Atlantis and Other Places (6 page)

“Good of you to say so,” Audubon replied. “It could be that I will have other chances.”

“And it could be that you won’t. You were the one who said the old Atlantis was going under. Grab with both hands while it’s here.”

“With the honkers, I intend to,” Audubon said. “If they’re there to be grabbed, grab them I shall. The ground owl . . . Well, who knows if it would have come when I hooted?”

“I bet it would. I never knew a soul who could call birds better than you.” Harris took a couple of squares of hardtack out of an oilcloth valise and handed one to Audubon. The artist waited till he had his tin cup of coffee before breakfasting. He broke his hardtack into chunks and dunked each one before eating it. The crackers were baked to a fare-thee-well so they would keep for a long time, which left them chewier than his remaining teeth could easily cope with.

As he and his friend got ready to ride on, he looked again at the remains of the giant katydid. “I really ought to get some specimens of those,” he remarked.

“Why, in heaven’s name?” Harris said. “They aren’t birds, and they aren’t viviparous quadrupeds, either. They aren’t quadrupeds at all.”

“No,” Audubon said slowly, “but doesn’t it seem to you that here they fill the role mice play in most of the world?”

“Next time I see me a six-legged chirping mouse with feelers”—Harris wiggled his forefingers above his eyes—“you can lock me up and lose the key, on account of I’ll have soused my brains with the demon rum.”

“Or with whiskey, or gin, or whatever else you can get your hands on,” Audubon said. Harris grinned and nodded. As Audubon saddled his horse, he couldn’t stop thinking about Atlantean katydids and mice.
Something
had to scurry through the leaves and eat whatever it could find there, and so many other creatures ate mice . . . or, here, the insects instead. He nodded to himself. That was worth a note in the diary whenever they stopped again.

They rode into a hamlet a little before noon. It boasted a saloon, a church, and a few houses. BIDEFORD HOUSE OF UNIVERSAL DEVOTION, the church declared. Strange Protestant sects flourished in Atlantis, not least because none was strong enough to dominate—and neither was his own Catholic Church.

But the saloon, in its own way, was also a house of universal devotion. Bideford couldn’t have held more than fifty people, but at least a dozen men sat in there, drinking and eating and talking. A silence fell when Audubon and Harris walked in. The locals stared at them. “Strangers,” somebody said; he couldn’t have sounded much more surprised had he announced a pair of kangaroos.

Not surprisingly, the man behind the bar recovered fastest. “What’ll it be, gents?” he asked.

Harris was seldom at a loss when it came to his personal comforts. “Ham sandwich and a mug of beer, if you please.”

“That sounds good,” Audubon said. “The same for me, if you’d be so kind.”

“Half an eagle for both of you together,” the proprietor said. Some of the regulars grinned. Even without those telltale smiles, Audubon would have known he was being gouged. But he paid without complaint. He could afford it, and he’d be asking questions later on, and priming the pump with more silver. He wanted the locals to see he could be openhanded.

The beer was . . . beer. The sandwiches, by contrast, were prodigies: great slabs of tender, flavorful ham on fresh-baked bread, enlivened by spicy mustard and pickles all but jumping with dill and garlic and something else, something earthy—an Atlantean spice?

Audubon hadn’t come close to finishing his—he had to chew slowly—when the man behind the bar said, “Don’t see too many strangers here.” Several locals—big, stocky, bearded fellows in homespun—nodded. So did Audubon, politely. The tapman went on, “Mind if I ask what you’re doing passing through?”

“I am John James Audubon,” Audubon said, and waited to see if anyone knew his name. Most places, he would have had no doubt. In Bideford . . . Well, who could say?

“The painter fella,” one of the regulars said.

“That’s right.” Audubon smiled, more relieved than he wanted to show. “The painter fella.” He repeated the words even though they grated. If the locals understood he was a prominent person, they were less likely to rob him and Harris for the fun of it. He introduced his friend.

“Well, what are you doing here in Bideford?” the proprietor asked again.

“Passing through, as you said,” Audubon replied. “I’m hoping to paint honkers.” This country was almost isolated enough to give him hope of finding some here—not quite, but almost.

