Servants of the Map by Andrea Barrett

Author:Andrea Barrett [Barrett, Andrea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-007-39685-6
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2002-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

He shared these with the boatmen on Christmas Day, when they asked him to join their quiet celebration. The captain led the men in some hymns; Caleb read from the Bible when asked; rain fell, harder and harder, melting the snow until it seemed that they must soon be freed. But after their dinner of pheasant and biscuits and pie, the rain stopped, the sky cleared, and a cold wind swept down the river, freezing everything again. Caleb excused himself from the boatmen’s cabin and retreated to the pleasures of Stuart’s farewell gift: John Filson’s essay on the natural history of Kentucky. A book older than he was, but still very useful—and how like Stuart, he thought fondly, to give him not the most up-to-date scientific volume but this early description of the area. Stuart had marked one page with a piece of paper; the passage described the salt lick—still so far downriver that Caleb could hardly imagine it—and the finds of astonishing bones.

The celebrated Dr. Hunter, Caleb read, had observed from the form of the giant teeth found there,

that they must have belonged to a carnivorous animal … These bones belonged to a quadruped now unknown, and whose race is probably extinct, unless it may be found in the extensive continent of New Holland, whose recesses have not yet been pervaded by the curiosity or avidity of civilized man. Can then so great a link have perished from the chain of nature …’

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