by IGMS
- from The Science of Cryptozoology, Ph. Mosegi Steyn, 1935
Pharmacant Steyn owned a black automobile; only the very poor or the very stubborn owned pterodactyl-drawn carriages anymore. Tale de Kaant owned neither, and was quite content.
She was out for a breather, between the grading of several essays as dry as the paper they were printed on, when she spotted Steyn's automobile. Its driver was several yards away, hunched over a small table at one of the French-style cafes, engaged in rather one-sided conversation with a man Tale did not recognize. Steyn's shoulders were drawn up towards his ears - he did not want to be seen.
Then he should not have sat in an open-air cafe, she thought smugly.
The temptation was too great. Whistling a rather jaunty version of N'Kosi Sikelel, she sauntered up to the two men and dipped her head toward the stranger. Then, as if in great surprise, she pretended to recognize the curator.
"Pharmacant Steyn!" she said. "Why, I hardly recognized you."
Steyn flinched away from her jovial greeting. "Ah, Miss de Kaant. What an unexpected pleasure. Allow me to introduce you to Dingani." He did not give the man's last name.
Dingani was shorter than Tale by at least a head - she could tell that even when he was sitting down - and his skin was much darker than Steyn's. Tale could see immediately that there was no Dutch blood in him, and she hesitated slightly before holding out her hand to him . . . as if, what? He might bite? She was not so far removed from the Bush as all that. She felt a little thrill of guilt, and looked him squarely in the face to banish it.
"I didn't mean to interrupt," she said, which was a complete lie.
Steyn looked as if he were ready to hurry her away, but Dingani kept hold of her hand a moment longer than was strictly polite. "I was just talking to your friend about dogs," he said. "I believe I know where to find one."
"Dogs?" she replied, shooting Steyn a sidelong glance. He did not meet her eye. "You might as well be talking about rabbits. Or do you and the Pharmacant share a love of children's stories?"
Dingani's mouth folded into a frown. "You do not believe in dogs, then, Miss de Kaant?"
"The Pharmacant is a woman of science," said Steyn. "She does not, of course, believe in rumor."
Tale drew up a third chair and sat down, her posture erect and her hands on the table. Dingani's gaze did not leave her face. "But you believe in what can be seen."
"I believe in what can be observed," said Tale, "which is not exactly the same thing."
"What you mean," said Dingani, "is that if I tell you I have seen a dog, you will not believe me until you have seen it, too."
Steyn scoffed. "Dogs! What nonsense!" He rubbed the palms of his hands against his trousers, as if to wipe away something that disgusted him.
Tale said, "What I can prove, I can believe."
Dingani smiled at her. His teeth were large and blunt and very white. "Then you should join us."
Steyn coughed.
"Join you?" Tale asked.
"The Pharmacant has hired me to take him on a little trip. I have seen something that interests him. Perhaps it would interest you as well."
"That was a private matter," hissed Steyn, his thin face knotting up with rage.
Dingani looked amused, but it was Tale who said, in her most reasonable voice, "More eyes find more proof, Pharmacant."
And even Mosegi Steyn could not argue with that.
"We will need to take a camera," grumbled Steyn. "And extra film. Can you be trusted to remember that?"
Tale had already packed two cameras and three spare rolls of film. She was also bringing a small hand-crank motion picture camera, but she had not told Steyn. He would only complain of the risk of the machine's being damaged, and of the tremendous expense.
"How did you happen across this Dingani fellow?" Tale asked.
"I heard rumors," snapped Steyn. "Bring iodine."
She had already packed emergency supplies. "Do you believe he has really seen . . . what he claims?" Tale could not quite bear to admit that Dingani might be a liar at worst, or a dreamer at best. "Could he really have seen - one?"
"Dogs are not real," said Steyn. But he was staring at the Moa when he said it, his face puckered with disdain. After a moment, he added, "Do not forget insect repellant."
It was in her bag, beside the rubbing alcohol and the miniature sewing kit. She stopped asking questions.
