R. A. LAFFERTY

ALL PIECES OF A RIVER SHORE

It had been a very long and ragged and incredibly interlocked and detailed river shore. Then a funny thing had happened to it. It had been broken up, sliced up into pieces. Some of the pieces had been folded and compressed into bales. Some of them had been rolled up on rollers. Some of them had been cut into still smaller pieces and used for ornaments and as Indian medicine. Rolled and baled pieces of the shore came to rest in barns and old warehouses, in attics, in caves. Some were buried in the ground.

And yet the river itself still exists physically, as do its shores, and you may go and examine them. But the shore you will see along tine river now is not quite the same as that old shore that was broken up and baled into bales and rolled onto rollers, not quite the same as the pieces you will find in attics and caves.

* * * *

His name was Leo Nation and he was known as a rich Indian. But such wealth as he had now was in his collections, for he was an examining and acquiring man. He had cattle, he had wheat, he had a little oil, and he spent everything that came in. Had he had more income he would have collected even more.

He collected old pistols, old ball shot, grindstones, early windmills, walking-horse threshing machines, flax combs, Conestoga wagons, brass-bound barrels, buffalo robes, Mexican saddles, slick horn saddles, anvils, Argand lamps, rush holders, hay-burning stoves, hackamores, branding irons, chuck wagons, longhorn horns, beaded serapes, Mexican and Indian leatherwork, buckskins, beads, feathers, squirrel-tail anklets, arrowheads, deerskin shirts, locomotives, streetcars, mill wheels, keelboats, buggies, ox yokes, old parlor organs, blood-and-thunder novels, old circus posters, harness bells, Mexican oxcarts, wooden cigar-store Indians, cable-twist tobacco a hundred years old and mighty strong, cuspidors (four hundred of them), Ferris wheels, carnival wagons, carnival props of various sorts, carnival proclamations painted big on canvas. Now he was going to collect something else. He was talking about it to one of his friends, Charles Longbank who knew everything.

“Charley,” he said, “do you know anything about ‘The Longest Pictures in the World’ which used to be shown by carnivals and in hippodromes?”

“Yes, I know a little about them, Leo. They are an interesting bit of Americana: a bit of nineteenth-century back country mania. They were supposed to be pictures of the Mississippi River shore. They were advertised as one mile long, five miles long, nine miles long. One of them, I believe, was actually over a hundred yards long. They were badly painted on bad canvas, crude trees and mud-bank and water ripples, simplistic figures and all as repetitious as wallpaper. A strong-armed man with a big brush and plenty of barn paint of three colors could have painted quite a few yards of such in one day. Yet they are truly Americana. Are you going to collect them, Leo?”

“Yes. But the real ones aren’t like you say.”

“Leo, I saw one. There is nothing to them but very large crude painting.”

“I have twenty that are like you say, Charley. I have three that are very different. Here’s an old carnival poster that mentions one.”

Leo Nation talked eloquently with his hands while he also talked with his mouth, and now he spread out an old browned poster with loving hands:

“The Arkansas Traveler, World’s Finest Carnival, Eight Wagons, Wheel, Beasts, Dancing Girls, Baffling Acts, Monsters, Games of Chance. And Featuring the World’s Longest Picture, Four Miles of Exquisite Painting. This is from the Original Panorama; it is Not a Cheap-Jack Imitation.”

“So you see, Charley, there was a distinction: there were the original pieces, and there were the crude imitations.”

“Possibly some were done a little better than others, Leo; they could hardly have been done worse. Certainly, collect them if you want to. You’ve collected lots of less interesting things,”

“Charley, I have a section of that panoramic picture that once belonged to the Arkansas Traveler Carnival. I’ll show it to you. Here’s another poster:

“King Carnival, The King of them All. Fourteen Wagons. Ten Thousand Wonders. See the Rubber Man. See the Fire Divers. See the Longest Picture in the World, see Elephants on the Mississippi River. This is a Genuine Shore Depictment, not the Botches that Others show.”

“You say that you have twenty of the ordinary pictures, Leo, and three that are different?”

“Yes I have, Charley. I hope to get more of the genuine. I hope to get the whole river.”

