Captain Nemo_ The Fantastic History of a Dark Genius - Kevin J Anderson [96]
Caroline continued to sketch. She turned around, studying the particulars of the landscape to add to the picture. Fergusson puttered with his notebook, adding thoughts and details.
Then Nemo realized that the air around them had grown oppressively silent. His awareness raised to a high peak, as when he’d hunted wild boars on his mysterious island. Ears attuned, ready to protect Caroline, he heard a rustle in the grasses -- then a muscular form like a tawny liquid shadow burst forward. He saw bright feline eyes and long teeth.
Nemo reacted without thinking. He snatched the rifle Fergusson had laid on the ground, swiveled, and fired. The booming sound startled the nearby herd of animals.
Caroline stumbled backward, dropping her pencil. Fergusson cried out, and Nemo stared in amazement as a lioness collapsed to the ground, a bullet hole blossoming scarlet at the center of her breast.
Dr. Fergusson stepped away from the antelope, astonished. “Good Lord! I never expected a magnificent specimen like this.” He went about making measurements of the lioness, wishing he could take the time to skin it. “This pelt would have made a marvelous display.”
Nemo reloaded the gun and kept careful watch. “Just be quick about your work, Doctor.”
Taking their antelope steaks, the three adventurers returned to the balloon, scrambled up the baobab and the ladder and into the Victoria’s basket.
When he looked down onto the plain again, Nemo was alarmed to see that half a dozen lions had appeared from the deep grasses, as if by magic, and were feasting on the dead animals. Timid hyenas lurked around the fringes, waiting for their turn at the carcasses.
Shaken, but enthralled, Caroline began a new sketch, trying to draw the tawny lioness in mid-leap.
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Buoyed by warm and fragrant air, they floated across the Serengeti until the end of the first week. Fergusson shot dozens of specimens and made numerous notations in his journals. The explorer had been quite a sportsman back in England. They ate fresh meat every night, after the specimens provided data for Fergusson’s scientific logbook and scenes for Caroline’s increasingly detailed drawings. Otherwise, the slain animals would have been wasted.
While drifting along, the crew of the Victoria had considerable idle time, and the doctor told them his life story. Samuel Fergusson’s younger years had been rather checkered: He’d served aboard a ship from the age of eighteen and had sailed around the world before his twenty-second birthday. He had spent a year in Australia and Tasmania, and later trudged across India and into Nepal and Tibet, always bearing the British flag. He had a restless nature, a burning curiosity, and so much impatience to move on to the next conquest that he rarely enjoyed the fruits of his own discoveries.
Nemo got along well enough with the man, though Caroline grew weary of Fergusson’s constant killing in the name of science. The doctor neither scorned her presence nor opposed her desire to do her share of the work, since Caroline’s finances had made the entire adventure possible. The only things that inspired great enthusiasm in Fergusson were his hunt and the expedition.
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As they floated over rock-studded plains, they came upon a ponderous herd of elephants. Beaming, Dr. Fergusson insisted that they obtain a pachyderm specimen so that he could perform meticulous physiognomic measurements on the size and thickness of the ears, the biological hydraulics of the trunk, and the protective qualities of the hide. But the herd milled about in the open grasslands, far from any convenient tree for the balloon’s anchorage.
“Drop the grappling hook anyway,” Fergusson suggested, “all the way to the ground. Perhaps we’ll snag it on a rock, eh?”
Nemo followed the command, but the colorful