Angler In Darkness

by Edward M. Erdelac

It was without a doubt a living pteranodon, beating the rainy air with its tremendous wings, struggling to carry off the mule.

  Pabodie crawled from the tent like a supplicant, heedless of the mud soaking his knees and hands, not daring to stand, desperate only to feel the wind of its wings, or to smell its breath and know it was real.

  “I told you!" yelled the old man, whooping above the storm, his wild, red hair a ragged curtain across his ghost eye.

  Neb primed his rifle as a new sound rose above it all. It was like the raw scream of an eagle many times amplified. The creature’s call sent the animals into new frenzies. The lightning came again.

  Pabodie pressed his spotted glasses to his eyes for fear they would slip from his face. He saw the long scissor bill and the gigantic, black, avian eyes. He treasured the glimpse of its curling, hooked talons sunk deep in the flanks of the kicking mule. As it shifted its grip, dark blood showered down on the other animals in random gouts between its tremendous knuckles. The lightning shone through its membranous wings. It sounded again, drowning his ears in noise. The cactus bent double as the creature beat its wings and tried again to pull away with its burden.

  As the lightning flickered and died, Neb angled Mazeppa upward, dropped his cheek and fired. The captured mule disappeared in a fireball and a sound like an explosion of cannonade. The bullet had struck the pack containing the dynamite sticks.

  Pabodie saw the color of the thing in the resulting flash. He saw the woody flesh curl and blacken. He saw the tan membrane of the bat-like wings; glowing like lampshades as they were engulfed in flame.

  The creature gave a piercing cry. Pabodie saw Neb fly past him. The old man tumbled into the collapsing tent. Then something heavy as a cannonball slammed into Pabodie’s skull and he fell face forward.

  As his eyelids fluttered and stinging blood poured across his eyes, Pabodie’s last sight was of a bright missile arcing into the vast, dark, rainy sky, trailing cinders and blue smoke like a rocket. The screaming of the pteranodon diminished and with it, so fled Pabodie's consciousness.

  * * * *

  He was awakened by the back of Neb's hand cracking sharply against his cheek.

  "Wake up, Mister Pabodie!"

  He was pulled roughly up by his lapels to sit in the mud. All around him the storm was still raging. He was bitter cold.

  "What the hell was in them packs?” Neb demanded to know.

  “Dynamite,” Pabodie answered. “In case we needed to blast.”

  “You damn fool! You should’ve told me!" Neb lifted him to his feet. "Help me get the tent back up!"

  Pabodie wavered on unsteady legs and gingerly touched his forehead, feeling with his fingertips a perforation that had been washed clean by the rain.

  "Something struck me."

  "Mule's foot," Neb cackled, thrusting the tent pole into his hands and gesturing to an object lying nearby.

  It was the foreleg of the mule, its severed end shredded, one splintered black bone jutting out.

  “Lucky it didn’t kick a window through your skull,” Neb said. “Come on!”

  It was hard work rebuilding the tent in the storm, and not much comfort when it was finished. They were already soaked to their skin.

  The blast had killed the animals. They lay half-cooked where they’d fallen. A burnt fragment of the obliterated pack mule’s tether danced where it hung from one broken arm of the ruined saguaro.

  Neb managed to start a small fire, letting the smoke out through a hole he cut in the canvas with his big knife. They warmed themselves as best they could, Pabodie trembling with chill and excitement.

  "I can hardly believe it," he stammered. "I mean, I've seen it, but I can hardly believe it."

  "Well, if seein's believin' you're gonna be a whole lot more convinced tomorrow," Neb said. "We're gonna hike up into them mountains and find its carcass come first light."

  "Oh, of course," Pabodie readily agreed. "Of course, we must! We must preserve what remains we can and port them back to town."

  He thought briefly of provisions and water...did they have enough to trek up into the mountains and return? Could they salvage anything from the animals’ packs? All these concerns fled in the face of his excitement.

  The creature they had seen dwarfed the longiceps Marsh had discovered in Kansas. This was no dusty pit of calcified bones, but a fresh, cooling carcass they were after. It would be worth any risk. Would they find it before scavengers tore it to shreds? Did they have to wait until dawn?

