he could assign them an exact provenance: the pastel-tinted cliffs of Lamorna Cove, where ancient quarries produced greenstone and the coarse-grained granite that gave birth to that country’s tors and neolithic forts and standing stones.
After Schelling’s discovery, Bolerium’s mysterious stones would periodically draw geologists from universities and museums across the country. They would carefully tap at the mansion’s walls and take their slender samples off to the city, where the results were always the same—an unusual mixture of Penwith greenstone and St. Buryan granite. The shaved and splintered rock was examined and dated and filed away, but the mystery remained: there were no records of Bolerium’s construction, no ship’s manifest detailing how or when or why a million tons of Cornish granite came to New York Harbor, and thence seventy miles inland to a remote hamlet where only hardscrabble farmers lived, and red men, and witches.
Town records showed the official date of Bolerium’s construction as 1743, and were attributed to the mansion’s first registered owner, an Irishman named Crom MacCrutch. According to village legend, MacCrutch brought with him the last remaining herd of Megaloceros, the so-called Giant Irish Elk, with the intention of establishing a sanctuary for them in the New World. This fact was duly typed on a yellowing index card, where I read it during one of the elementary school’s annual trips to the Courthouse Museum.
“That’s impossible,” Hillary announced disdainfully when I told him about it after school that day. We were kicked back in his basement watching The Munsters, Uncle Cosmo’s only television rival. “Those things were deer, not elk. Besides which they became extinct about twenty thousand years ago.”
“Well, that’s what it said in the museum,” I insisted, then went on stubbornly, “and Mrs. Langford said it was true. Plus how would you know?”
Hillary said nothing, only tightened his lips and stared fixedly at the television. But at the commercial he stalked upstairs, returning a few minutes later with two oversized volumes. He set them side by side on the coffee table and then opened the first, a heavy old book with a stained blue cover and the title Ancient Man in Briton stamped in gold letters.
“How would I know?” he demanded, and opened the book. Flecks of paper and dust flew up. There was a faint smell of mold as he flipped through the pages, and finally stopped. “From this —”
He stabbed at an illustrative plate, its sepia tones tinged with gray and feathered with the remains of silverfish.
“‘Irish Elk,’” I read out loud. “Peat burial in Hound’s Pool, Devonshire, alongside of human remains.’ So?”
“So that was ten thousand years ago,” Hillary sniffed. “And wait, look here—”
He shoved aside the first book and opened the second. A glossy guide to prehistoric mammals, it had been a Christmas present several years earlier, when Hillary’s passion for saber-toothed tigers had driven me nuts. “Look at this,” he commanded, and pointed at a two-page spread.
Megaloceros: Giant Eurasian Deer of the Pleistocene Era.
Above the legend were realistic illustrations of what looked like pretty ordinary deer, the same kind of deer that leaped across the road in front of the school bus or nibbled apples from the trees in our front yard. Save only this: the deer in the pictures were crowned by absolutely massive mooselike antlers, spreading upward and out like the canopy of an oak, and so huge it seemed impossible that the creatures could have held their heads erect.
“Holy cow.” I whistled and read the rest of the caption.
In a fully mature male, the palmate antlers could span twenty feet and weigh forty pounds. Even after the stag reached its full growth, each year it would continue to produce successively larger and more unwieldy crowns, which may ultimately have contributed to their extinction. With the minor ice
After Schelling’s discovery, Bolerium’s mysterious stones would periodically draw geologists from universities and museums across the country. They would carefully tap at the mansion’s walls and take their slender samples off to the city, where the results were always the same—an unusual mixture of Penwith greenstone and St. Buryan granite. The shaved and splintered rock was examined and dated and filed away, but the mystery remained: there were no records of Bolerium’s construction, no ship’s manifest detailing how or when or why a million tons of Cornish granite came to New York Harbor, and thence seventy miles inland to a remote hamlet where only hardscrabble farmers lived, and red men, and witches.
Town records showed the official date of Bolerium’s construction as 1743, and were attributed to the mansion’s first registered owner, an Irishman named Crom MacCrutch. According to village legend, MacCrutch brought with him the last remaining herd of Megaloceros, the so-called Giant Irish Elk, with the intention of establishing a sanctuary for them in the New World. This fact was duly typed on a yellowing index card, where I read it during one of the elementary school’s annual trips to the Courthouse Museum.
“That’s impossible,” Hillary announced disdainfully when I told him about it after school that day. We were kicked back in his basement watching The Munsters, Uncle Cosmo’s only television rival. “Those things were deer, not elk. Besides which they became extinct about twenty thousand years ago.”
“Well, that’s what it said in the museum,” I insisted, then went on stubbornly, “and Mrs. Langford said it was true. Plus how would you know?”
Hillary said nothing, only tightened his lips and stared fixedly at the television. But at the commercial he stalked upstairs, returning a few minutes later with two oversized volumes. He set them side by side on the coffee table and then opened the first, a heavy old book with a stained blue cover and the title Ancient Man in Briton stamped in gold letters.
“How would I know?” he demanded, and opened the book. Flecks of paper and dust flew up. There was a faint smell of mold as he flipped through the pages, and finally stopped. “From this —”
He stabbed at an illustrative plate, its sepia tones tinged with gray and feathered with the remains of silverfish.
“‘Irish Elk,’” I read out loud. “Peat burial in Hound’s Pool, Devonshire, alongside of human remains.’ So?”
“So that was ten thousand years ago,” Hillary sniffed. “And wait, look here—”
He shoved aside the first book and opened the second. A glossy guide to prehistoric mammals, it had been a Christmas present several years earlier, when Hillary’s passion for saber-toothed tigers had driven me nuts. “Look at this,” he commanded, and pointed at a two-page spread.
Megaloceros: Giant Eurasian Deer of the Pleistocene Era.
Above the legend were realistic illustrations of what looked like pretty ordinary deer, the same kind of deer that leaped across the road in front of the school bus or nibbled apples from the trees in our front yard. Save only this: the deer in the pictures were crowned by absolutely massive mooselike antlers, spreading upward and out like the canopy of an oak, and so huge it seemed impossible that the creatures could have held their heads erect.
“Holy cow.” I whistled and read the rest of the caption.
In a fully mature male, the palmate antlers could span twenty feet and weigh forty pounds. Even after the stag reached its full growth, each year it would continue to produce successively larger and more unwieldy crowns, which may ultimately have contributed to their extinction. With the minor ice
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