Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (570 page)

First published in
Universe 10
, August 1980

My car was broken, and I had a class to teach at eleven. So I took the city bus, something I rarely do.

I spent last summer crawling through The Big Thicket with cameras and tape recorder, photographing and taping two of the last ivory-billed woodpeckers on the earth. You can see the films at your local Audubon Society showroom.

This year I wanted something just as flashy but a little less taxing. Perhaps a population study on the Bermuda cahow, or the New Zealand takahe. A month or so in the warm (not hot) sun would do me a world of good. To say nothing of the advance of science.

I was idly leafing through Greenway’s Extinct and Vanishing Birds of the World. The city bus was winding its way through the ritzy neighborhoods of Austin, stopping to let off the chicanas, black women, and Vietnamese who tended the kitchens and gardens of the rich.

“I haven’t seen any of those ugly chickens in a long time,” said a voice close by.

A grey-haired lady was leaning across the aisle toward me.

I looked at her, then around. Maybe she was a shopping-bag lady. Maybe she was just talking. I looked straight at her. No doubt about it, she was talking to me. She was waiting for an answer.

“I used to live near some folks who raised them when I was a girl,” she said. She pointed.

I looked down at the page my book was open to.

What I should have said was: “That is quite impossible, madam. This is a drawing of an extinct bird of the island of Mauritius. It is perhaps the most famous dead bird in the world. Maybe you are mistaking this drawing for that of some rare Asiatic turkey, peafowl, or pheasant. I am sorry, but you are mistaken.”

I should have said all that.

What she said was, “Oops, this is my stop,” and got up to go.

My name is Paul Linberl. I am twenty-six years old, a graduate student in ornithology at the University of Texas, a teaching assistant. My name is not unknown in the field. I have several vices and follies, but I don’t think foolishness is one of them.

The stupid thing for me to do would have been to follow her.

She stepped off the bus.

I followed her.

* * * *

I came into the departmental office, trailing scattered papers in the whirlwind behind me. “Martha! Martha!” I yelled.

She was doing something in the supply cabinet.

“Jesus, Paul! What do you want?”

“Where’s Courtney?”

“At the conference in Houston. You know that. You missed your class. What’s the matter?”

“Petty cash. Let me at it!”

“Payday was only a week ago. If you can’t…”

“It’s business! It’s fame and adventure and the chance of a lifetime! It’s a long sea voyage that leaves…a plane ticket. To either Jackson, Mississippi or Memphis. Make it Jackson, it’s closer. I’ll get receipts! I’ll be famous. Courtney will be famous. You’ll even be famous! This university will make even more money! I’ll pay you back. Give me some paper. I gotta write Courtney a note. When’s the next plane out? Could you get Marie and Chuck to take over my classes Tuesday and Wednesday? I’ll try to be back Thursday unless something happens. Courtney’ll be back tomorrow, right? I’ll call him from, well, wherever. Do you have some coffee?…”

And so on and so forth. Martha looked at me like I was crazy. But she filled out the requisition anyway.

“What do I tell Kemejian when I ask him to sign these?”

“Martha, babe, sweetheart. Tell him I’ll get his picture in Scientific American.”

“He doesn’t read it.”

“Nature, then!”

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

* * * *

The lady I had followed off the bus was named Jolyn (Smith) Jimson. The story she told me was so weird that it had to be true. She knew things only an expert, or someone with firsthand experience, could know. I got names from her, and addresses, and directions, and tidbits of information. Plus a year: 1927.

And a place: northern Mississippi.

I gave her my copy of the Greenway book. I told her I’d call her as soon as I got back into town. I left her standing on the corner near the house of the lady she cleaned for twice a week. Jolyn Jimson was in her sixties.

* * * *

Think of the dodo as a baby harp seal with feathers. I know that’s not even close, but it saves time.

In 1507, the Portuguese, on their way to India, found the (then unnamed) Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean—three of them a few hundred miles apart, all east and north of Madagascar.

