Atlantis and Other Places (8 page)

And then, from the edge of a meadow, Harris called, “John! Come quick! I’ve found it!”

“Mon Dieu!”
Audubon crashed toward him, his heart thumping and thudding in his chest. “Is it, Edward?” he asked. “Is it a—?”

“See for yourself.” Harris pointed out to the curved lump of meat that lay in the middle of the grass and weeds.

“Mon Dieu,”
Audubon said again, softly this time, and crossed himself. “It is a dead honker. It
is
. And where there are dead ones, there must be live ones as well.”

“Stands to reason,” Harris said, “unless this one here is the very last of its kind.”

“Bite your tongue, you horrible man. Fate wouldn’t be so cruel to me.” Audubon hoped—prayed—he was right. He walked out to the huge dead bird.

If any large scavengers had been at the corpse, Harris—or Audubon’s noisy passage through the woods—had scared them off. Clouds of flies still buzzed above it, though, while ants and beetles took their share of the odorous bounty. Audubon stood upwind, which helped some, but only so much.

This wasn’t one of the truly enormous honkers that had wandered the eastern plains before men found Atlantis. It was an upland species, and probably hadn’t been as tall as Audubon or weighed much more than twice as much as he did. A great wound in the center of its back—now boiling with maggots—told how it died. That was surely a blow from a red-crested eagle: perhaps the one Audubon and Harris had shot, perhaps another.

“Can you draw from this one?” Harris asked.

Regretfully, Audubon shook his head. “I fear not. It’s too far gone.” His sensitive stomach heaved. Even with the ground firm under his feet, the stench nauseated him.

“I was afraid you’d say that,” Harris said. “Shall we take specimens—bones and feathers and such—so we have
something
to bring back in case we don’t run into any live honkers?”

Messing about with the dead, reeking bird was the last thing Audubon wanted to do. “We
will
find live ones,” he said. Harris didn’t answer. He just stolidly stood there and let Audubon listen to himself and know he couldn’t be certain he was right. The artist glared at him. “But I suppose we should preserve what specimens we can, in the interest of science.”

Pulling feathers from the honker wasn’t too bad. The black ones on its neck and the white patch under the chin testified to its affinity to Canada geese. The feathers on the body, though, were long and shaggy, more hairlike than similar to the plumage of birds gifted with flight.

Getting the meat from the bones and then cleaning them . . . Audubon’s poor stomach couldn’t stand the strain. He lost his breakfast on the green meadow grass and then dry-heaved helplessly for a while. A little rill ran through the meadow not far away. Perhaps the honker was going out to drink there when the eagle struck.

Audubon rinsed his mouth with cold, clear water from the rill . . . upstream from where Harris washed rotting flesh from the honker’s right femur. The thighbone was larger and stouter than his own. Gathering himself, Audubon went back to the corpse to free the bird’s pelvis. He brought it back to the rill to clean it. How long would his hands reek of decay? How long would his clothes? Would he ever be able to wear this outfit again? He doubted it. As he worked, he tried not to look at what he was doing.

His hands, then, told him of something odd: a hole in the bone on the left side of the pelvis that wasn’t matched on the right. That did make him look. Sure enough, the hole was there, and a shallow groove leading to it. “See what I have here,” he said to Harris.

His friend examined it, then asked, “What do you make of that?”

“Don’t you think it comes from the claw of the red-crested eagle?” Audubon said. “You saw the talons on the bird. One could pierce the flesh above the bone, and then the bone itself. This is plainly a very recent wound: notice how rough the bone is all around the edge. It had no chance to heal.”

After considering, Harris nodded. “I’d say you’re right. I’d say you have to be right. You might almost have seen the eagle flying at the honker.”

“I wish I would have!” Audubon held up the still-stinking pelvis. “I’ll have to draw this. It holds too much information to be easily described in words.”

“Let Mr. Owen look to his laurels, then,” Harris said.