Dingani's boat was anchored in New London. Steyn's automobile could have gotten them there in about thirteen hours, but Dingani put his foot down. "It is a very fine car, Mr. Steyn," he said, "but pterodactyls are more efficient. The roads to the South are bad - better to fly overland than risk blowing a tire in the Bush."
"So old fashioned," mumbled Steyn, who took offense at any title that did not offer deference to his degrees. But Dingani did not answer him, and in the end Steyn suffered himself to be loaded into the pterodactyl-drawn carriage, along with a man he did not like, a woman he did not respect, and more luggage than the space was made to accommodate.
Tale did not sympathize in the slightest. For one thing, Steyn had gone through her carefully packed bags, taken everything out, sorted it, and repacked it so that the same things took up twice as much room. He had left the crank-camera off to the side, along with a heap of other things that Tale was sure would be useful. Even when she had everything back in its proper place, there were still two extra cases worth of Steyn's possessions which he had deemed necessary.
Refusing to so much as look at her colleague, Tale struck up a conversation with the only other person available.
"So, Mr. Dingani -"
"Just Dingani," he said. He leaned back into the plush seat facing hers and tilted his head to one side.
"Yes. Well. Have you made a study of dogs?"
Dingani shrugged. "From birth, we hear tales, Miss de Kaant. Stories told around a campfire. Legends. Almost nobody takes them seriously. Nobody aside from your esteemed friend."
Tale snorted very softly and shot Steyn a sidelong glare. Friend indeed!
Dingani's accent was very strange - very coarse and country, she had thought at first, but the longer she was near him the more she suspected that Afrikaans was not his first language, and that he had been raised on a Bush tongue. Rural people often believed strange things. It was not their fault, she told herself, they did not have good schools . . .
Dingani did not seem ignorant or poorly educated.
Outside, one of the dray-pterodactyl screamed, and the carriage lurched; the teetering pile of luggage slid toward Tale, crushing her against the wall. When the carriage righted, they had to shove the bags back into place.
"Do you have some background in biology?" asked Tale.
Dingani shook his head. Steyn coughed loudly into his fist.
"Then how can you be sure what you saw? That this trip is worth the trouble?"
Dingani pressed his face to the window and did not answer for a few moments. The silence stretched thin and began to fray. "You believe what you can observe," he said at last. "You are not the type to be convinced by words alone."
And oddly, that did more to convince her than anything else he might have said. Steyn, on the other hand, groaned, and settled back in his seat so that his eyes were on the roof. She would have liked to kick him, but a crate of formaldehyde-filled jars stood between them, and so she could not reach.
They arrived in New London shortly before midnight, cramped and short-tempered from the long flight. Steyn was in a fouler mood than anyone - as usual.
The pterodactyl-drawn carriage had been cramped, but Dingani's rented boat was even worse: it was cramped, it smelled strongly of fish, and it moved. The moment Tale set foot on board, her stomach began an uneasy heaving.
At first she insisted on helping stow their bags, but after a few minutes of stumbling back and forth - the deck was never quite where her feet expected it to be - she allowed Dingani to help her down the stairs into the cabin, where a small and rather grub
by cot awaited. Under normal circumstances, Tale would have insisted on fresh sheets, or at least a clean blanket to lie on, but at the moment she would have gladly taken the upper deck, fish-gut stains and all.
Lying down offered minimal relief, and although she could close her eyes, she could not calm her stomach or stop her ears.
"Typical," Steyn was saying. His voice carried through the walls. "Just like a woman, to grow faint when there's work to be done." If I am sick, thought Tale, I will make sure to aim for his shoes.
"She'll be alright in a few hours," said Dingani. "She has never been on a boat before, that's all."
"Nor have I, but you don't hear me moaning about it!"
Dingani did not reply right away. At last he said, "No. I do not hear you moaning about that."
Even in her misery, Tale smiled at that.