“Let’s go look at one, Leo, and see what the difference is.”

They went out to one of the hay barns. Leo Nation kept his collections in a row of hay barns. “What would I do?” he had asked once, “call in a carpenter and tell him to build me a museum? He’d say, ‘Leo, I can’t build a museum without plans and stuff. Get me some plans.’ And where would I get plans? So I always tell him to build me another hay barn one hundred feet by sixty feet and fifty feet high. Then I always put in four or five decks myself and floor them, and leave open vaults for the tall stuff. Besides, I believe a hay barn won’t cost as much as a museum.”

“This will be a big field, Charley,” Leo Nation said now as they came to one of the hay-barn museums. “It will take all your science in every field to figure it out Of the three genuine ones I have, each is about a hundred and eighty yards long. I believe this is about the standard length, though some may be multiples of these. They passed for paintings in the years of their display, Charley, but they are not paintings.”

“What are they then, Leo?”

“I hire you to figure this out. You are the man who knows everything.”

Well, there were two barrel reels there, each the height of a man, and several more were set further back.

“The old turning mechanism is likely worth a lot more than the picture,” Charles Longbank told Leo Nation. “This was turned by a mule on a treadmill, or by a mule taking a mill pole round and round. It might even be eighteenth century.”

“Yeah, but I use an electric motor on it,” Leo said. “The only mule I have left is a personal friend of mine. I’d no more make him turn that than he’d make me if I was the mule. I line it up like I think it was, Charley, the full reel north and the empty one south. Then we run it. So we travel, we scan, from south to north, going upstream as we face west.”

“It’s funny canvas and funny paint, much better than the one I saw,” said Charles Longbank, “and it doesn’t seem worn at all by the years.”

“It isn’t either one, canvas or paint,” said Ginger Nation, Leo’s wife, as she appeared from somewhere. “It is picture.”

Leo Nation started the reeling and ran it. It was the wooded bank of a river. It was a gravel and limestone bank with mud overlay and the mud undercut a little. And it was thick timber to the very edge of the shore.

“It is certainly well done,” Charles Longbank admitted. “From the one I saw and from what I had read about these, I wasn’t prepared for this.” The rolling picture was certainly not repetitious, but one had the feeling that the riverbank itself might have been a little so, to lesser eyes than those of the picture.

“It is a virgin forest, mostly deciduous,” said Charles Longbank, “and I do not believe that there is any such temperate forest on any large river in the world today. It would have been logged out. I do not believe that there were many such stretches even in the nineteenth century. Yet I have the feeling that it is a faithful copy of something, and not imaginary.”

The rolling shores: cottonwood trees, slash pine, sycamore, slippery elm, hackberry, pine again.

“When I get very many of the pictures, Charley, you will put them on film and analyze them or have some kind of computer do it. You will be able to tell from the sun’s angle what order the pictures should have been in, and how big are the gaps between.”

“No, Leo, they would all have to reflect the same hour of the same day to do that.”

“But it was all the same hour of the same day,” Ginger Nation cut in. “How would you take one picture at two hours of two days?”

“She’s right, Charley,” Leo Nation said. “All the pictures of the genuine sort are pieces of one original authentic picture. I’ve known that all along.”

Rolling shore of pine, laurel oak, butternut, persimmon, pine again.

“It is a striking reproduction, whatever it is,” Charles Longbank said, “but I’m afraid that after a while even this would become as monotonous as repeating wallpaper.”

“Hah,” said Leo. “For a smart man you have dumb eyes, Charley. Every tree is different, every leaf is different. All the trees are in young leaf too. It’s about a last-week-of-March picture. What it hangs on, though, is what part of the river it is. It might be a third-week-in-March picture, or a first-week-in-April. The birds, old Charley who know everything, why don’t we pick up more birds in this section? And what birds are those there?”

“Passenger pigeons, Leo, and they’ve been gone for quite a few decades. Why don’t we see more birds there? I’ve a humorous answer to that, but it implies that this thing is early and authentic. We don’t see more birds because they are too well camouflaged. North America is today a bird watchers’ paradise because very many of its bright birds are later European intrusions that have replaced native varieties. They have not yet adjusted to the native backgrounds, so they stand out against them visually. Really, Leo, that is a fact. A bird can’t adapt in a short four or five hundred years. And there are birds, birds, birds in that, Leo, if you look sharp enough.”

