similar to those of the rest. The same held true for island warblers, which flitted through the trees after insects like their counterparts on the far side of the Hesperian Gulf. Yes, there were many similarities. But…
'I wonder how soon we'll start seeing oil thrushes,' Audubon said.
'Not this close to Avalon,' Harris said. 'Not with so many dogs and cats and pigs running around.'
'I suppose not,' Audubon said. 'They're trusting things, and they haven't much chance of getting away.'
Laughing, Harris mimed flapping his fingertips. Oil thrushes' wings were bigger than that, but not by much-they couldn't fly. The birds themselves were bigger than chickens. They used their long, pointed beaks to probe the ground for worms at depths ordinary thrushes, flying thrushes, couldn't hope to reach. When the hunting was good, they laid up fat against a rainy day.
But they were all but helpless against men and the beasts men had brought to Atlantis. It wasn't just that they were good eating, or that their fat, rendered down made a fine lamp oil. The real trouble was, they didn't seem to know enough to run away when a dog or a fox came after them. They weren't used to being hunted by animals that lived on the ground; the only viviparous quadrupeds on Atlantis before men arrived were bats.
'Even the bats here are peculiar,' Audubon muttered.
'Well, so they are, but why do you say so?' Harris asked.
Audubon explained his train of thought. 'Where else in the world do you have bats that spend more of their time scurrying around on the ground than flying?' he went on.
He thought that was a rhetorical question, but Harris said, 'Aren't there also some in New Zealand?'
'Are there?' Audubon said in surprise. His friend nodded. The painter scratched at his side whiskers. 'Well, well. Both lands far from any others, out in the middle of the sea…'
'New Zealand had its own honkers, too, or something like them,' Harris said. 'What the devil were they called?'
'Moas,' Audubon said. 'I do remember that. Didn't I show you the marvelous illustrations of their remains Professor Owen did recently? The draftsmanship is astonishing. Astonishing!' The way he kissed his bunched fingertips proved him a Frenchman at heart.
Edward Harris gave him a sly smile. 'Surely you could do better?'
'I doubt it,' Audubon said. 'Each man to his own bent. Making a specimen look as if it were alive on the canvas-that I can do. My talent lies there, and I've spent almost forty years now learning the tricks and turns that go with it. Showing every detail of dead bone -I'm not in the least ashamed to yield the palm to the good professor there.'
'If only you were a little less modest, you'd be perfect,' Harris said.
'It could be,' Audubon said complacently, and they rode on.
The slow, deep drumming came from thirty feet up a dying pine. Harris pointed. 'There he is, John! D'you see him?'
'I'm not likely to miss him, not when he's the size of a raven,' Audubon answered. Intent on grubs under the bark, the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker went on drumming. It was a male, which meant its crest was also scarlet. A female's crest would have been black, with a forward curl the male's lacked. That also held true for its close relatives on the Terranovan mainland, the ivory-bill and the imperial woodpecker of Mexico.
Audubon dismounted, loaded his shotgun, and approached the bird. He could get closer to the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker than he could have to one of its Terranovan cousins. Like the oil thrush, like so many other Atlantean birds, the woodpecker had trouble understanding that something walking along on the ground could endanger it. Ivory-bills and imperial woodpeckers were less naive.
The woodpecker raised its head and called. The sound was high and shrill, like a false note on a clarinet. Audubon paused with the gun on his shoulder, waiting to see if another bird would answer. When none did, he squeezed the trigger. The shotgun boomed, belching fireworks-smelling smoke.
With a startled squawk, the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker tumbled out of the pine. It thrashed on the ground for a couple of minutes, then lay still. 'Nice shot,' Harris said.
'Merci,' Audubon answered absently.
He picked up the woodpecker. It was still warm in his hands, and still crawling with mites and bird lice. No one who didn't handle wild birds freshly dead thought of such things. He brushed his palm against his trouser leg to get rid of some of the vagrants. They didn't usually trouble people, who weren't to their taste, but every once in a while…
A new thought struck him. He stared at the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker. 'I wonder if the parasites on Atlantean birds are as different as the birds themselves, or if they share them with the birds of Terranova.'
'I don't know,' Harris said. 'Do you want to pop some into spirits and see?'
After a moment, Audubon shook his head. 'No, better to let someone who truly cares about such things take care of it. I'm after honkers, by God, not lice!'
'Nice specimen you took there, though,' his friend said. 'Scarlet-cheeks are getting scarce, too.'
'Not so much forest for them to hunt in as there once was,' Audubon said with a sigh. 'Not so much of anything in Atlantis as there once was -except men and farms and sheeps.' He knew that was wrong as soon as it came out of his mouth, but let it go. 'If we don't show what it was, soon it will be no more, and then it will be too late to show. Too late already for too much of it.' Too late for me? he wondered. Please, let it not be so!
'You going to sketch now?' Harris asked.
'If you don't mind. Birds are much easier to pose before they start to stiffen.'
'Go ahead, go ahead.' Harris slid down from his horse. 'I'll smoke a pipe or two and wander around a bit with my shotgun. Maybe I'll bag something else you can paint, or maybe I'll shoot supper instead. Maybe both -who knows? If I remember right, these Atlantean ducks and geese eat as well as any other kind, except canvasbacks.' He was convinced canvasback ducks, properly roasted and served with loaf sugar, were the finest fowl in the world. Audubon wasn't so sure he was wrong.
As Harris ambled away, Audubon set the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker on the grass and walked over to one of the pack horses. He knew which sack held his artistic supplies: his posing board and his wires, his charcoal sticks and precious paper.
He remembered how, as a boy, he'd despaired of ever portraying birds in realistic poses. A bird in the hand was all very well, but a dead bird looked like nothing but a dead bird. It drooped, it sagged, it cried its lifelessness to the eye.
When he studied painting with David in France, he sometimes did figure drawings from a mannequin. His cheeks heated when he recalled the articulated bird model he'd tried to make from wood and cork and wire. After endless effort, he produced something that might have done duty for a spavined dodo. His friends laughed at it. How could he get angry at them when he wanted to laugh at it, too? He ended up kicking the horrible thing to pieces.
If he hadn't thought of wires… He didn't know what he would have done then. Wires let him position his birds as if they were still alive. The first kingfisher he'd posed -he knew he was on to something even before he finished. As he set up the posing board now, a shadow of that old excitement glided through him again. Even the bird's eyes had seemed to take on life again once he posed it the way he wanted.
As he worked with wires now to position the woodpecker as it had clung to the tree trunk, he wished he could summon more than a shadow of the old thrill. But he'd done the same sort of thing too many times. Routine fought against art. He wasn't discovering a miracle now. He was… working.
Well, if you're working, work the best you can, he told himself. And practice did pay. His hands knew almost without conscious thought how best to set the wires, to pose the bird. When his hands thought he was finished, he eyed the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker. Then he moved a wire to adjust its tail's position. It used those long, stiff feathers to brace itself against the bark, almost as if it had hind legs back there.
He began to sketch. He remembered the agonies of effort that went into his first tries, and how bad they were despite those agonies. He knew others who'd tried to paint, and who gave up when their earlier pieces failed to match what they wanted, what they expected. Some of them, from what he'd seen, had a real gift. But having it and honing it… Ah, what a difference! Not many were stubborn enough to keep doing the thing they wanted to do even when they couldn't do it very well. Audubon didn't know how many times he'd almost given up in despair. But when stubbornness met talent, great things could happen.
The charcoal seemed to have a life of its own as it moved across the page. Audubon nodded to himself. His line remained as strong and fluid as ever. He didn't have the tremors and shakes that marked so many men's descent