It wasn’t until 1598, when that old Dutch sea captain Cornelius van Neck bumped into them, that the islands received their names—names which changed several times through the centuries as the Dutch, French, and English changed them every war or so. They are now know as Rodriguez, Réunion, and Mauritius.

The major feature of these islands were large flightless birds, stupid, ugly, bad-tasting birds. Van Neck and his men named them dod-aarsen, stupid ass, or dodars, silly birds, or solitaires.

There were three species—the dodo of Mauritius, the real grey-brown, hooked-beak clumsy thing that weighed twenty kilos or more; the white, somewhat slimmer dodo of Réunion; and the solitaires of Rodriguez and Réunion, which looked like very fat, very dumb light-colored geese.

The dodos all had thick legs, big squat bodies twice as large as a turkey’s, naked faces, and big long downcurved beaks ending in a hook like a hollow linoleum knife. They were flightless. Long ago they had lost the ability to fly, and their wings had degenerated to flaps the size of a human hand with only three or four feathers in them. Their tails were curly and fluffy, like a child’s afterthought at decoration. They had absolutely no natural enemies. They nested on open ground. They probably hatched their eggs wherever they happened to lay them.

No natural enemies until van Neck and his kind showed up. The Dutch, French, and Portuguese sailors who stopped at the Mascarenes to replenish stores found that besides looking stupid, dodos were stupid. They walked right up to them and hit them on the head with clubs. Better yet, dodos could be herded around like sheep. Ship’s logs are full of things like: “Party of ten men ashore. Drove half-a-hundred of the big turkey-like birds into the boat. Brought to ship where they are given the run of the decks. Three will feed a crew of 150.”

Even so, most of the dodo, except for the breast, tasted bad. One of the Dutch words for them was walghvogel, disgusting bird. But on a ship three months out on a return from Goa to Lisbon, well, food was where you found it. It was said, even so, that prolonged boiling did not improve the flavor.

That being said, the dodos might have lasted, except that the Dutch, and later the French, colonized the Mascarenes. These islands became plantations and dumping-places for religious refugees. Sugar cane and other exotic crops were raised there.

With the colonists came cats, dogs, hogs, and the cunning Rattus norvegicus and the Rhesus monkey from Ceylon. What dodos the hungry sailors left were chased down (they were dumb and stupid, but they could run when they felt like it) by dogs in the open. They were killed by cats as they sat on their nests. Their eggs were stolen and eaten by monkeys, rats, and hogs. And they competed with the pigs for all the low-growing goodies of the islands.

The last Mauritius dodo was seen in 1681, less than a hundred years after man first saw them. The last white dodo walked off the history books around 1720. The solitaires of Rodriguez and Réunion, last of the genus as well as the species, may have lasted until 1790. Nobody knows.

Scientists suddenly looked around and found no more of the Didine birds alive, anywhere.

* * * *

This part of the country was degenerate before the first Snopes ever saw it. This road hadn’t been paved until the late fifties, and it was a main road between two county seats. That didn’t mean it went through civilized country. I’d traveled for miles and seen nothing but dirt banks red as Billy Carter’s neck and an occasional church. I expected to see Burma Shave signs, but realized this road had probably never had them.

I almost missed the turn-off onto the dirt and gravel road the man back at the service station had marked. It led onto the highway from nowhere, a lane out of a field. I turned down it and a rock the size of a golf ball flew up over the hood and put a crack three inches long in the windshield of the rent-a-car I’d gotten in Grenada.

It was a hot muggy day for this early. The view was obscured in a cloud of dust every time the gravel thinned. About a mile down the road, the gravel gave out completely. The roadway turned into a rutted dirt pathway, just wider than the car, hemmed in on both sides by a sagging three-strand barbed-wire fence.

In some places the fenceposts were missing for a few meters. The wire lay on the ground and in some places disappeared under it for long stretches.

The only life I saw was a mockingbird raising hell with something under a thorn bush the barbed wire had been nailed to in place of a post. To one side now was a grassy field which had gone wild, the way everywhere will look after we blow ourselves off the face of the planet. The other was fast becoming woods—pine, oak, some black gum and wild plum, fruit not out this time of the year.