“I look sharp to begin with, Charley; I just wanted you to look sharp.”

“This rolling ribbon of canvas or whatever is about six feet high, Leo, and I believe the scale is about one to ten, going by the height of mature trees and other things.”

“Yeah, I think so, Charley. I believe there’s about a mile of river shore in each of my good pictures. There’s things about these pictures though, Charley, that I’m almost afraid to tell you. I’ve never been quite sure of your nerves. But you’ll see them for yourself when you come to examine the pictures closely.”

“Tell me the things now, Leo, so I’ll know what to look for.”

“It’s all there, Charley, every leaf, every knob of bark, every spread of moss. I’ve put parts of it under a microscope, ten power, fifty power, four hundred power. There’s detail there that you couldn’t see with your bare eyes if you had your nose right in the middle of it. You can even see cells of leaf and moss. You put a regular painting under that magnification and all you see is details of pigment, and canyons and mountains of brush strokes. Charley, you can’t find a brush stroke in that whole picture! Not in any of the real ones.”

* * * *

It was rather pleasant to travel up that river at the leisurely equivalent rate of maybe four miles an hour, figuring a one to ten ratio. Actually the picture rolled past them at about half a mile an hour. Rolling bank and rolling trees, pin oak, American elm, pine, black willow, shining willow.

“How come there is shining willow, Charley, and no white willow, you tell me that?” Leo asked.

“If this is the Mississippi, Leo, and if it is authentic, then this must be a far northern sector of it.”

“Naw. It’s Arkansas, Charley. I can tell Arkansas anywhere. How come there was shining willow in Arkansas?”

“If that is Arkansas, and if the picture is authentic, it was colder then.”

“Why aren’t there any white willow?”

“The white willow is a European introduction, though a very early one, and it spread rapidly. There are things in this picture that check too well. The three good pictures that you have, are they pretty much alike?”

“Yeah, but not quite the same stretch of the river. The sun’s angle is a little different in each of them, and the sod and the low plants are a little different”

“You think you will be able to get more of the pictures?”

“Yeah. I think more than a thousand miles of river was in the picture. I think I get more than a thousand sections if I know where to look.”

“Probably most have been destroyed long ago, Leo, if there ever were more than the dozen or so that were advertised by the carnivals. And probably there were duplications in that dozen or so. Carnivals changed their features often, and your three pictures may be all that there ever were. Each could have been exhibited by several carnivals and in several hippodromes at different times.”

“Nah, there were more, Charley. I don’t have the one with the elephants in it yet. I think there are more than a thousand of them somewhere. I advertise for them (for originals, not the cheap-jack imitations), and I will begin to get answers.”

“How many there were, there still are,” said Ginger Nation. “They will not destroy. One of ours has the reel burned by fire, but the picture did not burn. And they won’t burn.”

“You might spend a lot of money on a lot of old canvas, Leo,” said Charles Longbank. “But I will analyze them for you: now, or when you think you have enough of them for it.”

“Wait till I get more, Charley,” said Leo Nation. “I will make a clever advertisement. ‘I take those things off your hands,’ I will say, and I believe that people will be glad to get rid of the old things that won’t burn and won’t destroy, and weigh a ton each with reels. It’s the real ones that won’t destroy. Look at that big catfish just under the surface there, Charley! Look at the mean eyes of that catfish! The river wasn’t as muddy then as it is now, even if it was springtime and the water was high.”

Rolling shore and trees: pine, dogwood, red cedar, bur oak, pecan, pine again, shagbark hickory. Then the rolling picture came to an end.

“A little over twenty minutes I timed it,” said Charles Longbank. “Yes, a yokel of the past century might have believed that the picture was a mile long, or even five or nine miles long.”

