The mate’s eyes rested upon a horse-drawn carriage. It was drawn by three horses abreast, and they were either so trained or so checkreined that the two outer horses’ heads were arched outward in the fashion of Tsarist Russia.
But that was natural enough. When an interpreter could be found, the mate and skipper were savagely abused for entering the harbor of Novo Skevsky without paying due heed to the ordinances in force by the ukase of the Tsar Alexis of all the Russias. These rules, they learned, were enforced with special rigor in all the Russian territory in America, from Alaska on south.
The boy ran shouting up to the village. “Hey, grandpa! Hey, grandpa! Lookit the birds!” He pointed as he ran.
A man looked idly, and stood transfixed. A woman stopped, and stared. Lake superior glowed bluely off to westward, and the little village most often turned its eyes in that direction. Now, though, as the small boy ran shouting of what he had seen, men stared, women marveled, and children ran and shouted and whooped in the instinctive excitement of childhood at anything which entrances grown-ups.
Over the straggly pine forests birds were coming. They came in great dark masses. Not by dozens, or by hundreds, or even by thousands. They came in millions, in huge dark clouds which obscured the sky. There were two huge flights in sight at the boy’s first shouting. There were six in view before he had reached his home and was panting a demand that his elders come and look. And there were others, incredible numbers of others, sweeping onward straight over the village.
Dusk fell abruptly as the first flock passed overhead. The whirring of wings was loud. It made people raise their voices as they asked each other what such birds could possibly be. Daylight again, and again darkness as the flocks poured on. The size of each flock was to be measured not in feet or yards, but in miles of front. Two, three miles of birds, flying steadily in a single enormous mass some four miles deep. Another such mass, and another, and another.
“What are they, grandpa? There must be millions of ‘em!”
Somewhere, a shotgun went off. Small things dropped from the sky. Another gunshot, and another. A rain of bird shot went up from the village into the mass of whirring wings. And crazily careening small bodies fell down among the houses.
Grandpa examined one of them, smoothing its rumpled plumage. He exclaimed. He gasped in excitement. “It’s a wild pigeon! What they used to call passenger pigeons! Back in ‘78 there was these birds by billions. Folks said a billion was killed in Michigan that one year! But they’re gone now. They’re gone like the buffalo. There ain’t any more.”
The sky was dark with birds above him. A flock four miles wide and three miles long made lights necessary in the village. The air was filled with the sound of wings. The passenger pigeon had returned to a continent from which it had been absent for almost fifty years.
Flocks of passenger pigeons flew overhead in thick, dark masses equaling those seen by Audubon in 1813, when he computed the pigeons in flight above Kentucky at hundreds of billions in number. In flocks that were innumerable they flew to westward. The sun set, and still the air was filled with the sound of their flying. For hours after darkness fell, the whirring of wings continued without ceasing.
VI
A great open fire licked at the rocks against which it had been built. The horses cropped uneasily at herbage near by. The smell of fat meat cooking was undeniably savory, but one of the girls blubbered gustily on a bed of leaves. Harris tended the cookery. Tom Hunter brought wood. Blake stood guard a little beyond the firelight, revolvers ready, staring off into the blackness. Professor Minott pored over a topographical map of Virginia. Maida Haynes tried to comfort the blubbering girl.
“Supper’s ready,” said Harris. He made even that announcement seem somehow shy and apologetic.
Minott put down his map. Tom Hunter began to cut great chunks of steaming meat from the haunch of venison. He put them on slabs of bark and began to pass them around. Minott reached out his hand and took one of them. He ate with obvious appetite. He seemed to have abandoned his preoccupation the instant he laid down his map. He was displaying the qualities of a capable leader.
“Hunter,” he observed, “After you’ve eaten that stuff, you might relieve Blake. We’ll arrange reliefs for the rest of the night. By the way, you men mustn’t forget to wind your watches. We’ll need to rate them, ultimately.”
Hunter gulped down his food and moved out to Blake’s hiding place. They exchanged low-toned words. Blake came back to the fire. He took the food Harris handed him and began to eat it. He looked at the blubbering girl on the bed of leaves.
“She’s just scared,” said Minott. “Barely slit the skin on her arm. But it is upsetting for a senior at Robinson College to be wounded by a flint arrowhead.”
Blake nodded. “I heard some noises off in the darkness,” he said curtly “I’m not sure, but my impression was that I was being stalked. And I thought I heard a human voice.”
“We may be watched,” admitted Minott. “But we’re out of the path of time in which those Indians tried to ambush us. If any of them follow, they’re too bewildered to be very dangerous.”
“I hope so,” said Blake.
His maimer was devoid of cordiality, yet there was no exception to be taken to it. Professor Minott had deliberately got the party into a predicament from which there seemed to be no possibility of escape. He had organized it to get it into just that predicament. He was unquestionably the leader of the party, despite his action. Blake made no attempt to undermine his leadership.
But Blake himself had some qualifications as a leader, young as he was. Perhaps the most promising of them was the fact that he made no attempt to exercise his talents until he knew as much as Minott of what was to be looked for, what was to be expected.
He listened sharply and then said: “I think we’ve digested your lesson of this morning, sir. But how long is this scrambling of space and time to continue? We left Fredericksburg and rode to the Potomac. It was Chinese territory. We rode back to Fredericksburg, and it wasn’t there. Instead, we encountered Indians who let loose a flight of arrows at us and wounded Bertha Ketterling in the arm. We were nearly out of range at the time, though.”
“They were scared,” said Minott. “They’d never seen horses before. Our white skins probably upset them, too. And then our guns, and the fact that I killed one, should have chased them off.”
“But, what happened to Fredericksburg? We rode away from it. Why couldn’t we ride back?”
“The scrambling process has kept up,” said Minott dryly. “You remember that queer vertigo? We’ve had it several times today, and every time, as I see it, there’s been an oscillation of the earth we happened to be on. Hm! Look!” He got up and secured the map over which he had been poring. He brought it back and pointed to a heavy penciled line. “Here’s a map of Virginia, in our time. The Chinese continent appeared just about three miles north of Fredericksburg. The line of democration was, I consider, the line along which the giant sequoias appeared. While in the Chinese time we felt that giddiness and rode back toward Fredericksburg. We came out of the sequoia forest at the same spot as before. I made sure of it. But the continent of our time was no longer there.
“We rode east and, whether you noticed it or not, before we reached the border of King George County there was another abrupt change in the vegetation from a pine country to oaks and firs, which are not exactly characteristic of this part of the world in our time.
We saw no signs of any civilization. We turned south, and ran into that heavy fog and the snow beyond it. Evidently, there’s a section of a time path in which Virginia is still subject to a glacial climate.”