The Describer's Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations (30 page)

Suddenly the water heaved and a round, shining, black thing like a cannon-ball came into sight. Then he saw eyes and mouth—a puffing mouth bearded with bubbles. More of the thing came up out of the water. It was gleaming black. Finally it splashed and wallowed to the shore and rose, steaming, on its hind legs—six or seven feet high and too thin for its height, like everything in Malacandra. It had a coat of thick black hair, lucid as seal-skin, very short legs with webbed feet, a broad beaver-like or fish-like tail, strong forelimbs with webbed claws or fingers, and some complication half-way up the belly which Ransom took to be its genitals. It was something like a penguin, something like an otter, something like a seal; the slenderness and flexibility of the body suggested a giant stoat. The great round head, heavily whiskered, was mainly responsible for the suggestion of seal; but it was higher in the forehead than a seal’s and the mouth was smaller.

I am not a naturalist, nor have we on board a book of zoology, so the most I can do is to describe him. He is almost my height (nearly five feet ten inches) and appears to be sturdily built. Feet and hands are human in appearance except that they have a bulbous, skew, arthritic look common to monkeys. He is muscular and covered with fine reddish-brown hair. One can see the whiteness of his tendons when he stretches an arm or leg. I have mentioned the sharp, dazzling white teeth, set in rows like a trap, canine and pointed. His face is curiously delicate, and covered with orange hair leading to a snow-white crown of fur. My breath nearly failed when I looked into his eyes, for they are a bright, penetrating blue.

The eyes of the buffalo were glazing over, his tongue stuck out, and blood was streaming into the dry ground. Round and round the dead beast Clint walked, looking again and again at the great black head with its short shiny dark horns, the shaggy shoulders and breast, the tufts of hair down the forelegs.

Adela Pingsford said nothing, but led the way to her garden. It was normally a fair-sized garden, but it looked small in comparison with the ox, a huge mottled brute, dull red about the head and shoulders, passing to dirty white on the flanks and hind-quarters, with shaggy ears and large bloodshot eyes.

No coral snake this, with slim, tapering body, ringed like a wasp with brilliant colors; but thick and blunt with lurid scales, blotched with black; also a broad, flat murderous head, with stony, ice-like, whity-blue eyes, cold enough to freeze a victim’s blood in its veins and make it sit still, like some wide-eyed creature carved in stone, waiting for the sharp, inevitable stroke—so swift, at last, so long in coming.

Sometimes King Pellinore could be descried galloping over the purlieus after the Beast, or with the Beast after him if they happened to have got muddled up. Cully lost the vertical stripes of his first year’s plumage and became greyer, grimmer, madder, and distinguished by smart horizontal bars where the long stripes had been.

In contrast, the common dolphin (
Delphinus delphis
) often leaps from the water and plays in the bow waves of boats. Its taller dorsal fin has a curved trailing edge. Also called the saddleback, Delphinus has a black back, white belly and distinctive crisscross pattern along the sides.

With renewed enthusiasm I dug on and was soon rewarded by the sight of the inhabitant—a gopher tortoise. Reaching into the tunnel, I grasped one stubby foreleg and tried to pull it out but found that it had apparently wedged itself so tightly in the narrow passage that I was forced to dig again. Eventually I dug around the specimen and hauled the struggling creature out. It was an adult, about eight inches across and slate-black in color. Its feet were elephant-like and bore blunt claws instead of toes, an ideal arrangement for digging. Its dome-like carapace was set with diamond-shaped plates in which the yearly growth rings or zones could clearly be discerned.

Weighing only about seven pounds, the southern gray fox is smaller than the better-known red fox. Its grizzled, salt-and-pepper-gray body, with rusty red along the sides and neck, is about two feet long; the black-tipped bushy gray tail, with a black streak along its top, adds another twelve or fourteen inches to the fox’s length. He stands not much more than a foot above the ground at the shoulders, and when he trots, his paw marks along his trail are about eleven inches apart.

But this was not a beaver. Although its fur, like a beaver‘s, was rich brown and glossy, I could see that the animal was smaller. Besides, I knew muskrats on sight, having trapped them when I was a boy. This one weighed about three pounds—they weigh from one and a half to four pounds—and it was about twenty inches long from the tip of its moist black nose to the end of its naked tail. The nine-inch tail, had I any doubt of what the animal was, identified it for me: a black, slender, thinner-then-high tail; not the wide, flat, boardlike tail of a beaver.

Barred owls are beginning to call as the raccoons first look out of their tree hollows at oncoming night. Their rounded furry ears point forward then back, catching every sound—the snap of a twig under a deer’s hoof, the far baying of a distant hound, the lightest tread of a passing fox, the faintest squeak of a shrew or a mouse. As they peer dark-eyed from their black-masked faces, they lift their slender muzzles to sniff the night.