“Nah,” said Leo. “They were smarter then, Charley; they were smarter then. Most likely that yokel would have believed that it was a little less than a furlong long, as it is. He’d have liked it, though. And there may be pieces that are five miles long or nine miles long. Why else would they have advertised them? I think I can hit the road and smell out where a lot of those pictures are. And I will call in sometimes and Ginger can tell me who have answered the advertisements. Come here again in six months, Charley, and I will have enough sections of the river for you to analyze. You won’t get lonesome in six months, will you, Ginger?”

“No. There will be the hay cutters, and the men from the cattle auctions, and the oil gangers, and Charley Longbank here when he comes out, and the men in town and the men in the Hill-Top Tavern. I won’t get lonesome.”

“She jokes, Charley,” said Leo. “She doesn’t really fool around with the fellows.”

“I do not joke,” said Ginger. “Stay gone seven months,

I don’t care.”

* * * *

Leo Nation did a lot of traveling for about five months. He acquired more than fifty genuine sections of the river and he spent quite a few thousands of dollars on them. He went a couple of years into hock for them. It would have been much worse had not many people given him the things and many others sold them to him for very small amounts. But there were certain stubborn men and women who insisted on a good price. This is always the hazard of collecting, the thing that takes most of the fun out of it. All these expensively acquired sections were really prime pieces and Leo could not let himself pass them by.

How he located so many pieces is his own mystery, but Leo Nation did really have a nose for these things. He smelt them out; and all collectors of all things must have such long noses.

There was a professor man in Rolla, Missouri, who had rugged his whole house with pieces of a genuine section.

“That sure is tough stuff, Nation,” the man said. “I’ve been using it for rugs for forty years and it isn’t worn at all. See how fresh the trees still are! I had to cut it up with a chain saw, and I tell you that it’s tougher than any wood in the world for all that it’s nice and flexible.”

“How much for all the rugs, for all the pieces of pieces that you have?” Leo asked uneasily. There seemed something wrong in using the pieces for rugs, and yet this didn’t seem like a wrong man.

“Oh, I won’t sell you any of my rugs, but I will give you pieces of it, since you’re interested, and I’ll give you the big piece I have left. I never could get anyone much interested in it. We analyzed the material out at the college. It is very sophisticated plastic material. We could reproduce it, or something very like it, but it would be impossibly expensive, and plastics two-thirds as tough are quite cheap. The funny thing, though, I can trace the history of the thing back to quite a few decades before any plastic was first manufactured in the world. There is a big puzzle there, for some man with enough curiosity to latch onto it.”

“I have enough curiosity; I have already latched onto it,” Leo Nation said. “That piece you have on the wall—it looks like—if I could only see it under magnification—”

“Certainly, certainly, Nation. It looks like a swarm of bees there, and it is. I’ve a slide prepared from a fringe of it. Come and study it. I’ve shown it to lots of intelligent people and they all say ‘So what?’ It’s an attitude that I can’t understand.”

Leo Nation studied the magnification with delight. “Yeah,” he said. “I can even see the hairs on the bees’ legs. In one flaking-off piece there I can even make out the cells of a hair.” He fiddled with low and high magnification for a long while. “But the bees sure are funny ones,” he said. “My father told me about bees like that once and I thought he lied.”

“Our present honeybees are of late European origin, Nation,” the man said. “The native American bees were funny and inefficient from a human viewpoint. They are not quite extinct even yet, though. There are older-seeming creatures in some of the scenes.”

“What are the clown animals in the piece on your kitchen floor?” Leo asked. “Say, those clowns are big!”

“Ground sloths, Nation. They set things as pretty old. If they are a hoax, they are the grandest hoax I ever ran into. A man would have to have a pretty good imagination to give a peculiar hair form to an extinct animal—a hair form that living sloths in the tropics do not have ... a hair form that sloths of a colder climate just possibly might have. But how many lifetimes would it have taken to paint even a square foot of this in such microscopic detail? There is no letdown anywhere, Nation; there is prodigious detail in every square centimeter of it.”

“Why are the horses so small and the buffaloes so big?”

“I don’t know, Nation. It would take a man with a hundred sciences to figure it out, unless a man with a hundred sciences had hoaxed it. And where was such a man two hundred and fifty years ago?”

“You trace your piece that far back?”

