Audubon in Atlantis

"The Crimson Brand" Coates said. "Not a bad title, if I say so myself—and I do, because it's mine. He wanted to name it The Shores of a Different Sea" He yawned, as if to say authors were hopeless with titles. Then, pointing at Audubon, he did say it: "I'd have called your books something else, too, if they weren't also coming out in England and Terranova. Birds and Critters, maybe. Who remembers what a quadruped is, let alone a viviparous one?"

"They've done well enough with the name I gave them," Audubon said.

"Well enough, sure, but they might've done better. I could've made you big" Coates was a man with an eye for the main chance. Making Audubon big — he lingered lovingly over the word—would have made him money.

"I know why folks here don't know quadrupeds from a hole in the ground," Harris said. "Atlantis hardly had any before it got discovered. No snakes in Ireland, no… critters" —he grinned —"here, not then."

"No viviparous quadrupeds." Audubon had drunk enough wine to make him most precise —but not too much to keep him from pronouncing viviparous. "A very great plenty of lizards and turtles and frogs and toads and salamanders —and snakes, of course, though snakes lack four legs of quadrupedality." He was proud of himself for that.

"Sure enough, snakes haven't got a leg to stand on." Harris guffawed.

"Well, we have critters enough now, by God," Coates said. "Everything from mice on up to elk. Some of 'em we wanted, some we got anyway. Try and keep rats and mice from coming aboard ship. Yeah, go ahead and try. Good luck—you'll need it."

"How many indigenous Atlantean creatures are no more because of them?" Audubon said.

"Beats me," Coates answered. "Little too late to worry about it now, anyway, don't you think?"

"I hope not," Audubon said. "I hope it's not too late for them. I hope it's not too late for me." He took another sip of wine. "And I know the viviparous creature responsible for the greatest number of those sad demises here."

"Rats?" Coates asked.

"Weasels, I bet," Harris said.

Audubon shook his head at each of them in turn. He pointed an index finger at his own chest. "Man," he said.

He rode out of Avalon three days later. Part of the time he spent buying horses and tackle for them; that, he didn't begrudge. The rest he spent with Gordon Coates, meeting with subscribers and potential subscribers for his books; that, he did. He was a better businessman than most of his fellow artists, and normally wouldn't have resented keeping customers happy and trolling for new ones. If nobody bought your art, you had a devil of a time making more of it. As a younger man, he'd worked at several other trades, hated them all, and done well at none. He knew how lucky he was to make a living doing what he loved, and how much work went into what others called luck.

To his relief, he did escape without painting portraits. Even before he set out from New Orleans, he'd felt time's hot breath at his heels. He felt himself aging, getting weaker, getting feebler. In another few years, maybe even in another year or two, he would lack the strength and stamina for a journey into the wilds of central Atlantis. And even if he had it, he might not find any honkers left to paint.

I may not find any now, he thought. That ate at him like vitriol. He kept seeing a hunter or a lumberjack with a shotgun…

Setting out from Avalon, Audubon might almost have traveled through the French or English countryside. Oh, the farms here were larger than they were in Europe, with more meadow between them. This was newly settled land; it hadn't been cultivated for centuries, sometimes for millennia. But the crops —wheat, barley, maize, potatoes—were either European or were Terranovan imports long familiar in the Old World. The fruit trees came from Europe; the nuts, again, from Europe and Terranova. Only a few stands of redwoods and Atlantean pines declared that the Hesperian Gulf lay just a few miles to the west.

It was the same with the animals. Dogs yapped outside of farmhouses Chickens scratched. Cats prowled, hoping for either mice —also immigrants —or unwary chicks. Ducks and geese —ordinary domestic geese—paddled in ponds. Pigs rooted and wallowed. In the fields, cattle and sheep and horses grazed.

Most people probably wouldn't have noticed the ferns that sprouted here and there or the birds on the ground, in the trees, and on the wing. Some of those birds, like ravens, ranged all over the world. Others, such as the white-headed eagle Audubon had seen in Avalon, were common in both Atlantis and Terranova (on Atlantis' eastern coast, the white-tailed eagle sometimes visited from its more usual haunts in Europe and Iceland). Still others —no one knew how many—were unique to the great island.