  "This is a discovery of the utmost importance," he managed, furiously wiping the spots from his glasses with a handkerchief. "There's...there's never been anything like it before..."

  "Like I was sayin’ before, you can pick your bones and whatever else you wanna box up and ship back east," Neb said. "I’ll take you up there. Money don’t matter so much, but you got to promise me one thing, Mister Pabodie. You got to let me have the heart."

  Pabodie stared, his giddy, jumbled thoughts suddenly halted in their racing.

  "What did you say?"

  "I want its heart, if it ain't been blowed to mince by your Swedish blasting powder or gobbled up by some cussed varmint."

  "Well...but why, on earth?"

  The rain lessened outside. Neb listened for a bit before he sighed and answered.

  "Mr. Pabodie, I been a hunter a long time. I hunted everything that ever walked, crawled, swam or flew. Men, even," he said, fastening a meaningful look on Pabodie. "They's a tradition 'mongst true hunters. You ask any Injin worth his blood and he'll tell you the same. Eat the heart of what you kill, and you add its strength to your own. It’s true."

  Pabodie said nothing. Neb stared across the little fire into his eyes for a long time.

  "How old d'you think I am?"

  Pabodie opened his mouth to answer, but Neb spoke, shaking his head.

  "Never mind. You kin never guess. I got me the power of a million hunts. A million kills. I may look decrepit, but I'm twenty times stronger'n a yearling catamount. I got the spirits of fightin' bulls and killer eagles runnin' all through me. I kin twist off a bear's head with my own two hands," and he splayed and curled his knobby fingers over the fire. The flames seemed to retreat from him warily. "I kin run quicker'n a pint 'o whiskey through forty Irishmen, from dusk till the new day dawnin.' I been and done most everything in this world, and now I've given myself over to this; I want the thunderbird's heart, Mr. Pabodie...I believe it’ll make me fly."

  Pabodie could say nothing to that. He promised the old lunatic the creature's heart (what a feast that would be for a single man!) and prayed he would make it to the morning without feeling his whiskey breath in the night.

  “Don’t worry, Mister Pabodie,” Neb said as they finally lay down across from each other. “I don’t believe I’d gain a thing from eatin’ you.”

  He laughed to himself and was snoring inside a minute.

  Pabodie lay on his back and in a few hours, watched the canvas lighten.

  * * * *

  At dawn they began their walk across the basin to the western foothills, packing only essentials. There was very little food, but their canteens had survived. Neb shouldered his Mazeppa. As Pabodie still fretted over the wild Apache of the country, he didn’t object to adding the old man's lead and powder to his own portage.

  The torrential downpour of the previous night had died somewhere before dawn. It was a harsh and vengeful sun that returned to wield its full ire against the rain washed desert like a raging cuckold against his wayward wife. The earth dried and cracked beneath their boots. It was as if the storm had never been.

  At noon they clambered up the broken slopes, ascending the mountains via twisting trails that hardly deserved the name. These were empty gullies and furrows whose deceptive footholds often proved nothing more than shifting shale.

  They said little. Neb only answered Pabodie's infrequent questions about their direction with a curse against the gall of all easterners and an assurance that he had marked th
e pteranodon’s impact the night before.

  When they turned a stone rise, Pabodie momentarily wondered if there was in fact some truth to Neb's mad bragging. Perhaps the old man might not have eaten the heart of an eagle and gained its uncanny sight. The huge carcass lay stretched out on its back before them. It was like the burned out ruin of a grand cathedral, all jutting angles and broken limbs like toppled spires.

  Four coyotes scattered at their approach, emerging from the wounds laid open in the colossal torso. Its coiling innards were strewn about the stones, shriveled in a baste of drying blood, its thin tongue lolling half out of the canoe-like shell of its tapered bill.

  Pabodie noticed the long maw was tooth-lined like that of the pterodactyl of Austria, not like Marsh's longiceps at all. The great eyes had been picked at. They looked like broken boulders of polished agate, their glistening surface besmirched with crusted blood.

