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 ru

“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.

Come morning they set out across the gently rolling meadowland, southward toward the mountains. The fur snakes made passable riding animals — they didn’t mind bearing human cargo and would even respond to direction from a crude bridle — but their bodies were simply too wide to straddle comfortably (not to mention greasy and evil-smelling), and no one had yet invented a functional snake saddle. Guilford preferred to walk, even after the second day, when the march seemed infinitely more grueling, when calves and ankles and thighs made their most concerted protests.

The meadowed hills rolled steadily higher. Fresh water was harder to find now, though the snakes could sense a creek or pool from a mile’s distance. And the mountains on the horizon, subject of Keck’s relentless triangulation, were clearly a barrier: the end of the road, even if Finch and company found an accessible pass where Bre

But he was proud of what they had accomplished. We walked, he told the frontiersman, where no one else had walked, puzzled out at least a few of Darwinia’s secrets.

“We haven’t fucked the continent,” Tom Compton agreed, “but I guess we’ve lifted her skirts.”

Guilford trudged through the cool afternoon with Compton and Sullivan and their pack animals. Low clouds drifted across the sky, blindingly white at the margins, woolly gray beneath. His boots left brief imprints in the spongy meadow growth. Down a western slope of land Keck had spotted another insect midden, a ring of bone around a deceptively peaceful patch of green, like a troll’s garden, Guilford thought. They gave it a wide berth.

Tom Compton brooded on another matter. “There have been campfires behind us the last couple of nights,” he said. “Five, six miles back. I don’t know what that means.”

“Partisans?” Sullivan asked.

“Probably just hunters, maybe followed us up past the Rheinfelden — followed Erasmus, more likely, poaching on his territory. The Partisans, they’re mostly coast pirates out of the rogue settlements. They don’t come inland as a rule, unless they’re hunting or prospecting, which makes them less likely to practice politics at gunpoint.”

“Still,” Sullivan said, “I liked it better when we were alone.”

“So did I,” the frontiersman said.

Hill camp by a nameless creek. Land rising visibly now. Distant snow-capped alpine range. Stands of forest, mostly mosque trees, a new plant, a small bush with hard inedible yellow berries. (Not true berries, Sullivan says, but that’s what they look like.) Stiff cooling wind keeps the billyflies away, or perhaps they simply don’t care for the altitude.

Postscriptum. Looking north at di