“Yes. And the scene itself might well be fifteen thousand years old. I tell you that this is a mystery. Yes, you can carry those scraps with you if you wish, and I’ll have the bale that’s the remaining big piece freighted up to your place.”

* * * *

There was a man in Arkansas who had a section of the picture stored in a cave. It was a tourist-attraction cave, but the river-shore picture had proved a sour attraction.

“The people all think it is some sort of movie projection I have set up in my cave here,” he said. “ ‘Who wants to come down in a cave to see movies,’ they say. ‘If we want to see a river shore we will go see a river shore,’ they say, ‘we won’t come down in a cave to see it.’ Well, I thought it would be a good attraction, but it wasn’t.”

“How did you ever get it in here, man?” Leo Nation asked him. “That passage just isn’t big enough to bring it in.”

“Oh, it was already here, rock rollers and all, fifteen years ago when I broke out that little section to crawl through.”

“Then it had to be here a very long time. That wall has formed since.”

“Nah, not very long,” the man said. “These limestone curtains form fast, what with all the moisture trickling down here. The thing could have been brought in here as recent as five hundred years ago. Sure, I’ll sell it. I’ll even break out a section so we can get it out. I have to make the passage big enough for people to walk in anyhow. Tourists don’t like to have to crawl on their bellies in caves. I don’t know why. I always liked to crawl on my belly in caves.”

This was one of the most expensive sections of the picture that Nation bought. It would have been even more expensive if he had shown any interest in certain things seen through trees in one sequence of the picture. Leo’s heart had come up into his mouth when he had noticed those things, and he’d had to swallow it again and maintain his wooden look. This was a section that had elephants on the Mississippi River.

The elephant (Mammut americanum) was really a mastoden, Leo had learned that much from Charles Longbank. Ah, but now he owned elephants; now he had one of the key pieces of the puzzle.

* * * *

You find a lot of them in Mexico. Everything drifts down to Mexico when it gets a little age on it. Leo Nation was talking with a rich Mexican man who was as Indian as himself.

“No, I don’t know where the Long Picture first came from,” the man said, “but it did come from the North, somewhere in the region of the River itself. In the time of De Soto (a little less than five hundred years ago) there was still Indian legend of the Long Picture, which he didn’t understand. Yourselves of the North, of course, are like children. Even the remembering tribes of you like the Caddos have memories no longer than five hundred years.

“We ourselves remember longer. But as to this, all that we remember is that each great family of us took a section of the Long Picture along when we came south to Mexico. That was, perhaps, eight hundred years ago that we came south as conquerors. These pictures are now like treasures to the old great Indian families, like hidden treasures, memories of one of our former homes. Others of the old families will not talk to you about them. They will even deny that they have them. I talk to you about it, I show it to you, I even give it to you because I am a dissident, a sour man, not like the others.”

“The early Indian legends, Don Caetano, did they say where the Long Picture first came from or who painted it?”

“Sure. They say it was painted by a very peculiar great being, and his name (hold onto your capelo) was Great River Shore Picture Painter. I’m sure that will help you. About the false or cheap-jack imitations for which you seem to have contempt, don’t. They are not what they seem to you, and they were not done for money. These cheap-jack imitations are of Mexican origin, just as the shining originals were born in the States. They were done for the new great families in their aping the old great families, in the hope of also sharing in ancient treasure and ancient luck. Having myself just left off aping great families of another sort, I have a bitter understanding of these imitations. Unfortunately they were done in a late age that lacked art, but the contrast would have been as great in any case: all art would seem insufficient beside that of the Great River Shore Picture Painter himself.

“The cheap-jack imitation pictures were looted by gringo soldiers of the U.S. Army during the Mexican War, as they seemed to be valued by certain Mexican families. From the looters they found their way to mid-century carnivals in the States.”

“Don Caetano, do you know that the picture segments stand up under great magnification, that there are details in them far too fine to be seen by the unaided eye?”

“I am glad you say so. I have always had this on faith but I’ve never had enough faith to put it to the test. Yes, we have always believed that the pictures contained depths within depths.”

“Why are there Mexican wild pigs in this view, Don Caetano? It’s as though this one had a peculiar Mexican slant to it.”

