McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [2]
Thirty-three-year-old Roy Henry Tedford and his little pile of provisions were braced on the lee side of a talus slope on a speck of an island at somewhere around degree of longitude 146 and degree of latitude 58, seven hundred miles from Adélie Land on the Antarctic Coast, and four hundred from the nearest landfall on any official map: the unprepossessing dot of Macquarie Island to the east. It was a fine midsummer night in 1923.
His island, one of three ice-covered rocks huddled together in a quarter-mile chain, existed only on the hand-drawn chart that had brought him here, far from those few shipping lanes and fishing waters this far south. The chart was entitled, in Heuvelmans’s barbed-wire handwriting, alongside his approximation of the location, The Islands of the Dead. Under that Heuvelmans had printed in block letters the aboriginal word Kadimakara, or “Animals of the Dreamtime.”
Tedford’s provisions included twenty-one pounds of hardtack, two tins of biscuit flour, a sack of sweets, a bag of dried fruit, a camp-stove, an oilskin wrap for his almanac, two small reading-lanterns, four jerry cans of kerosene, a waterproofed one-man tent, a bedroll, a spare coat and gloves, a spare set of Wellington boots, a knife, a small tool set, waterproofed and double-wrapped packets of matches, a box camera in a specially made mahogany case in an oilskin pouch, a revolver, and a Bland’s .577 Axite Express. He’d fired the Bland’s twice, and both times been knocked onto his back by the recoil. The sportsman in Melbourne who’d sold it to him had assured him that it was the closest thing to field artillery that a man could put to his shoulder.
He was now four hundred miles from sharing a wish, or a word, or a memory. If all went well, it might be two months before he again saw a friendly face. Until she’d stopped writing, his mother had informed him regularly that it took a powerful perversity of spirit to send an otherwise intelligent young man voluntarily into such a life.
His plan looked excellent on paper. He’d already left another kayak, with an accompanying supply depot, on the third or western-most island, in the event bad weather or high seas prevented his return to this one.
He’d started as a student of J.H. Tate’s in Adelaide. Tate had assured himself of volunteers for his fieldwork by making a keg of beer part of his collection kit, and had introduced Tedford to evolutionism and paleontology, enlivening the occasional dinner party by belting out, to the tune of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”:
It’s a long way from Amphioxus,
It’s a long way to us;
It’s a long way from Amphioxus
To the meanest human cuss.
Farewell, fins and gill slits,
Welcome, teeth and hair—
It’s a long long way from Amphioxus,
But we all came from there!
Tedford had been an eager acolyte for two years and then had watched his enthusiasm stall in the face of the remoteness of the sites, the lack of monetary support, and the meagerness of the finds. Three months for an old tooth, as old Tate used to put it. Tedford had taken a job as a clerk for the local land surveyor, and his duties had exposed him to a panoply of local tales, whispered stories, and bizarre sightings. He’d found himself investigating each, in his free time, in search of animals known to local populations but not to the world at large. His mode was analysis, logical dissection, and reassembly, when it came to the stories. His tools were perseverance, an appetite for observation, a tolerance for extended discomfort, and his aunt’s trust fund. He’d spent a winter month looking for bunyips, which he’d been told inhabited the deep waterholes and roamed the billabongs at night. He’d found only a few fossilized bones of some enormous marsupials. He’d been fascinated by the paringmal, the “birds taller than the mountains,” but had uncovered them only in rock paintings. He’d spent a summer baking on a blistering hardpan awaiting the appearance of the legendary cadimurka.
All that knocking about had become focused on the day that a fisherman had