“Honkers?” Two or three men said it at the same time. A heartbeat later, they all laughed. One said, “Ain’t seen any of them big fowl round these parts since Hector was a pup.”

“That’s right,” someone else said. Solemn nods filled the saloon.

“It’s a shame, too,” another man said. “My granddad used to say they was easy to kill, and right good eatin’. Lots of meat on ’em, too.” That had to be
why
no honkers lived near Bideford these days, but the local seemed ignorant of cause and effect.

“If you know of any place where they might dwell, I’d be pleased to pay for the information.” Audubon tapped a pouch on his belt. Coins clinked sweetly. “You’d help my work, and you’d advance the cause of science.”

“Half now,” the practical Harris added, “and half on the way back if we find what we’re looking for. Maybe a bonus, too, if the tip’s good enough.”

A nice ploy
, Audubon thought.
I have to remember that one
. The locals put their heads together. One of the older men, his beard streaked with gray, spoke up: “Well, I don’t know anything for sure, mind, but I was out hunting a few years back and ran into this fellow from Thetford.”
He
knew where Thetford was, but Audubon didn’t. A few questions established that it lay to the northeast. The Bideford man continued, “We got to gabbing, and he said he saw some a few years before that, off the other side of his town. Can’t swear he wasn’t lyin’, mind, but he sounded like he knew what he was talking about.”

Harris looked a question towards Audubon. The artist nodded. Harris gave the Bideford man a silver eagle. “Let me have your name, sir,” Harris said. “If the tip proves good, and if we don’t pass this way again on our return journey, we
will
make good on the rest of the reward.”

“Much obliged, sir,” the man said. “I’m Lehonti Kent.” He carefully spelled it out for Harris, who wrote it down in one of his notebooks.

“What can you tell me about the House of Universal Devotion?” Audubon asked.

That got him more than he’d bargained for. Suddenly everyone, even the most standoffish locals, wanted to talk at once. He gathered that the church preached the innate divinity of every human being and the possibility of transcending mere mankind—as long as you followed the preachings of the man the locals called the Reverend, with a very audible capital R.
Universal Devotion to the Reverend
, he thought. It all seemed to him the rankest, blackest heresy, but the men of Bideford swore by it.

“Plenty of Devotees”—another obvious capital letter—“in Thetford and other places like that,” Lehonti Kent said. He plainly had only the vaguest idea of places more than a couple of days’ travel from his home village.

“Isn’t that interesting?” Audubon said: one of the few phrases polite almost anywhere.

Because the Bidefordites wanted to preach to them, he and Harris couldn’t get away from the saloon for a couple of hours. “Well, well,” Harris said as they rode away. “Wasn’t that
interesting
?” He freighted the word with enough sarcasm to sink a ship twice the size of the
Maid of Orleans
.

Audubon’s head was still spinning. The Reverend seemed to have invented a whole new prehistory for Atlantis and Terranova, one that had little to do with anything Audubon thought he’d learned. He wondered if he’d be able to keep it straight enough to get it down in his diary. The Devotees seemed nearly as superstitious to him as the wild red Terranovan tribes—and they should have known better, while the savages were honestly ignorant. Even so, he said, “If Lehonti—what a name!—Kent gave us a true lead, I don’t mind the time we spent . . . too much.”

 

 

Thetford proved a bigger village than Bideford. It also boasted a House of Universal Devotion, though it had a Methodist church as well. A crudely painted sign in front of the House said, THE REVEREND PREACHES SUNDAY!! Two exclamation points would have warned Audubon away even if he’d never passed through Bideford.

He did ask after honkers in Thetford. No one with whom he talked claimed to have seen one, but a couple of men did say some people from the town had seen them once upon a time. Harris doled out more silver, but it spurred neither memory nor imagination.

“Well, we would have come this way anyhow,” Audubon said as they went on riding northeast. The Green Ridge Mountains climbed higher in the sky now, dominating the eastern horizon. Peering ahead with a spyglass, Audubon saw countless dark valleys half hidden by the pines and cycads that gave the mountains their name. Anything could live there . . . couldn’t it? He had to believe it could. “We have a little more hope now,” he added, as much to himself as to Harris.

“Hope is good,” his friend said. “Honkers would be better.”