  Hordes of ants swirled at their feet in endless conveyance. A burst of winged insects of every sort lifted from the carcass as Neb anxiously laid aside Mazeppa and waded in the spilled and stinking guts of the thing up to his hips, pushing aside huge, jellied organs with his bare hands and making for its open chest cavity with lustful alacrity.

  Pabodie leaned back against an up thrust boulder, took out his charcoal and hastily began to sketch the scene. He imagined himself standing before the College with...what? This drawing? What other proof could he bring them? Surely he could figure out how to bear some piece of the creature down to Delirium Tremens, something suitable for shipping back to Yale. Pabodie would single-handedly render the previous twenty years of paleontology practically obsolete with this discovery. To hell with Marsh and Cope and their silly bones, placing heads on the asses of dinosaurs and sabotaging each other’s measly field digs.

  How had this animal come to survive here? What was its food source? How did it live? How had it escaped discovery for so long? Well, that probably wasn't hard to surmise. The various Indian tribes of the region had spoken of creatures such as these in their pictographic and oral histories. The white man had never regarded them as anything other than folkloric traditions passed down from an earlier epoch. Who could have known these things actually existed in the modern world? What other animals thought long extinct might exist in some other desolate pocket of the world? The welcome onrush of forgotten possibilities thrilled him to his core.

  "It's gone, goddammit!"

  Pabodie had nearly forgotten his guide. Neb emerged from the depths of the creature like a wild man from a cave.

  He was smeared from the crown of his hat to the heels of his boots in blood. Sinew and gore hung in chords from his shoulders. He shook off dribbling strands of it like a wet dog and scowled.

  He reclaimed his rifle and bags. Then without a word or a look at Pabodie, he began to trek higher up the mountain.

  "Wait!" Pabodie called. He couldn't carry any sizable piece of the creature back to town on his own, and he certainly couldn't treat a hunk of its flesh for the journey without the hunter's expertise. His own skill lay in the preservation of dusty relics, not biological tissue. "Where are you going? We've got to save these remains!”

  Neb kept walking.

  “You've got to help me,” Pabodie nearly screamed. “This is the find of the century, for God's sake! We can’t just leave it!"

  The old man paused on the incline and pointed to the dead animal with his rifle.

  “The heart's been blowed to bits. It ain't worth nothin' to me."

  "Now hang on just a minute!" Pabodie shouted. "I hired you! You work for me! Now you get back down here and help me carry some part of this back to town."

  He observed the bloody old hunter's disapproving countenance and decided immediately to try a different approach.

  "Look...you said nobody in town believed you when you told them about the thunderbird. Well, here’s your proof right here. Now everybody down there will know you weren't lying.”

  “You think I care a whit about them jackasses?" Neb muttered. "Look here, boss. That buzzard's a female. Could be she's got a nest higher up she was tryin' to get back to. Nest means maybe eggs. Persevere a little with me. Might be you could get your hands on a nipper thunderbird to take back east. How'd that suit you and your professors?"

  "Well," said Pabodie, looking reluctantly at the dead hulk drawing flies and putting his sketchbook in his coat pocket. "I guess that'd suit me fine."

  Higher they went, following a trail only Neb could see. Just a scored white bone of a cow miles above the valley floor, or the tip of a broken conifer. Their food ran out on the third day. Neb assured Pabodie there would be something to eat further on. He speculated just one of the eggs could probably feed a jacal full of Mexicans. They would save one for the road back.

  Pabodie felt uneasy when they talked of it, and changed the subject. He remembered the casual way the old man had mentioned hunting men. The comment took on new meaning for him the tighter their bellies got.

  The sun was cantankerous during the day. The old man stank, for he had not cleaned the guts from himself, and he’d been far from a rose before that. But it seemed the coat of dried slime protected his skin, whereas Pabodie's arms reddened and boiled into white headed blains that seared when his sleeves brushed against them.

  They climbed forever, till the valley was a wispy dream half forgotten, and the San Pedro River nothing more than a thin dark slash bisecting an imaginary country.

  The world lessened to needle points of hot stone now. They came to a place where the rocks were slick with viscid caps of white and black dung like curdled milk.

  "There it is!" Neb declared, pointing to a natural pillar of sheer stone that pointed accusatorially at the blue sky.