“I’ll do the best I can, that’s all,” Audubon said. The detailed scientific illustration would have to be pen and ink, not charcoal or watercolor. It would also have to be unrelentingly precise. He couldn’t pose the pelvis, except to show the perforation to best advantage, and he couldn’t alter and adjust to make things more dramatic. His particular gift lay in portraying motion and emotion; he would have to eschew them both here. He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “An artist should be versatile, eh?”

“I know you can do it.” Harris showed more confidence in him than he had in himself.

The smell of rotting honker came closer to spooking the horses than the eagle’s blood had a couple of days before. The packhorse that carried Audubon’s artistic supplies didn’t want to let him anywhere near it. It didn’t even want sugar from his stinking hand. He counted himself lucky to take what he needed without getting kicked.

He set the honker hipbone in the sun, then started sketching with a pencil. He tried and rubbed out, tried and rubbed out. Sweat ran down his face, though the day was fine and mild. This was ever so much harder—for him, anyway—than painting would have been. It seemed like forever before what he set down on paper bore any resemblance to the specimen that was its model.

When he was finally satisfied, he held up the sketch to show it to Harris, only to discover his friend had gone off somewhere and he’d never noticed. Painting took far less concentration. It left room for artistry. This . . . This was a craft, and one in which he knew himself to be imperfectly skilled.

He’d just inked his pen for the first time when Harris’ shotgun boomed. Would that be supper or another specimen?
I’ll find out
, Audubon thought, and set about turning his shades of gray into black and white. He had to turn the pelvis to compensate for the way shadows had shifted with the moving sun while he worked.

Harris fired again. Audubon heard the blast, but didn’t consciously register it. His hand never twitched. A fine line here, shading there to show a hollow, the exact look of the gouge the eagle’s claw had dug before piercing the pelvis where the bone thinned . . .

“We’ve got supper,” Harris said. Audubon nodded to show he heard. Harris went on, “And here’s something for you to work on when you’re done there.”

That made Audubon look up. Along with a plump oil thrush, Harris carried a small, grayish, pale-bellied bird with a black cap. “An Atlantean tit!” Audubon said. The bird was closely allied to the tits of England and Europe and to Terranovan chickadees. Naturalists disagreed about which group held its nearest kin. At the moment, though, he was just glad he would be able to sketch and paint; to feel; to let imprecision be a virtue, not a sin. “Yes, that will be a change—and a relief.”

“How’s the drawing coming?” Harris asked. Audubon showed him. Harris looked from the paper to the pelvis and back again. After a moment, he silently lifted his broad-brimmed felt hat from his head, a salute Audubon cherished more than most wordier ones.

“Bones are all very well,” the artist said, “but I want the chance to draw honkers from life!”

 

 

Audubon began to despair of getting what he wanted. He began to believe Harris’ gibe was right, and he’d come along just in time to find the last honker in the world moldering in the meadow. Could fate be so cruel?

Whenever he started to fret, Harris would say, “Well, we’ve got something, anyway. We didn’t know for sure we’d get anything at all when we set out.” Every word of that was true, and it always made Audubon feel worse, not better.

He spent several days haunting the meadow where his friend found the dead honker, hoping it was part of a flock or a gaggle or whatever the English word for a group of honkers was. No others showed up, though. He found no fresh tracks in the mud by the rill. At last, sorrowfully, he decided the dead bird must have been alone.

“What if it
was
the last one?” he said. “To miss it by a few days . . . Why couldn’t we have shot the eagle sooner? Then the honker would still be alive!”

He waited for Harris to be grateful again for what they had. But Harris surprised him, saying, “No use worrying about it. We don’t
know
that eagle got that honker, anyhow.”

“Well, no,” Audubon admitted upon reflection. “Maybe it was some other villainous eagle instead.” He got most affronted when Harris laughed at him.

Even though he was forced to admit to himself that honkers weren’t going to visit the meadow, he was loath to leave it. He knew at least one live bird had frequented it up until mere days before. About what other spot in all Atlantis—in all the world—could he say the same?

He kept looking back over his shoulder long after he and Harris rode away. “Don’t worry,” said Harris, the optimist born. “Bound to be better land ahead.”

“How do you know that?” Audubon demanded.

