Darwinia

We have waited a week already for Erasmus and will wait at least another. Fortunately I have the copy of Argosy for which I traded Finch’s geology tome. The magazine contains an installment of E. R. Burroughs’ Lost Kingdom of Darwinia, more of his imagined “ancient hinterland” complete with dinosaurs, noble savages, and a colony of evil-minded Junkers to rule them. A princess requires rescue. I know your disdain for this type of fiction, Caroline, and I have to admit that even Burroughs’ wild Darwinia pales against close contact with the real thing: these too-solid hills and shadowy, cool forests. But the magazine is a delightful distraction I am much envied by the other Expeditionaries, since I have been chary about loaning the volume.

I find myself looking forward to civilization — the tall buildings, the newsstands, and such.

Erasmus arrived with the pack animals and accepted payment in the form of a check drawn on a Jeffersonville bank. He spent an evening in camp and expressed his condolences, though not his surprise, regarding Gillvany’s death.

But his arrival was overshadowed by Avery Keck’s discovery. Keck and Tom Compton had gone on another snake hunt, Keck observing both the local geography and the frontiersman’s tracking skills. Not that the snakes required much tracking, as Keck explained over the campfire. They had simply cut off one snake from the herd and taken it down with a single shot from Tom Compton’s rifle. Dragging the carcass back to camp was the difficult part.

More interesting, Keck said, was that they had come across an insect nest and its midden.

The insects, Keck said, were ten-legged invertebrate carnivores, distantly related to the stump runners Guilford had encountered outside London. They tunneled in boggy lowland areas where the soil was loose and wet. A fur snake or any other animal wandering into the insects’ territory would be repeatedly bitten by the colony’s venomous drones, then swarmed and stripped of its meat. Cleaned bones were meticulously shuttled to the colony’s rim — the famous midden.

“The older a colony, the bigger its midden,” Keck said. “I saw one nest in the Rhinish lowlands that had grown like a fairy ring, about a hundred meters across. The one Tom and I found is about average, in my experience. A perfect circle of pitted white bones. Mainly the bones of unlucky fur snakes, but—” Keck unwrapped the oilcloth package he had carried back to camp. “We found this.”

It was a long, high-domed, spike-toothed skull. It was white as polished ivory, but it glittered redly in the firelight.

“Well, shit!” Diggs exclaimed, which earned him a stiff look from Preston Finch.

Guilford turned to Sullivan, who nodded. “Similar to the skull we saw in London.” He explained the Museum of Monstrosities. “Interesting. It looks to me like a large predator, and it must have been widely distributed, at least at one time.”

“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.