Atlantis and Other Places (9 page)

“We go north,” Audubon said, as if his friend hadn’t spoken. “The eagle may fly away, but if honkers are nearby they won’t. They can’t.”

“If.” Edward Harris packed a world of doubt into one small word.

“You said it yourself: we’ve come too far and done too much to give up hope.” If that wasn’t precisely what Harris had said, Audubon preferred not to be reminded of it. Harris had the sense to recognize as much.

Going north proved no easier than going in any other cardinal direction. Audubon swore in English, French, and occasionally Spanish when game tracks swerved and led him astray. The red-crested eagle had fallen silent after that one series of screeches, so it told him nothing about how much farther he needed to come.
Maybe it’s killed again. Maybe it’s feasting
, he thought. Even a freshly dead honker might do.

He and Harris came to a stream like a young river. Those Goliath frogs croaked from the rocks. “Can we ford it?” Audubon asked.

“We’d better look for a shallow stretch,” the ever-sensible Harris said.

They found one half a mile to the west, and forded the stream without getting the horses’ bellies wet. He unfolded a map of northern Atlantis. “Which stream do you suppose this is?” he said. “It should be big enough to show up here.”

Harris put on reading glasses to peer at the map. “If it was ever surveyed at all,” he said, and pointed. “It might be a tributary of the Spey. That’s about where we are.”

“I would have guessed it flows into the Liffey myself.” Audubon pointed, too.

“Next one farther north? Well, maybe,” Harris said. “The way we’ve been wandering lately, we could be damn near anywhere. Shall we go on?” Without waiting for an answer, he urged his horse forward. Audubon got his mount moving, too.

Not long after the murmur of the stream and the frogs’ formidable calls—what Aristophanes would have done with them!—faded in the distance, Audubon heard what he first thought were geese flying by. He’d ridden out onto a grassy stretch a little while before. He looked north to see if he could spot the birds, but had no luck.

Harris was peering in the same direction, his face puzzled. “Geese—but not quite geese,” he said. “Sounds like trumpet music played on a slide trombone.”

“It does!” For a moment, Audubon simply smiled at the comparison. Then, sudden wild surmise in his eye, he stared at his friend. “Edward, you don’t suppose—?”

“I don’t know,” Harris said, “but we’d better find out. If they aren’t honkers, they could be nondescript geese, which wouldn’t be bad, either. Audubon’s geese, you could call them.”

“I could,” said Audubon, who’d never had less interest in discovering a new species. “I could, yes, but . . . I’m going to load my gun with buckshot.” He started doing just that.

“Good plan.” So did Harris.

Keep calling. Please keep calling
, Audubon thought, again and again, as they rode through the forest toward the sound. The birds—whatever they were—did keep up the noise, now quietly, now rising to an angry peak as if a couple of males were quarreling over a female, as males were likely to do in spring.

When Audubon thought they’d come close enough, he slid down off his horse, saying, “We’d best go forward on foot now.” He carried not only his gun but also charcoal sticks and paper, in case . . . Harris also dismounted. Audubon believed he would have brained him with the shotgun had he argued.

After perhaps ten minutes, Harris pointed ahead. “Look. We’re coming to an open space.” Audubon nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He too saw the bright sunshine that told of a break in the trees. The birdcalls were very loud now, very near. “Would you call that honking?” Harris asked. Audubon only shrugged and slid forward.

He peered out from in back of a cycad at the meadow beyond . . . at the meadow, and at the honkers grazing on it. Then they blurred: tears of joy ran down his face.

 

 

“Blessed art Thou, O Lord, Who hast preserved me alive to see such things,” he whispered, staring and staring.

Harris stood behind a small spruce a few feet away. “Isn’t that something. Isn’t that
something
?” he said, his words more prosaic than his friend’s but his tone hardly less reverent.

Eight honkers grazed there, pulling up grass with their bills: two males, Audubon judged, and half a dozen smaller females. The birds had a more forward-leaning posture than did the mounted skeletons in the Hanover museum. That meant they weren’t so tall. The males probably could stretch their heads up higher than a man, but it wouldn’t be easy or comfortable for them.

And then they both moved toward the same female, and did stretch their necks up and up and up, and honked as loudly as ever they could, and flapped their tiny, useless wings to make themselves seem big and fierce. And, while they squabbled, the female walked away.

Audubon started sketching. He didn’t know how many of the sketches he would work up into paintings and how many would become woodcuts or lithographs. He didn’t care, either. He was sketching honkers from life, and if that wasn’t heaven it was the next best thing.

“Which species are they, do you suppose?” Harris asked.

Once, at least a dozen varieties of honker had roamed Atlantis’ plains and uplands. The largest couple of species, the so-called great honkers, birds of the easily accessible eastern lowlands, went extinct first. Audubon had studied the remains in Hanover and elsewhere to be ready for this day. Now it was here, and he still found himself unsure. “I . . . believe they’re what’s called the agile honker,” he said slowly. “Those are the specimens they most resemble.”

“If you say they’re agile honkers, why then, they are,” Harris said. “Anyone who thinks otherwise will have to change his mind, because you’ve got the creatures.”

“I want to be right.” But Audubon couldn’t deny his friend had a point. “A shame to have to take a specimen, but ...”

“It’ll feed us for a while, too.” The prospect didn’t bother Harris. “They
are
supposed to be good eating.”

“True enough.” When Audubon had all the sketches he wanted of grazing honkers and of bad-tempered males displaying, he stepped out from behind the cycad. The birds stared at him in mild surprise. Then they walked away. He was something strange, but they didn’t think he was particularly dangerous. Atlantean creatures had no innate fear of man. The lack cost them dearly.