Steyn spoke again, but Tale could not stand the sound of his voice another moment, and burrowed her head beneath the greying, cover-less pillow. The smell was ripe and unfamiliar, but the quiet was a relief.
At some point she must have slept, and when she woke the merciless roil of her innards was reduced to a mere sloshing in the lower regions. The pillow was no longer over her head; it now lay beside her, tucked tight against her body like a small affectionate animal. She felt a twinge of loss that made no sense to her at all, and tossed the pillow aside so that it flapped limply against the wall.
Her clothes were rumpled, but she did not know where to find her personal luggage - and after all, who was there to impress? Not Steyn, surely, who was never impressed by anything not born of his own brain, and Dingani did not strike her as the sort that would care.
Dingani was at the wheel, and Steyn had spread a huge quantity of their belongings out across the foredeck. "Where," he demanded upon seeing her, "have you put the damned binoculars? I know they were here."
Tale unearthed them momentarily, and Steyn glared at her. She smiled very sweetly back.
He shoved all their things back into the bags, not looking at what went where. "We have a dog to track, Miss de Kaant," he said. "This is serious work. I hope that you find yourself up to the task."
Steyn retreated, binoculars in hand, and Dingani gave a low whistle in his wake. "That man needs a wife," he said.
"I wouldn't wish him on any woman," Tale replied. "What he needs is a thrashing."
Dingani's lips quirked. "Do all Pharmacants get along as well as the two of you?"
Tale shook her head, standing over the mound of freshly trashed luggage. "Some of them respect each other."
The captain's laugh echoed around the little boat.
After a moment's weary contemplation, Tale decided to leave the bags as-is and let Steyn sort the mess out himself. "That's not entirely true," she said, circling around to where Dingani stood against the wheel. It was a bright day - hot, too, in spite of the sea breeze and the fine spray of mist that spumed up around the boat. The sun turned the water yellow-gold instead of blue, and where it struck the waves the sea became too bright to look on. "I respect his work. In print, anyway, he can make himself very easily understood. Most of us," she waved her hand vaguely in front of her to encompass Pharmacants as a species, "are too opaque. We spend so much time in our own heads that we forget how to interact with the real world."
Dingani's face wrinkled up with an expression Tale could not read. She found herself suddenly embarrassed, and did not quite understand why. "I love the work," she said. "He loves the work. We might butt heads, but we want the same things."
"He does not always remember that," suggested Dingani.
"Not always," she agreed. "He can be forgetful. He's also childish, jealous, petty, and rude."
"But a genius." There was a smile hiding in Dingani's words, and the corners of Tale's lips twitched upward in agreement.
"A genius? No. But a very savvy curator."
Some little distance away, a great bottle-green hump broke the surface; Tale steadied herself against the ship, recognizing the brindled back of a massive pliosaur. Dingani, however, glanced across at it with no great concern.
"They do not trouble the ships," he told her. "Not this time of year."
"I'm not afraid," she said.
Dingani's lips twitched. "You do not seem the type. May I tell you something, Miss . . . that is, Pharmacant de Kaant?"
"Of course." She stared at the circling pliosaur as if riveted. Please, do not let it be a confession of some romantic inclination! she prayed.
"I have not seen the dog."
She turned so fast she almost tumbled over the side. "Excuse me?"
"Not in the flesh. But I dreamed it." He laughed at her indignation. "Pharmacant, you are a very smart woman, but there are many kinds of knowing. Some of us . . . we know where to find new creatures, even before we have proof. Evidence, you would say. The thing I am going to show you, it looks just like the old stories. We will be the first to lay eyes on it. I promise you."
The undulating body of the pliosaur slid beneath the water as the creature dove. There were so many common, perfect creatures in the world to study. Why was she always chasing shadows?
Because something is alive to cast those shadows, she told herself. And she stood there for a long while, watching the ocean before her, but thinking of the dog.
"What will you do with it?" asked Dingani. "Once you have your evidence?"
Shoot it. Stuff it. Dust it on the weekends, thought Tale. What she said was, "Preserve it."
