When morning came, I had not slept, nor had I left my perch. At first light I reloaded the upper barrel of my rifle. I had not dared to do so in the dark for fear of overcharging it. I dropped down from the tree, recovered my cane, and limped out to the herby. The meat would be rank for not having been bled, but my hunger could overcome any delicacies of appetite.

I laid my rifle close at hand and drew my knife. I would cut a steak and broil it.

I could not.

I stood with my knife poised and could not bring it down to lay back the skin and expose the firm, red meat beneath.

Cursing myself for a child, I plunged the blade in angrily. The firm flesh gave before my blade and I shuddered at its texture, though it was a texture I had known all my life. What was wrong with me?

I laid back a flap of skin from the haunch, forgetting to skin the beast properly. There was a stricken gasp from the trees where the unseen audience of flying things waited. Yet it had not been an audible gasp; I had heard it in my mind. I cut out a steak, though my hand trembled so that I could hardly control it. The mass of flesh which came out was misshapen and bloody. My stomach contracted.

It had returned and it was appalled.

Cursing, I carried my steak to the edge of the trees and built a fire. I impaled and broiled it. The juices dripped from the meat and sizzled in the fire while my stomach turned flips in anticipation. Let phantoms be damned; I was hungry and I would eat. I took the steak down half raw and sank my teeth into it.

I gagged. The blood juices were a fire in my throat and I barely avoided vomiting. How could I ever have eaten meat before? I threw the steak aside.

One of the flying creatures left its sanctuary and floated down to me. It was mammalian; its wings were covered with a tight, furry skin. I was reminded of stories of terrestrial bats, but this creature inspired no loathing. Its weight was about ten kilos and its wingspread greater than the reach of my arms. Its belly was round; like the herby it was earless and tailless. Its face was whiskered, looking for all the world like a terrestrial seal, and its expression was both benign and bemused.

“Dilwildi!” it said, so I named both the individual and his race after that sound. The creature looked up at me as if deciphering some great puzzle, then sat back with a thump, scratching its plump belly. “Dilwildi,” it announced again and I broke into laughter. It was not offended; rather, the tiny face seemed to beam even more happily.

The dilwildi drew up his wings and flapped heavily across the glade to a siskal bush, here of treelike stature. He slipped clumsily from branch to branch, then returned bearing a half-dozen siskal fruit which he gave to me. I bit into one and never had fruit tasted so good.

*****

No, I’m not a vegetarian, and this is not propaganda.

Actually I grew up on a farm. I know where food comes from first hand. I’ve done things as a jackleg veterinarian that you don’t want the hear about. I’ve attended hog butcherings. I’ve killed animals out of necessity, but never for sport. I don’t hunt and I don’t fish, not because I think it’s wrong, but because I wouldn’t enjoy it. I’m not a vegetarian, but I understand how a person could decide to be one.  more tomorrow

I killed the herby cleanly as he stooped to drink.

The herd scattered with cries of terror and the forest night sounds fell silent. For a moment I felt exultation, then a nameless dread. It was as if I had sinned in the face of God. Never had I felt such guilt.

Some presence moved in the jungle night. Something sleeping was wakened; something quiescent was angered.

Some thing became aware of my presence. I could feel its personality as it probed and quested.

I did not move.

The spirit of the place moved in the moonlit glade. A breeze stirred the trees, flattened the grass. The herby lay on its side, feet stretched stiffly toward me, lying in an obscene black pool of its own blood.

I dared not move, yet the thing found me. It moved in the tree beside me where no material thing could be seen.

Spiraling above the clearing, rising from somewhere inland, I saw the heavy flying things that had eluded me during the day. They rose like a cloud, circling, like some great aerial hieroglyph. Their cries came down to me, “Dilwildi, dilwildi, dilwildi.”

The presence sat unseen beside me in the tree, its essence scratching at the surface of my mind, seeking entry, finding none.

“No!” I was whimpering like a child in the treetop, overcome by some unspoken guilt. I was a man, a hunter. What business did I have with such feelings. Yet they were not to be denied.

The flying things descended to the clearing, making a circle around the dead herby. One slipped forward, scuttling crabwise to investigate this incursion of violence into a realm that knew no violence. How did I know that? Yet I did.

They were clearly creatures of the air who moved clumsily on land. Their wings were disproportionately long and seemed not feathered but furred; beyond that I could tell little about them.

Over the course of millennia, legions of demons have crept into earthly folklore and scores of these have made their way into the Monomythos. In my imagination, they sat with me that night.

The flying creatures left the ground in a concerted rush, flying laboriously into the trees. They had come from the rocky fastness at the center of the island.

Within me was a desire to follow them, to track them to the place of their origin. Was this my own wish, or something left me by the presence?

Then I realized that it was gone and I was alone again.

*****

Where is the boundary between science fiction and fantasy? Most of what we read lies near the border between them. Star Wars is clearly a fairy tale with light sabres. Hogwarts has boring lectures, student pranks, and demerits even while it is teaching spells and potions instead of history and math. There are more things in heaven and earth, Albert, than are dreamt of in your theories.

Perhaps it all lies in the difference between the unknown and the unknowable. If anything is actually unknowable. And if anything can be truly and finally known.

Beyond philosophy, there is the practical. I knew as I began Jandrax that a book of science fiction where the technology was reduced to nineteenth century level, could become dull without at least the whiff of the uncanny. The ruins at the end of chapter one were there from the first draft, and the “potbellied, winged mammals” on the mural there are the dilwildi which Jean will get to know in the next few posts.

I knew from the first that there would be a touch of the supernatural before Jandrax was through, but I didn’t know until I got there what that would entail. more tomorrow

I staggered and nearly fell, so unaccustomed was I to the firm, unswaying earth.

