'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.'
As the scents were different in this mostly pristine Atlantean wilderness, so too were the sounds. Enormous frogs boomed out their calls an octave lower than even Ter-ranovan bullfrogs, let alone the smaller frogs of Europe. When Audubon remarked on them, Harris said, 'I suppose you're sorry about the garlic butter there, too.'
'Why, yes, now that you mention it,' the painter said placidly. His friend screwed up his face again.
The big green katydids that might almost have been mice were noisier than rodents would have been, though some of their squeaks sounded eerily mouse-like. But most of their chirps and trills showed them to be insects after all. Their calls made up the background noise, more notable when it suddenly ceased than when it went on.
Audubon heard birdsongs he'd never imagined. Surely some of those singers were as yet nondescript, new to science. If he could shoot one, sketch it and paint it, bring back a type specimen… He did shoot several warblers and finches, but all, so far as he knew, from species already recognized.
Then he heard the scream of a red-crested eagle somewhere far off to the north. He reined in and pointed in that direction. 'We go there,' he declared, in tones that brooked no argument.
Harris argued anyhow: 'It's miles away, John. We can't hope to find just where it is, and by the time we get there it'll be somewhere else anyhow.'
'We go north,' Audubon said, as if his friend hadn't spoken. 'The eagle may fly away, but if honkers are nearby they won't. They can't.'
'If.' Edward Harris packed a world of doubt into one small word.
'You said it yourself: we've come too far and done too much to give up hope.' If that wasn't precisely what Harris had said, Audubon preferred not to be reminded of it. Harris had the sense to recognize as much.
Going north proved no easier than going in any other cardinal direction. Audubon swore in English; French, and occasionally Spanish when game tracks swerved and led him astray. The red-crested eagle had fallen silent after that one series of screeches, so it told him nothing about how much farther he needed to come. Maybe it's killed again. Maybe it's feasting, he thought. Even a freshly dead honker might do.
He and Harris came to a stream like a young river. Those Goliath frogs croaked from the rocks. 'Can we ford it?' Audubon asked.
'We'd better look for a shallow stretch,' the ever-sensible Harris said.
They found one half a mile to the west, and forded the stream without getting the horses' bellies wet. He unfolded a map of northern Atlantis. 'Which stream do you suppose this is?' he said. 'It should be big enough to show up here.'
Harris put on reading glasses to peer at the map. 'If it was ever surveyed at all,' he said, and pointed. 'It might be a tributary of the Spey. That's about where we are.'
'I would have guessed it flows into the Liffey myself.' Audubon pointed, too.
'Next one farther north? Well, maybe,' Harris said. 'The way we've been wandering lately, we could be damn near anywhere. Shall we go on?' Without waiting for an answer, he urged his horse forward. Audubon got his mount moving, too.
Not long after the murmur of the stream and the frogs' formidable calls-what Aristophanes would have done with them!-faded in the distance, Audubon heard what he first thought were geese flying by. He'd ridden out onto a grassy stretch a little while before. He looked north to see if he could spot the birds, but had no luck.
Harris was peering in the same direction, his face puzzled. 'Geese-but not quite geese,' he said. 'Sounds like trumpet music played on a slide trombone.'
'It does!' For a moment, Audubon simply smiled at the comparison. Then, sudden wild surmise in his eye, he stared at his friend. 'Edward, you don't suppose -?'
'I don't know,' Harris said, 'but we'd better find out. If they aren't honkers, they could be nondescript geese, which wouldn't be bad, either. Audubon's geese, you could call them.'
'I could,' said Audubon, who'd never had less interest in discovering a new species. 'I could, yes, but… I'm going to load my gun with buckshot.' He started doing just that.
'Good plan.' So did Harris.
Keep calling. Please keep calling, Audubon thought, again and again, as they rode through the forest toward the sound. The birds-whatever they were -did keep up the noise, now quietly, now rising to an angry peak as if a couple of males were quarreling over a female, as males were likely to do in spring.
When Audubon thought they'd come close enough, he slid down off his horse, saying, 'We'd best go forward on foot now.' He carried not only his gun but also charcoal sticks and paper, in case… Harris also dismounted. Audubon believed he would have brained him with the shotgun had he argued.
After perhaps ten minutes, Harris pointed ahead. 'Look. We're coming to an open space.' Audubon nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He too saw the bright sunshine that told of a break in the trees. The bird calls were very loud now, very near. 'Would you call that honking?' Harris asked. Audubon only shrugged and slid forward.
He peered out from in back of a cycad at the meadow beyond… at the meadow, and at the honkers grazing on it. Then they blurred: tears of joy ran down his face.
'Blessed art Thou, O Lord, Who hast preserved me alive to see such things,' he whispered, staring and staring.
