Them Bones: The Great Old Ones

(For the previous entry in this series, click here.)

Them Bones, 40-41, 44-46, 65-69:

After spending a few days in Took-His-Time's village, Madison Leake decides it will make a good place to wait for his fellow time travelers, and settles in for a long stay. He hides his carbine, trades in his uniform for a breechcloth, and begins accompanying Took on his fishing trips to the river. During one of these, Took, using a fishing spear tipped with three copper barbs, manages to kill a giant river creature of some kind. Canoemen bring the body ashore: it is a manatee, broad-flippered and flat-tailed, a lily pad still drooping from its bristled mouth. (Nice touch, that.) Madison notes that manatees had nearly gone extinct in his time, even before the nuclear war. Back in the Mississippian era, they are plentiful.

Waldrop identifies himself as a science fiction writer, but many of his stories don't seem to match the genre's archetypes; almost none feature space travelers, galactic empires, or aliens. Like mainstream SF writers, however, Waldrop knows how to evoke what the fans call “a sense of wonder,” in this case the wonderment one feels at seeing the dead come back to life. The homely details that Waldrop provides about manatees and passenger pigeons, and for that matter the awkward birds in his famous story “The Ugly Chickens,” make these lost creatures resonate with our senses, and impart life to them. Many's the story written about nostalgia, about longing for a vanished past, but few are the authors who can make us nostalgic for vanished species.

The novel returns to this theme a couple of chapters on, when winter arrives in northeastern Louisiana, and with it the first snow, “tick-tick[ing]” (65) on the walls of the huts, blanketing the town. Hamboon Bokulla and Dreaming Killer come to Took's house early that morning with bad news, though Leake doesn't understand what they're saying in such rapid-fire fashion. He nonetheless agrees to accompany the three men to the northwest, past frozen pools and snow-covered trees, four kilometers from his home village. The quartet eventually arrive at a small farming hamlet whose houses and fields have been torn up by something unseen. Took confers with the villagers, then he and Madison and their compadres follow a huge set of footprints to the west.

The group reaches the cause of the disturbance: “A mountain made of hair,” twelve feet high, with protruding tusks and trunk, “tar-drop eyes” (68), and a trumpeting call like a giant tuba. Took addresses the “old one” (67), and bids him depart, lest he capture its spirit with the pipestone he carries. (Clearly, pipes represent powerful items, presumably because they bridge the earthly and spiritual realms.) The creature regards Took and Leake with an enigmatic expression, perhaps weariness, then, very slowly, heads off to the west.

This scene requires a bit of license on Waldrop's part, as we have no evidence that wooly mammoths survived in North America, or anywhere else, into the fourteenth century. Dreaming Killer does say of the colossus “Not many of those left,” but there probably shouldn't be any. On the other hand, Waldrop is beginning to indicate that there are some elements of his Mississippian setting that differentiate it from the real thing, such as pipestone makers that know Greek, and (as we shall see) eccentric tornadoes.

Coming next: Did someone say "eccentric tornadoes"?