“Those were your pictures? December 1919?”
Guilford gave the snake herder a longer look. “Are you a member of the Society, Mr., uh, Erasmus?”
“Just call me Erasmus. You?”
“Guilford Law.”
“Well, Mr. Guilford Law, I’m not a member of the National Geographic Society, but the magazine comes upriver once in a while. I take it in trade. Reading material is hard to come by. I have your photographs.” He hesitated. “These pictures of my stock — they’ll be published?”
“Perhaps,” Guilford said. “I don’t make those decisions.”
“I see.” Erasmus pondered the possibilities. Then he drew in a great gulp of the heavy kraal air. “Would you care to come back to my cabin, Guilford Law? Now that Finch is gone, maybe we can talk.”
Guilford admired the snake farmer’s collection of National Geographic stacked on a wooden shelf — fifteen issues in all, most of them water-stained and dog-eared, some held together with binding twine, sharing space with equally tattered obscene postcards, cheap Westerns, and a recent Argosy Guilford hadn’t seen. He praised the meager library and said nothing about the pressed-earth floor, the reek of crudely cured hides, the oven-like heat and dim light, or the filthy trestle table decorated with evidence of meals long finished.
At Erasmus’ prodding Guilford reminisced for a time about Deep Creek Canyon, the Gallatin River, Walcott’s tiny fossil crustaceans: crayfish from the siliceous shale, unbelievably ancient, unless you accepted Finch’s caveats about the age of the Earth. The irony was that Erasmus, an old Darwinian hand who had been born in Milwaukee and lived downstream from the alien Rheinfelden, found the idea of Montana creek beds intensely exotic.
Talk drifted at last to the subject of Preston Finch. “Don’t mean to offend,” Erasmus said, “but he’s a pompous blowhard, and that’s that. Wants twenty head of snake at ten dollars a head, if you can imagine such a thing.”
“The price isn’t fair?”
“Oh, the price is fair — more than fair, actually; that’s not the problem.”
“You don’t want to sell twenty head?”
“Sure I do. Twenty head at that price would keep me through the winter.”
“Then, if I may ask, what’s the problem?”
“Finch! Finch is the problem! He comes into my home with his nose in the air and talks to me like I’m a child. Finch! I wouldn’t sell Preston Finch a road apple for a fortune if I was starving.”
Guilford considered the impasse. “Erasmus,” he said finally, “we can do more and go farther with those animals than without. The more successful the survey, the more likely you are to see my photographs in print. Maybe even in the Geographic.”
“My animals?”
“Your animals and you yourself, if you’re willing to pose.”
The snake breeder stroked his beard. “Well. Well. I might pose. But it makes no difference. I won’t sell my animals to Finch.”
“I understand. What if I asked you to sell them to me?”
Erasmus blinked and slowly smiled. “Then maybe we have the making of a bargain. But look, Guilford Law, there’s more to it. The animals will carry your boats above the Falls and you can probably follow the river as far as the Bodensee, but if you want pack animals into the Alps someone will have to herd them from above the falls to the shore of the lake.”
“You can do that?”
“I’ve done it before. Lot of herds winter there. That’s where most of my stock comes from. I would be willing to do it for you, sure — for a price.”
“I’m not authorized to negotiate, Erasmus.”
“Bullshit. Let’s talk terms. Then you can go dicker with the treasury or whatever you have to do.”
“All right… but one more thing.”
“What?”
“Are you willing to part with that Argosy on your shelf?”
“Eh? No. Hardly. Not unless you have something to trade for it.”
Well, Guilford thought, maybe Dr. Farr wouldn’t miss his copy of Diluvian and Noachian Geognosy.
Erasmus’ farm below the Rheinfelden. His kraal, the fur snakes. Erasmus with his herd. Storm clouds rising in the NW; Tom Compton predicts rain.
Postscriptum. With the aid of our “Martian mules” we will be able to portage the folding motor-launches — clever light constructions, white oak and Michigan pine, sixteen-footers with watertight storage and detachable skags — and travel above the cascades probably as far as Lake Constance (which Erasmus calls the Bodensee). All that we have collected and learned to date sails back to J’ville with the Weston.
Preston Finch I think resentful of my parley with Erasmus — he looks at me from under his solar topee like an irritable Jehovah — but Tom Compton seems impressed: he is at least willing to speak to me lately, not just suffer my presence on Sullivan’s account. Even offered me a draw on his notorious spittle-drenched pipe, which I politely declined, though perhaps that put us back to Square One — he has taken to waving his oilcloth bag of dried leaf at me laughing in a manner not altogether flattering.
We march in the morning if weather is at all reasonable. Home seems farther away than ever, the land grows stranger by the day.
Chapter Nine
Caroline adjusted to the rhythms of her uncle Jered’s household, strange as those rhythms were. Like London, or most of the world these days, there was something provisional about her uncle’s home. He kept odd hours. Often it was left to Alice (and more often now, Caroline herself) to mind the store. She found herself learning the uses of nuts and bolts, of winches and penny nails and quicklime. And there was the mildly entertaining enigma of Colin Watson, who slept on a cot in the storeroom and crept in and out of the building like a restless spirit. Periodically he would take an evening meal at the Pierce table, where he was faultlessly polite but about as talkative as a brick. He was gaunt, not gluttonous, and he blushed easily, Caroline thought, for a soldier. Jered’s table talk was sometimes coarse.
Lily had adjusted easily enough to her new environment, less easily to the absence of her father. She still asked from time to time where Daddy was. “Across the English Channel,” Caroline told her, “where no one has been before.”
“Is he safe?”
“Very safe. And very brave.”
Lily asked about her father most often at bedtime. It was Guilford who had always read to her, a ritual that left Caroline feeling faintly and unreasonably jealous. Guilford read to Lily with a wholeheartedness Caroline couldn’t match, distrustful as she was of the books Lily liked, their unwholesome preoccupation with fairies and monsters. But Caroline took up the task in his absence, mustering as much enthusiasm as she could. Lily needed the reassurance of a story before she could wholly relax, abandon vigilance, sleep.
Caroline envied the simplicity of the ritual. Too often, she carried her own burden of doubt well into the morning hours.
Still, the summer nights were warm and the air rich with a fragrance that was, though strange, not entirely unpleasant. Certain native plants, Jered said, blossomed only at night. Caroline imagined alien poppies, heavy-headed, narcotic. She learned to leave her bedroom window open and let the flowered breezes play over her face. She learned, as the summer progressed, to sleep more easily.
It was Lily’s sleeplessness, as July waned, that served as notice that something had changed in Jered’s house.
Lily with dark bands beneath her eyes. Lily picking dazedly at breakfast. Lily silent and grim at the dinner table, cringing away from Caroline’s uncle.