into age -not yet. Yet how far away from them was he? Every time the Sun rose, he came one day closer. He sketched fast, racing against his own decay.
Harris' shotgun bellowed. Audubon's hand did jump then. Whose wouldn't, at the unexpected report? But that jerky line was easily rubbed out. He went on, quick and confident, and had the sketch very much the way he wanted it by the time Harris came back carrying a large dead bird by the feet.
'A turkey?' Audubon exclaimed.
His friend nodded, face wreathed in smiles. 'Good eating tonight!'
'Well, yes,' Audubon said. 'But who would have thought the birds could spread so fast? They were introduced in the south… it can't be more than thirty years ago, can it? And now you shoot one here.'
'They give better sport than oil thrushes and the like,' Harris said. 'At least they have the sense to get away if they see trouble coming. The sense God gave a goose, you might say-except He didn't give it to all the geese here, either.'
'No,' Audubon said. Some of Atlantis' geese flew to other lands as well, and were properly wary. Some stayed on the great island the whole year round. Those birds weren't. Some of them flew poorly. Some couldn't fly at all, having wings as small and useless as those of the oil thrush.
Honkers looked uncommonly like outsized geese with even more outsized legs. Some species even had black necks and white chin patches reminiscent of Canada geese. That frankly puzzled Audubon: it was as if God were repeating Himself in the Creation, but why? Honkers' feet had vestigial webs, too, while their bills, though laterally compressed, otherwise resembled the broad, flat beaks of ordinary geese.
Audubon had seen the specimens preserved in the museum in Hanover: skeletons, a few hides, enormous greenish eggs. The most recent hide was dated 1803. He wished he hadn't remembered that. If this was a wild goose chase, a wild honker chase… then it was, that was all. He was doing all he could. He only wished he could have done it sooner. He'd tried. He'd failed. He only hoped some possibility of success remained.
Harris cleaned the turkey and got a fire going. Audubon finished the sketch. 'That's a good one,' Harris said, glancing over at it.
'Not bad,' Audubon allowed -he bad caught the pose he wanted. He gutted the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker so he could preserve it. Not surprisingly, the bird's stomach was full of beetle larvae. The very name of its genus, Campephilus, meant grub-loving. He made a note in his diary and put the bird in strong spirits.
'Better than that,' Harris said. He cut up the turkey and skewered drumsticks on twigs.
'Well, maybe,' Audubon said as he took one of the skewers from his friend and started roasting the leg. He wasn't shy of praise -no, indeed. All the same, he went on, 'I didn't come here for scarlet-cheeked woodpeckers. I came for honkers, by God.'
'You take what you get.' Harris turned his twig so the drumstick cooked evenly. 'You take what you get, and you hope what you get is what you came for.'
'Well, maybe,' Audubon said again. He looked east, toward the still poorly explored heart of Atlantis. 'But the harder you work, the likelier you are to get what you want. I hope I can still work hard enough. And' -he looked east once more - 'I hope what I want is still there to get.'
He and Harris stayed on the main highway for most of a week. The broad, well-trodden path let them travel faster than they could have on narrower, more winding roads. But when Audubon saw the Green Ridge Mountains rising over the eastern horizon, the temptation to leave the main road got too strong to resist.
'We don't want to go into the mountains anywhere near the highway,' he declared. 'We know no honkers live close to it, or people would have seen them, n'est- ce pas?'
'Stands to reason,' Harris said loyally. He paused before adding, 'I wouldn't mind another couple of days of halfway decent inns, though.'
'When we come back with what we seek, the Hesperian Queen will be none too good,' Audubon said. 'But we go through adversity to seek our goal.'
Harris sighed. 'We sure do.'
On the main highway, fruit trees and oaks and chestnuts and elms and maples thrived. They were all imports from Europe or from Terranova. Audubon and Harris hadn't gone far from the highway before Atlantean flora reasserted itself: gink-goes and magnolias, cycads and pines, with ferns growing in profusion as an understory. Birdsongs, some familiar, others strange, doubled and redoubled as the travelers moved into less settled country. Atlantean birds seemed more comfortable with the trees they'd lived in for generations uncounted than with the brash newcomers men brought in.