As the day went on, and the sky darkened with clouds, something like mist began to creep across the water. Little spits of rock rose up from that mist, like the back of the pliosaur - but Tale's mind snagged on fantasies, and every time she glimpsed one she thought, It is a whale, no matter how many islands they passed or how harshly she chided herself for her foolishness.
"There," said Dingani abruptly, pointing out across the water. "That's it."
The first drops of rain were falling, and Tale had to hold her hands above her eyes to see the shape that emerged from the coming storm. "It's very small," she observed, skeptical.
"This is one tip of the island," Dingani assured her. "It is large enough for one dog, I promise you." He was always promising things, this Bushman.
She did not hear Steyn come up behind them, but suddenly his hand was on Tale's shoulder, gripping it tight. "Our island," he breathed. "Can you imagine it, de Kaant? Such an ordinary place, and yet . . ." He seemed overcome with emotion, and did not go on.
She was almost fond of him in that moment; his expression was so much like hers must be, full of wonder and hope and the fear of disappointment.
Dingani held out one huge hand and let rainwater pool in the dark creases of his palm. "I hope you have brought something, Pharmacants, to keep the rain off," he said.
Tale had.
The third poncho was much too small for Steyn, although Tale's fit her perfectly and Dingani's was baggy on his skinny frame. Much of their luggage - most of it, really - would have to stay on the boat, but Tale snuck the motion-picture camera into her suitcase at the expense of a dry outfit.
They slid through wet sand, dragging tents and tarps and traps behind them. "We should sleep on the boat," suggested Steyn.
"All of us?" asked Tale.
Steyn had seen the size of the cabin. He pursed his lips.
"There will be no dogs on the boat," said Dingani.
"We cannot be sure," grumbled Steyn, who had abandoned his earlier optimism, "that there will be dogs on the island, either."
For the first time, Dingani looked truly angry. Tale stepped between them. "Steyn might deserve a thrashing," she whispered, "but not here, and not now."
Except for the beach, there was no flat place on the island, so they were forced to camp in wet sand; the tent pegs sunk deep but did not stay. While Tale and Dingani struggled with the canopy that would protect their gear, Steyn applied himself to his personal tent. Tale could not suppress a grim smile when it collapsed on him the mo
ment he crawled inside.
The light was gone, and they were all three soaked to the bone. They did not say good night. Tale did not even bother with food. She was exhausted, and the moment she had set foot on land her stomach had begun to complain almost as much as it had in her first moments on the boat.
This life is hell, she thought grimly, bundled into her wet sleeping bag. Nothing is worth it.
She woke at midnight. The rain had stopped. Something on the far side of the island was screaming.
No. Not screaming. Barking.
In the old stories, Dog is the trickster who stole stories from Sky God and Earth Mother. She invented fire. She tricked Tyrannosaur out of his treats, she invented song, she taught humans how to sleep so that they would not always be working.
In the old stories, Dog was Man's best friend.
- from Bush Beasts in Folklore and Legend, Ph. Mosegi Steyn, 1924
Tale stumbled out of her tent, tugging on her poncho. The night was clear, and the sky was full of stars like silver coins, with a fat white-beetle moon just waning from the full. "Mosegi! Mosegi!" she cried, "can you hear it?"
But only Dingani met her on the beach; Steyn's tent was empty, the bedroll still warm.
"He's gone," she said, though it was obvious. "He left without me."
In the face of her fury, Dingani only shrugged. "He loves the work," he said.
The barking got louder - it was a sound she knew, a sound she'd dreamed. Dogs always sounded like that, in the old stories, in eyewitness accounts, a buff-chuff like a gunshot, with a high whine laced beneath it.
Tale snatched the camera up from beside her bedroll, and began an ungainly sprint up the slope, a shrub-pocked scree that shifted damply beneath her feet. The wind off the water was unseasonably cold, saltier now that the rain was over, and it dulled all other sounds in her ears: Dingani's steps behind her, the roll of the surf, and bark of the dog across the island.