Harris surprised him by having an answer: “Because as best I can tell, nobody’s ever come this way before. We’re on a track now, not a road. I haven’t seen any hoofprints besides the ones our horses are leaving for a couple of hours now.”

Audubon blinked. He looked around—
really
looked around.
“Nom d’un nom!”
he murmured. “So it would seem.” Pines and cycads and ginkgoes crowded close together on either side of the track. The air was fragrant with scents whose like he would find nowhere else. “This might almost be the antediluvian age, or another world altogether. What do you suppose made our trail?”

“Anywhere else, I’d say deer. That may be so here, too, but I haven’t seen any sign of them—no tracks, no droppings,” Harris said. “Oil thrushes? Some of the other big flightless birds they have here? Maybe even honkers—who knows?”

That was enough to make Audubon dismount and minutely examine the surface of the trail in the hope of finding honker tracks. With their size and with the vestigial webbing between their toes, they were unmistakable. He found none. He did see oil-thrush footprints, as Harris had suggested: they reminded him of those of the European blackbird or Terranovan robin, except for being three or four times as large. And he saw a fox’s pads, which stood out against the spiky background of bird tracks. Imported creatures penetrated even here, to the wild heart of Atlantis.

But of course
, he thought.
Harris and I are here, aren’t we? And we’re no less fond of an oil-thrush supper than foxes are
.

A splash of vivid green on the side of a redwood sapling caught his eye as he rode past. At first, he thought it was some strange Atlantean fungus clinging to the trunk. Then, ever so slowly, it moved. “A cucumber slug!” Harris exclaimed.

The slug was almost the size of a cucumber, though Audubon would have fought shy of eating anything of that iridescent hue. Though it was neither bird nor viviparous quadruped, he stopped and sketched it. It was a curiosity, and one little known to naturalists—few of them penetrated to the cool, humid uplands where it lived. Eyestalks waving, it glided along the trunk, leaving behind a thumb-wide trail of slime.

“Maybe we’ll come across some of those snails that are almost as big as your fist, too,” Harris said.

“A shame to do it now, when we have no garlic butter.” Audubon might draw the line at a cucumber slug, but he was fond of
escargots
. Harris, a Terranovan born and bred, made a horrible face. Audubon only laughed.

They rode on. The tracks they followed were never made by man. They twisted this way and that and doubled back on themselves again and again. Whenever Audubon came out into the open, he scanned the stretch of grass ahead with eager hope. How he longed to see honkers grazing there, or pulling leaves from tender young trees! How disappointed he was, again and again!

“Maybe that
was
the last honker in this part of Atlantis,” he mourned as he and Harris made camp one night. “Maybe it was the last honker in all of Atlantis.”

“Maybe it was,” his friend replied. Audubon, toasting an oil-thrush drumstick over the flames, glared at him. The least Harris could do was sympathize. But then he continued, “We’ve come too far and we’ve done too much to give up so soon, haven’t we?”

“Yes,” Audubon said. “Oh, yes.”

 

 

As the scents were different in this mostly pristine Atlantean wilderness, so too were the sounds. Enormous frogs boomed out their calls an octave lower than even Terranovan bullfrogs, let alone the smaller frogs of Europe. When Audubon remarked on them, Harris said, “I suppose you’re sorry about the garlic butter there, too.”

“Why, yes, now that you mention it,” the painter said placidly. His friend screwed up his face again.

The big green katydids that might almost have been mice were noisier than rodents would have been, though some of their squeaks sounded eerily mouselike. But most of their chirps and trills showed them to be insects after all. Their calls made up the background noise, more notable when it suddenly ceased than when it went on.

Audubon heard birdsongs he’d never imagined. Surely some of those singers were as yet nondescript, new to science. If he could shoot one, sketch it and paint it, bring back a type specimen . . . He did shoot several warblers and finches, but all, so far as he knew, from species already recognized.

Then he heard the scream of a red-crested eagle somewhere far off to the north. He reined in and pointed in that direction. “We go there,” he declared, in tones that brooked no argument.

Harris argued anyhow: “It’s miles away, John. We can’t hope to find just where it is, and by the time we get there it’ll be somewhere else anyhow.”