“No. The peccary was an all-American pig, Leo. It went all the way north to the ice. But it’s been replaced by the European pig everywhere but in our own wilds. You want the picture? I will have my man load it and ship it to your place.”

“Ah, I would give you something for it surely—”

“No, Leo, I give it freely. You are a man that I like. Receive it, and God be with you! Ah, Leo, in parting, and since you collect strange things, I have here a box of bright things that I think you might like. I believe they are no more than worthless garnets, but are they not pretty?”

Garnets? They were not garnets. Worthless? Then why did Leo Nation’s eyes dazzle and his heart come up in his throat? With trembling hands he turned the stones over and worshiped. And when Bon Caetano gave them to him for the token price of one thousand dollars, his heart rejoiced.

You know what? They really were worthless garnets. But what had Leo Nation thought that they were in that fateful moment? What spell had Don Caetano put on him to make him think that they were something else?

Oh well, you win here and you lose there. And Don Caetano really did ship the treasured picture to him free.

* * * *

Leo Nation came home after five months of wandering and collecting.

“I stand it without you for five months,” Ginger said. “I could not have stood it for six months, I sure could not have stood it for seven. I kidded. I didn’t really fool around with the fellows. I had the carpenter build another hay barn to hold all the pieces of picture you sent in. There were more than fifty of them.”

Leo Nation had his friend Charles Longbank come out.

“Fifty-seven new ones, Charley,” Leo said. “That makes sixty with what I had before. Sixty miles of river shore I have now, I think. Analyze them, Charley. Get the data out of them somehow and feed it to your computers. First I want to know what order they go in, south to north, and how big the gaps between them are.”

“Leo, I tried to explain before, that would require (besides the presumption of authenticity) that they were all done at the same hour of the same day.”

“Presume it all, Charley. They were all done at the same time, or we will assume that they were. We will work on that presumption.”

“Leo, ah—I had hoped that you would fail in your collecting. I still believe we should drop it all.”

“Me, I hoped I would succeed, Charley, and I hoped harder. Why are you afraid of spooks? Me, I meet them every hour of my life. They’re what keeps the air fresh.”

“I’m afraid of it, Leo. All right, I’ll get some equipment out here tomorrow, but I’m afraid of it. Damn it, Leo, who was here?”

“Wasn’t anybody here,” Ginger said. “I tell you like I tell Charley, I was only kidding, I don’t really fool around with the fellows.”

Charles Longbank got some equipment out there the next day. Charles himself was looking bad, maybe whiskeyed up a little bit, jerky, and looking over his shoulder all the time as though he had an owl perched on the back of his neck. But he did work several days running the picture segments and got them all down on scan film. Then he would program his computer and feed the data from the scan films to it.

“There’s like a shadow, like a thin cloud on several of the pictures,” Leo Nation said. “You any idea what it is, Charley?”

“Leo, I got out of bed late last night and ran two miles up and down that rocky back road of yours to shake myself up. I was afraid I was getting an idea of what those thin clouds were. Lord, Leo, who was here?”

Charles Longbank took the data in to town and fed it to his computers.

He was back in several days with the answers.

“Leo, this spooks me more than ever,” he said, and he looked as if the spooks had chewed him from end to end. “Let’s drop the whole thing. I’ll even give you back your retainer fee.”

“No, man, no. You took the retainer fee and you are retained. Have you the order they go in, Charley, south to north?”

“Yes, here it is. But don’t do it, Leo, don’t do it.”

“Charley, I only shuffle them around with my lift fork and put them in order. I’ll have it done in an hour.”

And in an hour he had it done.

“Now, let’s look at the south one first, and then the north one, Charley.”

“No, Leo, no, no! Don’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“Because it scares me. They really do fall into an order. They really could have been done all at the same hour of the same day. Who was here, Leo? Who is the giant looking over my shoulder?”

“Yeah, he’s a big one, isn’t he, Charley? But he was a good artist and artists have the right to be a little peculiar. He looks over my shoulder a lot too.”

Leo Nation ran the southernmost segment of the Long Picture. It was mixed land and water, island, bayou and swamp, estuary and ocean mixed with muddy river.