He walked after them, and they withdrew again. Harris came out, too, which likely didn’t help. Audubon held up a hand. “Stay there, Edward. I’ll lure them back.”

Setting down his shotgun, he lay on his back in the sweet-smelling grass, raised his hips, and pumped his legs in the air, first one, then the other, again and again, faster and faster. He’d made pronghorn antelope on the Terranovan prairie curious enough to approach with that trick. What worked with the wary antelope should work for agile honkers as well. “Are they coming?” he asked.

“They sure are.” Harris chuckled. “You look like a damn fool—you know that?”

“So what?” Audubon went on pumping. Yes, he could hear the honkers drawing near, hear their calls and then hear their big, four-toed feet tramping through the grass.

When he stood up again, he found the bigger male only a few feet away. The honker squalled at him; it didn’t care for anything on two legs that was taller than it. “Going to shoot that one?” Harris asked.

“Yes. Be ready if my charge doesn’t bring it down,” Audubon said. Point-blank buckshot should do the job. Sometimes, though, wild creatures were amazingly tenacious of life.

Audubon raised the shotgun. No, the agile honker had no idea what it was. This hardly seemed sporting, but his art and science both required it. He pulled the trigger. The gun kicked against his shoulder. The male let out a last surprised honk and toppled. The rest of the birds ran off—faster than a man, probably as fast as a horse, gabbling as they went.

Harris came up beside Audubon. “He’s down. He won’t get up again, either.”

“No.” Audubon wasn’t proud of what he’d done. “And the other male can have all the females now.”

“He ought to thank you, eh?” Harris leered and poked Audubon in the ribs.

“He’d best enjoy them while he can.” Audubon stayed somber. “Sooner or later—probably sooner—someone else will come along and shoot him, too, and his lady friends with him.”

By then, the rest of the honkers had gone perhaps a hundred yards. When no more unexpected thunder boomed, they settled down and started grazing again. A few minutes later, a hawk soared by overhead—not a red-crested eagle, but an ordinary hawk far too small to harm them. Still, its shadow panicked them more thoroughly than the shotgun blast had. They sprinted for the cover of the trees, honking louder than they did when Audubon fired.

“Would you please bring my wires, Edward?” the artist asked. “No posing board with a bird this size, but I can truss him up into lifelike postures.”

“I’ll be back directly,” Harris said. He took longer than he promised, but only because instead of carrying things himself he led up the packhorses. That gave Audubon not only the wires but also his watercolors and the strong spirits for preserving bits of the agile honker. If he and Harris did what he’d told the customs man they wouldn’t do and drank some of the spirits instead of using them all as preservatives . . . Well, how else could they celebrate?

Audubon soon got to work. “This may be the last painting I ever do,” he said. “If it is, I want to give my best.”

“Don’t be foolish. You’re good for another twenty years, easy,” Harris said.

“I hope you’re right.” Audubon left it there. No matter what he hoped, he didn’t believe it, however much he wished he did. He went on, “And this may be the last view of these honkers science ever gets. I owe it to them to give my best, too.”

He wired the dead male’s neck and wings into the pose it took when challenging its rival. He had the sketches he’d made from life to help him do that. His heart pounded as he and Harris manhandled the honker. Ten years earlier, or even five, it wouldn’t have seemed so hard. No, he didn’t think he had twenty more left, or anything close to that.

Live for the moment, then
, he told himself.
It’s all there is
. His eye still saw; his hand still obeyed. If the rest of him was wearing out like a steamboat that had gone up and down the Big Muddy too many times . . . then it was. When people remembered him, it would be for what his eye saw and his hand did. The rest? The rest mattered only to him.

And when people remembered agile honkers from now on, that too would be for what
his
eye saw and what
his
hand did. Even more than he had with the red-crested eagle, he felt responsibility’s weight heavy on his shoulders.

The other honkers came out from the trees and began grazing again. Some of them drew close to where he worked. Their calls when they saw him by the male’s body seemed to his ear curious and plaintive. They knew their fellow was dead, but they couldn’t understand why Audubon stood near the corpse. Unlike a hawk’s shadow, he was no danger they recognized.

The sun was setting when he looked up from his work. “I think it may do,” he said. “The background will wait for later.”

Harris examined the honker on the paper, the honker vibrant with the life Audubon had stolen from its model. He set a hand on the painter’s shoulder. “Congratulations. This one will last forever.”

“Which is more than I will. Which is more than the birds will.” Audubon looked down at the dead honker, agile no more. “Now for the anatomical specimens, and now for the dark meat. Poor thing, it will be all flyblown by this time tomorrow.”

“But your painting will keep it alive,” Harris said.

“My painting will keep its memory alive. It’s not the same.” Audubon thought again about how his heart had beat too hard, beat too fast. It was quieter now, but another twenty years? Not likely. “No, it’s not the same.” He sighed. “But it’s all we have. A great pity, but it is.” He drew his skinning knife. “And now for the rest of the job ...”

BEDFELLOWS

There are photographers. There are strobing flashes. They know ahead of time there will be. They leave their rented limo and walk across the Boston Common toward the State House hand in hand, heads held high. They’re in love, and they want to tell the world about it.

W is tall, in a conservative—compassionate, oh yes, but conservative—gray suit with television-blue shirt and maroon neck-tie. O is taller, and his turban lends him a few extra inches besides. His
shalwar kamiz
is of all-natural fabrics. He’s trimmed his beard for the occasion—just a little, but you can tell.