate, however, for more than once it happened that three or four men were killed by the ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... bell for dat Meth'dis gopher dat's gointer be long long gone after dis trial. (laughter from ...
— De Turkey and De Law - A Comedy in Three Acts • Zora Neale Hurston
... characteristics, ready to wage this unequal battle to the death. But his brave fight was tragically hopeless. For all that his hundred and fifty pounds were, every ounce, lightning muscle and vibrant sinew, it was as if a gopher had waged war with a lynx. Yet by the law of his wild heart he could not turn and flee. His master—his stalwart god whose words thrilled him to the uttermost depths—had given his orders, and he must obey ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... three hundred yards from where Stone, rifle in hand, lay, and had reached the footpath leading from the bench to the creek bottom when Stone, half rising, covered him slowly with point-blank sights. In the path ahead, the dog had struck a fresh gopher hole and, still yelping, was pawing madly into it, when a rifle cracked. The man with the pail, swung violently half around by the shock of a spreading bullet, jerked convulsively and the pail flew clattering ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... the day after, shaking his head and saying he couldn't think what the world was coming to. As near as I could make him, his idea was that the world was going to be swamped with young ones if something wasn't done about it, like using squirrel poison or gopher traps. ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... carriage! The forehead, free from mainstay or coercion, Bends here, there, everywhere. But I, embracing Hatred, she lends,—forbidding, stiffly fluted, The ruff's starched folds that hold the head so rigid; Each enemy—another fold—a gopher, Who adds constraint, and adds a ray of glory; For Hatred, like the ruff worn by the Spanish, Grips like a vice, but frames you ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... few years was the whole series of hard-luck parables, with a few chapters from Job thrown in, and then one day he met old Jim. He seemed to cotton to Thorn from the jump. Explained to him that there was nothing in this digging gopher holes in the solid rock and eating Chinaman's grub for the sake of making niggers' wages. Allowed that he was letting other fellows dig the holes, and that he was selling them at a fair margin of profit to ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... minutes elapsed. A fearless blue-jay alighted on the bank and made a prospecting peck at the tobacco pouch. It yielded in favor of a gopher, who endeavored to draw it toward his hole, but in turn gave way to a red squirrel, whose attention was divided, however, between the pouch and the revolver, which he regarded with mischievous fascination. Then there was a splash, a grunt, a sudden ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... is what we keep them for, to hunt the gophers and rabbits and moles. They are clearing them out fast. Jim says by another spring there won't be a gopher on the place." ...
— The Hunter Cats of Connorloa • Helen Jackson
... interested in me romantic past, of course. Ain't I the 'cute little gopher when it comes to the ladies? Fan me, Collie, and slow music and a beer for ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs |
