Atlantis and Other Places (5 page)

The slow, deep drumming came from thirty feet up a dying pine. Harris pointed. “There he is, John! D’you see him?”

“I’m not likely to miss him, not when he’s the size of a raven,” Audubon answered. Intent on grubs under the bark, the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker went on drumming. It was a male, which meant its crest was also scarlet. A female’s crest would have been black, with a forward curl the male’s lacked. That also held true for its close relatives on the Terranovan mainland, the ivory-bill and the imperial woodpecker of Mexico.

Audubon dismounted, loaded his shotgun, and approached the bird. He could get closer to the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker than he could have to one of its Terranovan cousins. Like the oil thrush, like so many other Atlantean birds, the woodpecker had trouble understanding that something walking along on the ground could endanger it. Ivory-bills and imperial woodpeckers were less naive.

The woodpecker raised its head and called. The sound was high and shrill, like a false note on a clarinet. Audubon paused with the gun on his shoulder, waiting to see if another bird would answer. When none did, he squeezed the trigger. The shotgun boomed, belching fireworks-smelling smoke.

With a startled squawk, the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker tumbled out of the pine. It thrashed on the ground for a couple of minutes, then lay still. “Nice shot,” Harris said.

“Merci,”
Audubon answered absently.

He picked up the woodpecker. It was still warm in his hands, and still crawling with mites and bird lice. No one who didn’t handle wild birds freshly dead thought of such things. He brushed his palm against his trouser leg to get rid of some of the vagrants. They didn’t usually trouble people, who weren’t to their taste, but every once in a while . . .

A new thought struck him. He stared at the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker. “I wonder if the parasites on Atlantean birds are as different as the birds themselves, or if they share them with the birds of Terranova.”

“I don’t know,” Harris said. “Do you want to pop some into spirits and see?”

After a moment, Audubon shook his head. “No, better to let someone who truly cares about such things take care of it. I’m after honkers, by God, not lice!”

“Nice specimen you took there, though,” his friend said. “Scarlet-cheeks are getting scarce, too.”

“Not so much forest for them to hunt in as there once was,” Audubon said with a sigh. “Not so much of anything in Atlantis as there once was—except men and farms and sheeps.” He knew that was wrong as soon as it came out of his mouth, but let it go. “If we don’t show what it was, soon it will be no more, and then it will be too late to show. Too late already for too much of it.”
Too late for me?
he wondered.
Please, let it not be so!

“You going to sketch now?” Harris asked.

“If you don’t mind. Birds are much easier to pose before they start to stiffen.”

“Go ahead, go ahead.” Harris slid down from his horse. “I’ll smoke a pipe or two and wander around a bit with my shotgun. Maybe I’ll bag something else you can paint, or maybe I’ll shoot supper instead. Maybe both—who knows? If I remember right, these Atlantean ducks and geese eat as well as any other kind, except canvasbacks.” He was convinced canvasback ducks, properly roasted and served with loaf sugar, were the finest fowl in the world. Audubon wasn’t so sure he was wrong.

As Harris ambled away, Audubon set the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker on the grass and walked over to one of the packhorses. He knew which sack held his artistic supplies: his posing board and his wires, his charcoal sticks and precious paper.

He remembered how, as a boy, he’d despaired of ever portraying birds in realistic poses. A bird in the hand was all very well, but a dead bird looked like nothing but a dead bird. It drooped, it sagged, it cried its lifelessness to the eye.

When he studied painting with David in France, he sometimes did figure drawings from a mannequin. His cheeks heated when he recalled the articulated bird model he’d tried to make from wood and cork and wire. After endless effort, he produced something that might have done duty for a spavined dodo. His friends laughed at it. How could he get angry at them when he wanted to laugh at it, too? He ended up kicking the horrible thing to pieces.

If he hadn’t thought of wires . . . He didn’t know what he would have done then. Wires let him position his birds as if they were still alive. The first kingfisher he’d posed—he knew he was on to something even before he finished. As he set up the posing board now, a shadow of that old excitement glided through him again. Even the bird’s eyes had seemed to take on life again once he posed it the way he wanted.

As he worked with wires now to position the woodpecker as it had clung to the tree trunk, he wished he could summon more than a shadow of the old thrill. But he’d done the same sort of thing too many times. Routine fought against art. He wasn’t discovering a miracle now. He was . . . working.

Well, if you’re working, work the best you can
, he told himself. And practice did pay. His hands knew almost without conscious thought how best to set the wires, to pose the bird. When his hands thought he was finished, he eyed the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker. Then he moved a wire to adjust its tail’s position. It used those long, stiff feathers to brace itself against the bark, almost as if it had hind legs back there.

He began to sketch. He remembered the agonies of effort that went into his first tries, and how bad they were despite those agonies. He knew others who’d tried to paint, and who gave up when their earlier pieces failed to match what they wanted, what they expected. Some of them, from what he’d seen, had a real gift. But having it and honing it . . . Ah, what a difference! Not many were stubborn enough to keep doing the thing they wanted to do even when they couldn’t do it very well. Audubon didn’t know how many times he’d almost given up in despair. But when stubbornness met talent, great things could happen.

The charcoal seemed to have a life of its own as it moved across the page. Audubon nodded to himself. His line remained as strong and fluid as ever. He didn’t have the tremors and shakes that marked so many men’s descent into age—not yet. Yet how far away from them was he? Every time the sun rose, he came one day closer. He sketched fast, racing against his own decay.

Harris’ shotgun bellowed. Audubon’s hand did jump then. Whose wouldn’t, at the unexpected report? But that jerky line was easily rubbed out. He went on, quick and confident, and had the sketch very much the way he wanted it by the time Harris came back carrying a large dead bird by the feet.

“A turkey?” Audubon exclaimed.

His friend nodded, face wreathed in smiles. “Good eating tonight!”

“Well, yes,” Audubon said. “But who would have thought the birds could spread so fast? They were introduced in the south. . . . It can’t be more than thirty years ago, can it? And now you shoot one here.”

“They give better sport than oil thrushes and the like,” Harris said. “At least they have the sense to get away if they see trouble coming. The sense God gave a goose, you might say—except He didn’t give it to all the geese here, either.”

“No,” Audubon said. Some of Atlantis’ geese flew to other lands as well, and were properly wary. Some stayed on the great island the whole year round. Those birds weren’t. Some of them flew poorly. Some couldn’t fly at all, having wings as small and useless as those of the oil thrush.

Honkers looked uncommonly like outsized geese with even more outsized legs. Some species even had black necks and white chin patches reminiscent of Canada geese. That frankly puzzled Audubon: it was as if God were repeating Himself in the Creation, but why? Honkers’ feet had vestigial webs, too, while their bills, though laterally compressed, otherwise resembled the broad, flat beaks of ordinary geese.

Audubon had seen the specimens preserved in the museum in Hanover: skeletons, a few hides, enormous greenish eggs. The most recent hide was dated 1803. He wished he hadn’t remembered that. If this was a wild goose chase, a wild honker chase . . . Then it was, that was all. He was doing all he could. He only wished he could have done it sooner. He’d tried. He’d failed. He only hoped some possibility of success remained.

Harris cleaned the turkey and got a fire going. Audubon finished the sketch. “That’s a good one,” Harris said, glancing over at it.

“Not bad,” Audubon allowed—he
had
caught the pose he wanted. He gutted the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker so he could preserve it. Not surprisingly, the bird’s stomach was full of beetle larvae. The very name of its genus,
Campephilus
, meant
grub-loving
. He made a note in his diary and put the bird in strong spirits.

“Better than that,” Harris said. He cut up the turkey and skewered drumsticks on twigs.

“Well, maybe,” Audubon said as he took one of the skewers from his friend and started roasting the leg. He wasn’t shy of praise—no, indeed. All the same, he went on, “I didn’t come here for scarlet-cheeked woodpeckers. I came for honkers, by God.”

“You take what you get.” Harris turned his twig so the drumstick cooked evenly. “You take what you get, and you hope what you get is what you came for.”

“Well, maybe,” Audubon said again. He looked east, toward the still poorly explored heart of Atlantis. “But the harder you work, the likelier you are to get what you want. I hope I can still work hard enough. And”—he looked east once more—“I hope what I want is still there to get.”

