“At one time?” Finch asked scornfully. “Do you mean 1913? Or 1915?”
Sullivan ignored him. “How old would you judge this specimen to be, Mr. Keck?”
“Couldn’t venture a guess. Obviously it’s neither fossilized nor weathered, so — relatively recent.”
“Which means we might run into one of these beasties on the hoof,” Ed Betts put in. “Keep your pistols loaded.”
Tom Compton had never seen a living sample of the creature, however, in all his wilderness experience, nor had the snake trader Erasmus — “Though people do disappear in the bush.”
“Resembles a bear,” Diggs said. “California grizzly, if that’s an adult specimen. Might be drawn to garbage and such. How about we police the camp a little more scientifically from now on?”
“Maybe they avoid people,” Sullivan said. “Maybe we frighten them.”
“Maybe,” Tom said. “But that jaw could swallow a man’s leg up to the knee and probably snap it at the joint. If we frighten them, it ought to be mutual.”
“We’ll double the night watch,” Finch decided.
Even Eden had its serpent, Guilford thought.
Come morning they set out across the gently rolling meadowland, southward toward the mountains. The fur snakes made passable riding animals — they didn’t mind bearing human cargo and would even respond to direction from a crude bridle — but their bodies were simply too wide to straddle comfortably (not to mention greasy and evil-smelling), and no one had yet invented a functional snake saddle. Guilford preferred to walk, even after the second day, when the march seemed infinitely more grueling, when calves and ankles and thighs made their most concerted protests.
The meadowed hills rolled steadily higher. Fresh water was harder to find now, though the snakes could sense a creek or pool from a mile’s distance. And the mountains on the horizon, subject of Keck’s relentless triangulation, were clearly a barrier: the end of the road, even if Finch and company found an accessible pass where Brenner or Mount Genevre had been. Then we turn around, Guilford thought, and take our pressed plants and punctured bugs back to America, and people will say we helped “tame” the continent, though that’s a joke: we’re a very small pinprick of knowledge on the skin of this unknown country.
But he was proud of what they had accomplished. We walked, he told the frontiersman, where no one else had walked, puzzled out at least a few of Darwinia’s secrets.
“We haven’t fucked the continent,” Tom Compton agreed, “but I guess we’ve lifted her skirts.”
Guilford trudged through the cool afternoon with Compton and Sullivan and their pack animals. Low clouds drifted across the sky, blindingly white at the margins, woolly gray beneath. His boots left brief imprints in the spongy meadow growth. Down a western slope of land Keck had spotted another insect midden, a ring of bone around a deceptively peaceful patch of green, like a troll’s garden, Guilford thought. They gave it a wide berth.
Tom Compton brooded on another matter. “There have been campfires behind us the last couple of nights,” he said. “Five, six miles back. I don’t know what that means.”
“Partisans?” Sullivan asked.
“Probably just hunters, maybe followed us up past the Rheinfelden — followed Erasmus, more likely, poaching on his territory. The Partisans, they’re mostly coast pirates out of the rogue settlements. They don’t come inland as a rule, unless they’re hunting or prospecting, which makes them less likely to practice politics at gunpoint.”
“Still,” Sullivan said, “I liked it better when we were alone.”
“So did I,” the frontiersman said.
Hill camp by a nameless creek. Land rising visibly now. Distant snow-capped alpine range. Stands of forest, mostly mosque trees, a new plant, a small bush with hard inedible yellow berries. (Not true berries, Sullivan says, but that’s what they look like.) Stiff cooling wind keeps the billyflies away, or perhaps they simply don’t care for the altitude.
Postscriptum. Looking north at dinnertime I see what seems like all of Darwinia: a wonderful melancholy tapestry of light shadow as the sun westers. Reminds me of Montana — equally vast empty, though not so stark; cloaked in mild green, a rich and living land, however strange.
Caroline, I think of your patience in London without me, minding Lily, putting up with Jered’s moods and Alice’s uncommunicative nature. I know how much you hated my trip out West, and that was when you still had the comforts of Boston to console you. I trust it is worth the discomfort, that my work will be in greater demand when we’re finally back home, that the upshot will be a better more secure future for both my ladies.
Curious dreams lately, Caroline. I repeatedly dream I am wearing a military uniform, walking alone in some sere wasteland of a battlefield, lost in smoke mud. So real! Almost the quality of a memory, though of course no such thing has happened to me, the Civil War stories I heard at the family table were frankly less visceral.
Expeditionary madness, perhaps? Dr. Sullivan also reports odd dreams, even Tom Compton grudgingly admits that his sleep is troubled.
But how could I sleep comfortably without you next to me? In any case, daylight chases away the dreams. By day our only dream is of the mountains, their blue-white peaks our new horizon.
Tom Compton was standing watch at dawn, when the Partisans attacked.
He sat at the embers of a fire with Ed Betts, a rotund man whose chin kept drifting toward his chest. Betts didn’t know how to keep himself awake. Tom did. The frontiersman had stood these watches before, usually alone, wary of robbers or claim jumpers, especially when he hunted the coal country. It was a trick of the mind, to put away sleep until later. It was a skill. Betts didn’t have it.
Still, there was no warning when the first shots came from the dim woods to the east. There was barely enough light to turn the sky an India-ink blue. Four or five rifles barked in rough unison. “What the hell,” Betts said, then slumped forward with a hole in his neck, dousing the fire with blood.
The frontiersman rolled into the dirt. He fired his own rifle at the margin of the woods, more to wake the camp than defend it. He couldn’t see the enemy.
The fur snakes squealed their fear and then began to die in a second volley of bullets.
Guilford was asleep when the attack began — dreaming again of the Army picket, his twin in khaki, who was trying to deliver some vital but unintelligible message.
Yesterday’s march had been exhausting. The expedition had followed a series of lightly wooded ridgetops and ravines, prodding the reluctant fur snakes under the arches of the mosque trees, climbing and descending. The snakes disliked the close confinement of the woods and expressed their discontent by mewling, belching, and farting. The stink was cloying in the still air and was not abated by a steady drizzle, which only added the sour-milk stench of wet fur to the mix.
Eventually the land leveled. These high alpine meadows had blossomed in the rain, the false clover opening white star petals like summer snowflakes. Pitching tents in the drizzle was a tedious chore, and dinner came out of a can. Finch kept a lantern burning in his tent after dark — scribbling his theories, Guilford supposed, reconciling the day’s events with the dialectic of the New Creation — but everyone else simply collapsed into bedrolls and silence.
The eastern horizon was faintly blue when the first shots were fired. Guilford came awake to the sound of cries and percussion. He fumbled for his pistol, heart hammering. He had been carrying the pistol fully loaded since Keck recovered the monster skull, but he wasn’t a marksman. He knew how to fire the pistol but had never killed anything with it.