Not all the newcomers clung to the road. Buttercups and poppies splashed the improbably green landscape with color. Atlantean bees buzzed around the flowers that had to be unfamiliar to them… or maybe those were European honeybees, carried to the new land in the midst of the sea to serve the plants men needed, wanted, or simply liked. Curious, Audubon stopped and waited by some poppies for a closer look at the insects. They were, without a doubt, honeybees. He noted the fact in his diary. It left him oddly disappointed but not surprised.
'In another hundred years,' he said, climbing back onto his horse, 'how much of the old Atlantis will be left? Any?'
'In another hundred years,' Harries replied, 'it won't matter to either of us, except from beyond the Pearly Gates.'
'No, I suppose not.' Audubon wondered if he had ten years left, or even five, let alone a hundred. 'But it should matter to those who are young here. They throw away marvels without thinking of what they're doing. Wouldn't you like to see dodos preserved alive?' He tried not to recall his unfortunate bird model.
'Alive? Why, I can go to Hanover and hear them speechifying,' Harris said. Audubon snorted. His friend waved a placating hand. 'Let it go, John. Let it go. I take your point.'
'I'm so glad,' Audubon said with sardonic relish. 'Perhaps the authorities here - your speechifying dodos-could set up parks to preserve some of what they have.' He frowned. 'Though how parks could keep out foxes and weasels and rats and windblown seeds, I confess I don't know. Still, it would make a start.'
They slept on the grass that night. The throaty hoots of an Atlantean ground owl woke Audubon somewhere near midnight. He loaded his shotgun by the faint, bloody light of the campfire's embers, in case the bird came close enough for him to spot it. Ground owls were hen-sized, more or less. They could fly, but not well. They hunted frogs and lizards and the outsized katydids that scurried through the undergrowth here. Nothing hunted them -or rather, nothing had hunted them till foxes and wild dogs and men came to Atlantis. Like so many creatures here, they couldn't seem to imagine they might become prey. Abundant once, they were scarce these days.
This one's call got farther and farther away. Audubon thought about imitating it to lure the ground owl into range of his charge. In the end, he forbore. Blasting away in the middle of the night might frighten Harris into an apoplexy. And besides - Audubon yawned -he was still sleepy himself. He set down the shotgun, rolled himself in his blanket once more, and soon started snoring again.
When Audubon woke the next morning, he saw a mouse-sized katydid's head and a couple of greenish brown legs only a yard or so from his bedroll. He swore softly: the ground owl had come by, but without hooting, so he never knew. If he'd stayed up… If I'd stayed up, I would be useless today, he thought. He needed regular doses of sleep much more than he had twenty years earlier.
'I wouldn't have minded if you fired on an owl,' Harris said as he built up the fire and got coffee going. 'We're here for that kind of business.'
'Good of you to say so,' Audubon replied. 'It could be that I will have other chances.'
'And it could be that you won't. You were the one who said the old Atlantis was going under. Grab with both hands while it's here.'
'With the honkers, I intend to,' Audubon said. 'If they're there to be grabbed, grab them I shall. The ground owl… Well, who knows if it would have come when I hooted?'
'I bet it would. I never knew a soul who could call birds better than you.' Harris took a couple of squares of hardtack out of an oilcloth valise and handed one to Audubon. The artist waited till he had his tin cup of coffee before breakfasting. He broke his hardtack into chunks and dunked each one before eating it. The crackers were baked to a fare-thee-well so they would keep for a long time, which left them chewier than his remaining teeth could easily cope with.
As he and his friend got ready to ride on, he looked again at the remains of the giant katydid. 'I really ought to get some specimens of those,' he remarked.
'Why, in heaven's name?' Harris said. 'They aren't birds, and they aren't viviparous quadrupeds, either. They
