Over the Darkened Landscape - By Derryl Murphy Page 0,79

from an adult dog. Excepting, of course, that this creature was not actually a dog.

It had a trunk, just like an elephant, but its ears were small and its tusks were still just ivory nubs, and it was covered with thick reddish-brown fur. It lay on its side in the partially frozen mud, and Samuel could see that a puddle was beginning to form below its belly as it thawed in the weak mid-day sun, which was soon to disappear behind the small overhang immediately behind Samuel.

After a moment or two of searching, Samuel found his voice. “That’s no elephant,” he said, and he jumped down into the mud beside the beast. “It’s a woolly mammoth.” He grinned up at Fanny Alice. “A young one probably of the same type as the one that tooth you gave me last year came from.”

“A woolly what?” asked one of the miners.

“Mammoth,” said Samuel. “Probably an ancestor or distant cousin of the elephant, from many—many—thousands of years ago.” He looked back down at the animal’s corpse. “Maybe even longer.”

“An antediluvian beast somehow washed up on our frozen and landlocked shores,” said Pete Marliss, pushing his way to the front of the crowd. Pete was a town councilman, a large and florid man with a full thatch of white hair and an equally white and bristly beard. He was also a local hotelier as well as a lapsed Presbyterian minister who still sometimes exhibited signs of that faith. “Certainly anything older than the time of Noah is, of course, impossible. It seems obvious to me that this poor unfortunate beast was unlucky enough to step off the edge of the ark one unfortunate night, perhaps as the result of a stumble when the vessel bumped up against an iceberg. Its poor mate likely spent the rest of its days alone and despondent, aware that she was the last of her kind.”

Samuel glared at Pete for a moment, astonished by his delusional line of reasoning, but after searching for the right words he finally shrugged in response. He knew from tired experience that there was no sense in stepping into an argument with Pete. Instead, he turned his attention back to the baby mammoth and put his hand on its shaggy coat and instantly felt the shock of ages drift past and run up through his arm and through his body, grappling with his memories all the way. For a fraction of a second he saw and smelled a different world, enormous stretches of gleaming white punctuated by small oases of green, and then he felt himself stumble as a dreadful pain lanced into his right side.

He snatched his hand away and sat down hard on the mud beside the creature, rubbing his ribs until the ghost pain died away. When he finally thought to once again pay attention to his surroundings, he saw that Fanny Alice was bending over and had her hands on his face, trying to get his attention.

“I’m with you,” he said, and gingerly he stood again. “Sorry about that. I don’t know what happened there.”

Now, it was widely accepted that Fanny Alice was not the best-looking woman to ever practice her trade, but it was also well known that she had some conjuring skills and that some of those skills involved activities in the non-marital bed. But other skills of hers had nothing to do with physical bliss, and she was often useful that way, seeing the magic in life when others might have completely missed it.

This, Samuel was sorry to realize, appeared to be one of those times.

“Somethin’s reached out and touched you,” she said, and she herself reached out and put a hand on his side, where he’d felt the sharp pain. “I don’t know that I recognize it, but I can tell you that I don’t like it. It looked like very old magic, and very powerful as well. Certainly different than the magic in that tooth I gave you.”

Samuel’s own experiences with magic had been low-key and usually from a great remove. He was disinclined to think that this had been anything other than sheer imagination, him working himself to a state of great agitation and excitement over such a discovery. At worst, though, it could only have been an echo of something from thousands of years before, long dead and forgotten but still hanging in the fabric of the world, like ripples at the edge of a large pond long after the rock had been