  It must have been forty feet up from where they stood, but capping the distant tip was a bulky, dark corona not unlike a desert bird's bramble nest, fashioned from twisted trees and God knew what else.

  "It's too high," Pabodie said for the umpteenth time. "I can't go any further." He was past spent. In the course of his education he had certainly done his fair share of hiking in remote places, but this was the most arduous thing he had ever attempted in his life. He was sure he had reached his tolerance, fortune be damned.

  Neb was not convinced. He angled the long barrel of his rifle nonchalantly towards him.

  "Oh, I believe you could, boss," he said.

  Pabodie had thought the ascent up the mountain a trial, but it was nothing next to this lone climb, nails peeling back as he thrust his fingers into minute crevices and hung for panicked instants, swinging over a plunging death while his feet scrambled to find purchase. He didn’t dare to look down at the rocky ground far below nor at the endless blue sky above for fear he would somehow fall into either one. He only pressed his face to the sun warm rock and confined his attentions to the next handhold, until a thick dry branch of long dead conifer brushed against the top of his head like a skeletal hand and sent his hat spiraling slowly down to Neb's feet.

  Neb, who had shouted no encouragements, now turned his stained face to the sun and grinned.

  "You're there, boss!"

  Pabodie whimpered as he tested the overhanging branches of the nest with sore, bleeding fingers, and found them sturdy. He swung his weight onto them and slowly crawled up, finally wedging the toes of his boots into the knots of brambles. From there it was a relatively easy operation maneuvering up the latticework of interconnected branches and pulling himself over the edge to flop down gratefully into the deep, shaded center.

  He tore his clothes tumbling down the side of the nest wall. His landing was not soft, as he had expected. A vast rick of bones lined the floor, which crackled and snapped and bit into him when he landed.

  He felt a sharp sensation in his thigh and cried out.

  "What's the matter?" Neb's booming voice called from below.

  Pabodie lay on his side gasping. The pain did not abate, and totaled with all his labors of the day he resolved to rest here whether he coul
d somehow manage the descent or no.

  He shifted his weight and placed his back to the wall of the nest, feeling his pain double as he moved the offended leg. A splinter of foreign bone protruded from the side of his thigh. A sizable amount of blood was spreading down his pant leg.

  "I’ve got a bone in my leg!" he shouted in answer to the old man, his voice cracking.

  "What?"

  "There’s a bone stuck in my leg!" Shriller, he confirmed, "I'm bleeding!"

  "Don't get hysterical!" the old man shouted, and Pabodie actually laughed to himself. "Tear off a piece of your shirt, pull it out, and tie it up tight!"

  His shirt was in rags. Tearing it was no problem. But as he set to do so, he glanced about his surroundings, and his giddiness once more overtook him.

  The bed of bones was of every shape and composition. Some scraps of flesh left to rot on the bleached bones gave him clues as to their origin. The mostly decomposed head of a buffalo bull regarded him from a corner, the hollow eye sockets reminding him of Neb. His paleontologist’s eye recognized specific bones; there were avian carpal joints in abundance, a pile of castoff pedicles from what looked to be a horse, and the jaw of a large cave bear. The remains were not solely animal. Necklaces and bijouterie of bright turquoise and scraps of crafted leather marked the skeletons of hapless Indians who had been taken away by the creature. Their attitudes suggested nothing of their deaths; they were scattered haphazardly about, mingled with their animal neighbors.

  There were more remains than could be attributed to a single creature or its family. Pabodie suspected this was a kind of ancestral home which had seen more than one generation of the giant pteranodon.

  He caught his breath. What bones might lie beneath this top layer? The nearly intact frameworks of ancient creatures and peoples and their crude implements filled this space, no doubt. Here was the treasure trove Marsh and Cope had waged a frantic war across the country to discover. Here was a bone picker's white El Dorado.

  But these were the dreams of, in his mind, lesser men. He spotted what he'd come for. In the middle of the nest of deep black and blinding white, arrayed like pearls in the shade of the walls, a clutch of a half dozen speckled yellow eggs, each the size of a prize pumpkin.