 

 

He and Harris stayed on the main highway for most of a week. The broad, well-trodden path let them travel faster than they could have on narrower, more winding roads. But when Audubon saw the Green Ridge Mountains rising over the eastern horizon, the temptation to leave the main road got too strong to resist.

“We don’t want to go into the mountains anywhere near the highway,” he declared. “We know no honkers live close to it, or people would have seen them,
n’est-ce pas
?”

“Stands to reason,” Harris said loyally. He paused before adding, “I wouldn’t mind another couple of days of halfway decent inns, though.”

“When we come back with what we seek, the Hesperian Queen will be none too good,” Audubon said. “But we go through adversity to seek our goal.”

Harris sighed. “We sure do.”

On the main highway, fruit trees and oaks and chestnuts and elms and maples thrived. They were all imports from Europe or from Terranova. Audubon and Harris hadn’t gone far from the highway before Atlantean flora reasserted itself: ginkgoes and magnolias, cycads and pines, with ferns growing in profusion as an understory. Birdsongs, some familiar, others strange, doubled and redoubled as the travelers moved into less settled country. Atlantean birds seemed more comfortable with the trees they’d lived in for generations uncounted than with the brash newcomers men brought in.

Not all the newcomers clung to the road. Buttercups and poppies splashed the improbably green landscape with color. Atlantean bees buzzed around the flowers that had to be unfamiliar to them . . . or maybe those were European honeybees, carried to the new land in the midst of the sea to serve the plants men needed, wanted, or simply liked. Curious, Audubon stopped and waited by some poppies for a closer look at the insects. They were, without a doubt, honeybees. He noted the fact in his diary. It left him oddly disappointed but not surprised.

“In another hundred years,” he said, climbing back onto his horse, “how much of the old Atlantis will be left? Any?”

“In another hundred years,” Harries replied, “it won’t matter to either of us, except from beyond the Pearly Gates.”

“No, I suppose not.” Audubon wondered if he had ten years left, or even five, let alone a hundred. “But it should matter to those who are young here. They throw away marvels without thinking of what they’re doing. Wouldn’t you like to see dodos preserved alive?” He tried not to recall his unfortunate bird model.

“Alive? Why, I can go to Hanover and hear them speechifying,” Harris said. Audubon snorted. His friend waved a placating hand. “Let it go, John. Let it go. I take your point.”

“I’m so glad,” Audubon said with sardonic relish. “Perhaps the authorities here—your speechifying dodos—could set up parks to preserve some of what they have.” He frowned. “Though how parks could keep out foxes and weasels and rats and windblown seeds, I confess I don’t know. Still, it would make a start.”

They slept on the grass that night. The throaty hoots of an Atlantean ground owl woke Audubon somewhere near midnight. He loaded his shotgun by the faint, bloody light of the campfire’s embers, in case the bird came close enough for him to spot it. Ground owls were hen-sized, more or less. They could fly, but not well. They hunted frogs and lizards and the outsized katydids that scurried through the undergrowth here. Nothing hunted them—or rather, nothing had hunted them till foxes and wild dogs and men came to Atlantis. Like so many creatures here, they couldn’t seem to imagine they might become prey. Abundant once, they were scarce these days.

This one’s call got farther and farther away. Audubon thought about imitating it to lure the ground owl into range of his charge. In the end, he forbore. Blasting away in the middle of the night might frighten Harris into an apoplexy. And besides—Audubon yawned—he was still sleepy himself. He set down the shotgun, rolled himself in his blanket once more, and soon started snoring again.

 

 

When Audubon woke the next morning, he saw a mouse-sized katydid’s head and a couple of greenish brown legs only a yard or so from his bedroll. He swore softly: the ground owl
had
come by, but without hooting, so he never knew. If he’d stayed up . . .
If I’d stayed up, I would be useless today
, he thought. He needed regular doses of sleep much more than he had twenty years earlier.

“I wouldn’t have minded if you fired on an owl,” Harris said as he built up the fire and got coffee going. “We’re here for that kind of business.”