Audubon in Atlantis

Whenever he started to fret, Harris would say, "Well, we've got something, anyway. We didn't know for sure we'd get anything at all when we set out." Every word of that was true, and it always made Audubon feel worse, not better.

He spent several days haunting the meadow where his friend found the dead honker, hoping it was part of a flock or a gaggle or whatever the English word for a group of honkers was. No others showed up, though. He found no fresh tracks in the mud by the rill. At last, sorrowfully, he decided the dead bird must have been alone.

"What if it was the last one?" he said. "To miss it by a few days… Why couldn't we have shot the eagle sooner? Then the honker would still be alive!"

He waited for Harris to be grateful again for what they had. But Harris surprised him, saying, "No use worrying about it. We don't know that eagle got that honker, anyhow."

"Well, no," Audubon admitted upon reflection. "Maybe it was some other villainous eagle instead." He got most affronted when Harris laughed at him.

Even though he was forced to admit to himself that honkers weren't going to visit the meadow, he was loath to leave it. He knew at least one live bird had frequented it up until mere days before. About what other spot in all Atlantis —in all the world —could he say the same?

He kept looking back over his shoulder long after he and Harris rode away. "Don't worry," said Harris, the optimist born. "Bound to be better land ahead."

"How do you know that?" Audubon demanded.

Harris surprised him by having an answer: "Because as best I can tell, nobody's ever come this way before. We're on a track now, not a road. I haven't seen any hoof-prints besides the ones our horses are leaving for a couple of hours now."

Audubon blinked. He looked around—really looked around. "Nom d'un nom!" he murmured. "So it would seem." Pines and cycads and ginkgoes crowded close together on either side of the track. The air was fragrant with scents whose like he would find nowhere else. "This might almost be the antediluvian age, or another world altogether. What do you suppose made our trail?"

"Anywhere else, I'd say deer. That may be so here, too, but I haven't seen any sign of them —no tracks, no droppings," Harris said. "Oil thrushes? Some of the other big flightless birds they have here? Maybe even honkers—who knows?"

That was enough to make Audubon dismount and minutely examine the surface of the trail in the hope of finding honker tracks. With their size and with the vestigial webbing between their toes, they were unmistakable. He found none. He did see oil-thrush footprints, as Harris had suggested: they reminded him of those of the European blackbird or Terranovan robin, except for being three or four times as large. And he saw a fox's pads, which stood out against the spiky background of bird tracks. Imported creatures penetrated even here, to the wild heart of Atlantis.

But of course, he thought. Harris and I are here, aren't we? And we're no less fond of an oil-thrush supper than foxes are.

A splash of vivid green on the side of a redwood sapling caught his eye as he rode past. At first, he thought it was some strange Atlantean fungus clinging to the trunk. Then, ever so slowly, it moved. "A cucumber slug!" Harris exclaimed.

The slug was almost the size of a cucumber, though Audubon would have fought shy of eating anything of that iridescent hue. Though it was neither bird nor viviparous quadruped, he stopped and sketched it. It was a curiosity, and one little known to naturalists— few of them penetrated to the cool, humid uplands where it lived. Eye-stalks waving, it glided along the trunk, leaving behind a thumb-wide trail of slime.

"Maybe we'll come across some of those snails that are almost as big as your fist, too," Harris said.

"A shame to do it now, when we have no garlic butter." Audubon might draw the line at a cucumber slug, but he was fond of escargots. Harris, a Terranovan born and bred, made a horrible face. Audubon only laughed.

They rode on. The tracks they followed were never made by man. They twisted this way and that and doubled back on themselves again and again. Whenever Audubon came out into the open, he scanned the stretch of grass ahead with eager hope. How he longed to see honkers grazing there, or pulling leaves from tender young trees! How disappointed he was, again and again!

"Maybe that was the last honker in this part of Atlantis," he mourned as he and Harris made camp one night. "Maybe it was the last honker in all of Atlantis."

"Maybe it was," his friend replied. Audubon, toasting an oil-thrush drumstick over the flames, glared at him. The least Harris could do was sympathize. But then he continued, "We've come too far and we've done too much to give up so soon, haven't we?"

"Yes," Audubon said. "Oh, yes."