I began to ask myself what I was doing here. What if Ms. Jimson were some imaginative old crank who—but no. Wrong, maybe, but even the wrong was worth checking. But I knew she hadn’t lied to me. She had seem incapable of lies—good ol’ girl, backbone of the South, of the earth. Not a mendacious gland in her being.

I couldn’t doubt her, or my judgment, either. Here I was, creeping and bouncing down a dirt path in Mississippi, after no sleep for a day, out on the thin ragged edge of a dream. I had to take it on faith.

The back of the car sometimes slid where the dirt had loosened and gave way to sand. The back tire stuck once, but I rocked out of it. Getting back out again would be another matter. Didn’t anyone ever use this road?

The woods closed in on both sides like the forest primeval, and the fence had long since disappeared. My odometer said six miles and it had been twenty minutes since I’d turned off the highway. In the rearview mirror, I saw beads of sweat and dirt in the wrinkles of my neck. A fine patina of dust covered everything inside the car. Clots of it came through the windows.

The woods reached out and swallowed the road. Branches scraped against the windows and the top. It was like falling down a long dark leafy tunnel. It was dark and green in there. I fought back an atavistic urge to turn on the headlights. The roadbed must have been made of a few centuries of leaf mulch. I kept constant pressure on the accelerator and bulled my way through.

Half a log caught and banged and clanged against the car bottom. I saw light ahead. Fearing for the oil pan, I punched the pedal and sped out.

I almost ran through a house.

It was maybe ten yards from the trees. The road ended under one of the windows. I saw somebody waving from the corner of my eye.

I slammed on the brakes.

A whole family was on the porch, looking like a Walker Evans Depression photograph, or a fever dream from the mind of a Hee Haw producer. The house was old. Strips of peeling paint a yard long tapped against the eaves.

“Damned good thing you stopped,” said a voice. I looked up. The biggest man I had ever seen in my life leaned down into the driver’s-side window.

“If we’d have heard you sooner, I’d’ve sent one of the kids down to the end of the driveway to warn you,” he said.

Driveway?

His mouth was stained brown at the corners. I figured he chewed tobacco until I saw the sweet-gum snuff brush sticking from the pencil pocket in the bib of his overalls. His hands were the size of catchers’ mitts. They looked like they’d never held anything smaller than an axe handle.

“How y’all?” he said, by the way of introduction.

“Just fine,” I said. I got out of the car.

“My name’s Lindberl,” I said, extending my hand. He took it. For an instant, I thought of bear traps, sharks’ mouths, closing elevator doors. The thought went back to wherever it is they stay.

“This is the Gudger place?” I asked.

He looked at me blankly with his grey eyes. He wore a diesel truck cap, and had on a checked lumberjack shirt beneath his overalls. His rubber boots were the size of the ones Karloff wore in
Frankenstein.

“Naw, I’m Jim Bob Krait. That’s my wife Jenny, and there’s Luke and Skeeno and Shirl.” He pointed to the porch.

The people on the porch nodded.

“Lessee? Gudger? No Gudgers round here I know of. I’m sorta new here,” I took that to mean he hadn’t lived here for more than twenty years or so.

“Jennifer!” he yelled. “You know of anybody named Gudger?” To me he said, “My wife’s lived around here all her life.”

His wife came down onto the second step of the porch landing. “I think they used to be the ones what lived on the Spradlin place before the Spradlins. But the Spradlins left around the Korean War. I didn’t know any of the Gudgers myself. That’s while we was living over to Water Valley.”

“You an insurance man?” asked Mr. Krait.

“Uh…no,” I said. I imagined the people on the porch leaning toward me, all ears. “I’m a…I teach college.”

“Oxford?” asked Krait.

“Uh, no. University of Texas.”

“Well, that’s a damn long way off. You say you’re looking for the Gudgers?”

“Just their house. The area. As your wife said, I understand they left during the Depression, I believe.”