Sunday, April 28, 2002
Sorry that I've missed the last couple of nights. We've been having some sort of problem with Blogger and it wouldn't let me post new entries. The problem seems to have been resolved.
Chapter Five was slow getting started, but is moving along now. Only about 500 wds. yesterday, but almost a thousand today. There was also an interview yesterday and I'm proofing the galleys for Trilobite: The Writing of Threshold (which ought to be released in about six weeks). So, busy, busy.
I still haven't told the story of Mr. Moo Moo. Well, then. Early Wednesday afternoon, while we were still busy surveying for new Bluffport Marl outcrops, we drove out some nameless dirt road north of Epes until it finally dead ended. There at the end of the road was the only house for miles around, sitting alone in an overgrown yard, surrounded my great old oaks. Despite the rusted-out window unit air conditioner, the house itself must have dated back to 1925 or so and obviously had not been lived in for quite some time. The tin roof sagged and the front porch listed alarmingly to one side. A very new steel gate, bearing the name and logo of a local timber company, had been put up across the gravel driveway. And back behind the house, a bit to one side so that it was just visible from the road, was a tree whose trunk was studded with animal skulls, bleached white by the sun. I had Jennfer pull up to the gate so that I could get a better look and a photograph (which she will post here tomorrow), and I could see that most of the skulls were deer. But above them, well up the trunk, was the magnificent skull of an enormous steer, its long, forward-sweeping horns aimed down at the weedy ground.
Jennifer wanted to climb the gate and get the skull, but, no, I was starting to get seriously creeped out by the place, and it seemed obvious that this skull and all the others on the tree must form some eldritch talisman, placed here to keep an ancient, unfathomable evil at bay. Indeed, said I, this entire place must mark the entrance to some terrible nether world. As we drove away down the long, red, dusty road, Jennifer sulking, I began to giggle uncontrollably, though whether this was relief at our brush with this unnameable Otherness or only the result of the of the sun upon my poor brain I cannot say. "Mr. Moo Moo must forever guard that horror-shrouded place!" I declared. "Mankind would surely be doomed if his skull were ever stolen!"
Okay, so maybe you had to be there.
Note from Jennifer: Here he is, in all his spooky bovine glory!
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