The grass underfoot was not the ubiquitous gluegrass that the colonists hate. It did not cling to boots and clothing, carrying its mucilaginous spores. This grass was fine and sweet smelling, a pleasure to touch and an invitation to lie upon. I had heard of such grasses from the elders, but had thought them fantasy. The trees seemed even taller from beneath, and the profusion of birdlife and wildflowers was even more breathtaking than the soft grass and immense trees. Standing alone, cut off fully from my fellow man, I broke down into tears at the beauty around me and at the poverty of life as I had previously known it. Beside this, our settlement, our fields, and our silly pretensions to manhood looked pale and drab.

II

I stayed in that clearing for three days, living without shelter under the canopy of trees. On the first day I washed my clothes and built a bonfire to dry them. Then I bathed again and luxuriated in a clean body, cleanly clothed. I cooked the fish I had caught, but I did not see any large herbivores, nor did I wish to try to kill any of the small creatures around me. Never had I seen such a profusion of life except in the migratory herds during the melt, and I did not wish to subtract as much as one creature from it.

Each night I heard the crooning and the incessant “dilwildi, dilwildi.” I saw the large flying creatures several times at a distance during the day and every night close up in the darkness. I was convinced that they were not birds.

There is a creature called a milik which feeds on the dried seedpods of the siskal. There are never very many of these creatures and they are quite small, but they do provide a certain amount of sport and a bit of fresh meat in the off seasons. In order to snare them, boys often row far upstream on the Lydia during low winter. Six years ago, my father got the idea of attaching a sail to our gig and sailing upstream before the wind, then drifting back down. Since then several others have copied his idea.

Papa never had to contend with tacking against the wind, so his gig had neither keel nor centerboard. The sail itself was a large, clumsy square of sewn up herby hides. After ten weeks at sea I was only too familiar with the gig’s shortcomings.

Refashioning my rigging into a lateen pattern and building sideboards took the better part of three days, after which I decided to hunt. Though I had not wanted to set snares for the smaller creatures, I was not reluctant to face a herby and there were herby tracks in abundance along the inlet.

Herbies are burro-bodied, tapir-headed, earless, and tailless herbivores. They are devoid of defense, depending on their speed, agility, and prodigious birthrate to perpetuate their species. I had seen no large herbivore tracks other than these and no large carnivore tracks at all. This was an oddity, for without carnivores to thin their numbers, the herbies would soon have eaten the island into barrenness.

Several times I had heard the herbys come to drink during the night, so after finishing my work in the gig I slept away the afternoon in preparation for a night hunt.

Of course I could not stalk, but I had discovered their favorite watering place and took my place in the lower branches of a tree waiting in ambush. They came after midnight and I had calculated right in getting myself downwind of them. I killed one cleanly as he stooped to drink. more tomorrow

When dusk came, the crooning resumed, alternating with an airy cry of, “Dilwildi, dilwildi, dilwildi.” I searched the trees for the sources of the noise and saw patches of deeper darkness sitting at intervals along the larger limbs. Occasionally one of these would move, but I could not make them out. Alpha rose, with her tiny red companion Gamma in train. Beta, our third moon, would not be up for hours yet, but these two gave a silvery sheen to the lake, highlighting the darker gouges of the long, sweeping rollers. One of the patches of darkness detached itself from a limb and sailed seaward. I tracked it with my rifle, an instinctive, defensive action, but there was no reason to fire. It flew, but somehow I did not think of it as a bird. I followed it with my eyes until it was lost in the distance.

I slept too soundly that night. I had seen no carnivores, true, but there must be such or life here would quickly overpopulate. In the morning I slipped the oars into their sockets, cast off, and worked my way out of the inlet. I was in a foul mood, for rowing cost me much pain in my leg, yet I dared not set the unpredictable sail.

I rowed out into the lake a half kilometer to better survey the island, then turned west to follow the shore. The wind was against me, making the task harder than it need have been. From this distance I could see how thin the fringe of jungle actually was and how rugged were the hills beyond. Except for the shore, it was a forbidding and utterly inhospitable place.

I rowed for several hours, searching for a proper anchorage. I also filled my waterskins for the first time and set the line out to catch some fish more palatable than rocod. I had given up the idea of finding large game, but if I could get ashore and build a fire, cooked fish would be a delicacy by comparison.

At one point a flat plain no more than five meters above water level extended several kilometers inland. Here the jungle too thrust inland. There was an inlet into which I rowed.

It was not a river, of course, for there was nothing to feed it, yet it no doubt carried snowmelt from the mountains during the melt. Now the inlet was merely a thin arm of the lake, first a half–kilometer wide but soon narrowing to a dozen meters. My passage was silent but for the cutting of my oars, and the birds were in full song. Trees soared overhead, their branches intertwining to make tunnels of the smaller channels off the main stream. Twice I saw the large flying creatures overhead, but they passed quickly from sight.

I paused to check the charges in my rifle, for with a section of jungle this large I would have to revise my earlier assumption that there would be no large animals. It was my seventy-sixth day of raw fish.

The inlet continued for several kilometers, growing gradually narrower until trees began to meet over the main channel. I tied up to a tree and worked my way across the steps that its roots provided onto dry land. I staggered and nearly fell, so unaccustomed was I to the firm, unswaying earth.

*****

As I prepare this for serialization, I am struck by how much 1979 me doesn’t sound like 2016 me. It sounds more like Andre Norton, or H. Ryder Haggard, or Edgar Rice Burroughs. I grew up reading old books which were trapped in the amber of underfunded libraries, and started out writing like their authors.  more tomorrow