“It’s pretty, but it isn’t the Mississippi,” said Leo as it ran. “It’s that other river down there. I’d know it after all these years too.”

“Yes,” Charles Longbank gulped. “It’s the Atchafalaya River. By the comparative sun angle of the pieces that had been closely identified, the computer was able to give close bearings on all the segments. This is the mouth of the Atchafalaya River which has several times in the geological past been the main mouth of the Mississippi. But how did he know it if he wasn’t here? Gah, the ogre is looking over my shoulder again. It scares me, Leo.”

“Yeah, Charley, I say a man ought to be really scared at least once a day so he can sleep that night. Me, I’m scared for at least a week now, and I like the big guy. Well, that’s one end of it, or mighty close to it. Now we take the north end.

“Yes, Charley, yes. The only thing that scares you is that they’re real. I don’t know why he has to look over our shoulders when we run them, though. If he’s who I think he is he’s already seen it all.”

Leo Nation began to run the northernmost segment of the river that he had.

“How far north are we in this, Charley?” he asked. “Along about where the Cedar River and the Iowa River later came in.”

“That all the farther north? Then I don’t have any segments of the north third of the river?”

“Yes, this is the farthest north it went, Leo. Oh God, this is the last one.”

“A cloud on this segment too, Charley? What are they anyhow? Say, this is a pretty crisp scene for springtime on the Mississippi.”

“You look sick, Long-Charley-Bank,” Ginger Nation said. “You think a little whiskey with possum’s blood would help you?”

“Could I have the one without the other? Oh, yes, both together, that may be what I need. Hurry, Ginger.”

“It bedevils me still how any painting could be so wonderful,” Leo wondered.

“Haven’t you caught on yet, Leo?” Charles shivered. “It isn’t a painting.”

“I tell you that at the beginning if you only listen to me,” Ginger Nation said. “I tell you it isn’t either one, canvas or paint, it is only picture. And Leo said the same thing once, but then he forgets. Drink this, old Charley.”

Charles Longbank drank the healing mixture of good whiskey and possum’s blood, and the northernmost segment of the river rolled on.

“Another cloud on the picture, Charley,” Leo said. “It’s like a big smudge in the air between us and the shore.”

“Yes, and there will be another,” Charles moaned. “It means we’re getting near the end. Who were they, Leo? How long ago was it? Ah—I’m afraid I know that part pretty close—but they couldn’t have been human then, could they? Leo, if this was just an inferior throwaway, why are they still hanging in the air?”

“Easy, old Charley, easy. Man, that river gets chalky and foamy! Charley, couldn’t you transfer all this to microfilm and feed it into your computers for all sorts of answers?”

“Oh, God, Leo, it already is!”

“Already is what? Hey, what’s the fog, what’s the mist? What is it that bulks up behind the mist? Man, what kind of blue fog-mountain—?”

“The glacier, you dummy, the glacier,” Charles Longbank groaned. And the northernmost segment of the river came to an end.

“Mix up a little more of that good whiskey and possum’s blood, Ginger,” Leo Nation said. “I think we’re all going to need it.”

* * * *

“That old, is it?” Leo asked a little later as they were all strangling on the very strong stuff.

“Yes, that old,” Charles Longbank jittered. “Oh, who was here, Leo?”

“And, Charley, it already is what?”

“It already is microfilm, Leo, to them. A rejected strip, I believe.”

“Ah, I can understand why whiskey and possum’s blood never caught on as a drink,” Leo said. “Was old possum here then?”

“Old possum was, we weren’t.” Charles Longbank shivered. “But it seems to me that something older than possum is snuffing around again, and with a bigger snufter.”

Charles Longbank was shaking badly. One more thing and he would crack.

“The clouds on the—ah—film, Charley, what are they?” Leo Nation asked.

And Charles Longbank cracked.

“God over my head,” he moaned out of a shivering face, “I wish they were clouds on the film. Ah, Leo, Leo, who were they here, who were they?”

“I’m cold, Charley,” said Leo Nation. “There’s bone-chill draft from somewhere.”

The marks ... too exactly like something, and too big to be: the loops and whorls that were eighteen feet long...