The words were hardly out of his mouth before the ferns and cycads by the side of the road quivered . . . and a stag bounded across. Audubon started to raise his shotgun, but stopped with the motion not even well begun. For one thing, the beast was gone. For another, the gun was charged with birdshot, which would only have stung it.

“Sic transit gloria honkeris,”
Harris said.

“
Honkeris
?” But Audubon held up a hand before Harris could speak. “Yes,
honker
would be a third-declension noun, wouldn’t it?”

Little by little, the country rose toward the mountains. Cycads thinned out in the woods; more varieties of pines and spruces and redwoods took their places. The ferns in the undergrowth seemed different, too. As settlements thinned out, so did splashes of color from exotic flowers. The very air seemed different: mistier, moister, full of curious, spicy scents the nose would not meet anywhere else in the world. It felt as if the smells of another time were wafting past the travelers.

“And so they are,” Audubon said when that thought crossed his mind. “This is the air of Atlantis as it was, Atlantis before those fishermen saw its coast loom up out of the sea.”

“Well, almost,” Harris said. That he and Audubon and their horses were here proved his point. In case it didn’t, he pointed to the track down which they rode. The ground was damp—muddy in spots—for it had rained the day before. A fox’s pads showed plainly.

“How many birds has that beast eaten?” Audubon said. “How many ground-dwellers’ nests has it robbed?” Many Atlantean birds nested on the ground, far more than in either Europe or Terranova. But for a few snakes and large lizards, there were no terrestrial predators—or hadn’t been, before men brought them in. Audubon made another note in his diary. Till now, he hadn’t thought about the effect the presence or absence of predators might have on birds’ nesting habits.

Even here, in the sparsely settled heart of Atlantis, a great deal had been lost. But much still remained. Birdsongs filled the air, especially just after sunrise when Audubon and Harris started out each day. Atlantis had several species of crossbills and grosbeaks: birds with bills that seemed made for getting seeds out of cones and disposing of them afterwards. As with so many birds on the island, they were closely related to Terranovan forms but not identical to them.

Audubon shot a male green grosbeak in full breeding plumage. Lying in his hand, the bird, with its apple green back, warm cinnamon belly, and yellow eye streak, seemed gaudy as a seventeenth-century French courtier. But on the branch of a redwood, against the green foliage and rusty brown bark, it hadn’t been easy to spot. If it weren’t singing so insistently, chances were he would have ridden right past it.

At dusk, Harris shot an oil thrush. That wasn’t for research, though Audubon did save the skin. The long-billed flightless thrush had more than enough meat for both of them. The flavor put Audubon in mind of snipe or woodcock: not surprising, perhaps, when all three were so fond of earthworms.

Gnawing on a thighbone, Harris said, “I wonder how long these birds will last.”

“Longer than honkers, anyhow, because they’re less conspicuous,” Audubon said, and his friend nodded. He went on, “But you have reason—they’re in danger. They’re one more kind that nests on the ground, and how can they escape foxes and dogs that hunt by scent?”

Somewhere off in the distance, far beyond the light of the campfire, a fox yelped and yowled. Harris nodded. “There’s a noise that wasn’t heard here before the English brought them.”

“If it weren’t foxes, it would be dogs,” Audubon said sadly, and Harris’ head bobbed up and down once more. Atlantis was vulnerable to man and his creatures, and that was the long and short of it. “A pity. A great pity,” Audubon murmured. Harris nodded yet again.

 

 

The screech ripped across the morning air. Audubon’s horse snorted and tried to rear. He calmed it with hands and voice and educated thighs. “Good God!” Harris said. “What was that?”

Before answering, Audubon listened to the sudden and absolute silence all around. A moment before, the birds were singing their hearts out. As a lion’s roar was said to bring stillness to the African plains, so this screech froze the forests of Atlantis.

It rang out again, wild and harsh and fierce. Excitement tingled through Audubon. “I know what it is!” Despite the urgency in his voice, it hardly rose above a whisper. His gaze swung to the shotgun.
Have to charge it with stronger shot
, he thought.

“What?” Harris also whispered, hoarsely. As after a lion’s roar, talking out loud seemed dangerous.