Mountains without any of the normal transitions in between. It made people sleepy and a little sick to their stomachs, which most of them were treating with, yes, more alcohol. The mice were probably having a full-on bacchanal in the overhead compartment, but between the snoring and the roar of the engines, no one would be able to tell.
I sighed and reached up to turn on my reading light. We had a long way to go before we got to Australia. I might as well get a little work done.
There are very few cryptozoologist’s guides to Australia—or at least, there are very few guides available to non-Australians. I assumed the Thirty-Sixers would have plenty, since they’d been studying their home continent since before their official inception as a group, and no organization larger than three or four people can survive for long on nothing but oral traditions. I was hoping to come home from my visit with some of those guides to add to the family collection. In the meantime, I had to make do with Grandpa Thomas’ guide to the cryptozoological flora and fauna of Australia and New Zealand, which Dad had sent via overnight mail when I called to tell him that I was going home with Shelby. The book had been written before Grandpa Thomas met Grandma Alice, so it was almost certainly out of date. It was also the best resource I had.
I leaned back in my seat and opened the guide to the chapter on drop bears, which included some sketches that made me want to ask the pilot to turn the plane around. Give me a nice normal waheela or wendigo any day: drop bears were
freaky
.
(Yes, “give me a nice normal thing that I can find where I come from” is a statement drenched in colonialism and privilege: it supposes that the ecosystem that the speaker comes from is normal, and all other ecosystems are somehow weird or flawed. At the same time, Australia basically holds the copyright on “weird ecosystem.” The only place where you’re going to find weirder things is at the bottom of the ocean, and no one suggests that you go there for a fun family vacation.)
According to the guide, where we were going we would be contending with drop bears, bunyips, Queensland tigers, and other lovely, predatory things that I wasn’t used to seeing on a regular basis. There were also species of coatl, although Grandpa didn’t call them that, and garrinna, the marsupial equivalent of the miniature griffin. That was nice. I was already missing Crow more than a little.
I turned the page, and kept reading.
My grandfather—Thomas Price, the man who gave my family its name, along with the recessive genes that somehow resulted in my youngest sister being almost six inches taller than any of the other women in our family, and don’t think
that
hasn’t caused its share of resentment—was originally from England, but traveled a lot before settling down in Buckley Township, Michigan, where he married my grandmother and was eventually sucked into a dimensional portal leading to who-knows-where. (Grandma Alice is still looking for him, and continues to insist that he’s not dead, even though it’s been more than sixty years. Hope springs eternal, I guess, and is rarely questioned when it’s harbored by a woman whose idea of “Hello” sometimes involves frag grenades.)
Grandpa Thomas had been a member of the Covenant of St. George. Not that he’d fit in very well, being the sort to question authority whenever he could get a word in edgewise. His travels had been the Covenant’s last-ditch attempt to find
something
he could do to make himself useful: roam the world documenting the cryptid populations they had failed to find or eradicate, and then come home to England with his notes, making them available to the newest generation of monster-killing bastards in need of easy targets. Instead, he’d sworn up and down that he hadn’t seen hide nor hair of anything “unnatural” while he was traveling, and that he was ready for a nice, sedentary assignment.
I sighed and reached up to turn on my reading light. We had a long way to go before we got to Australia. I might as well get a little work done.
There are very few cryptozoologist’s guides to Australia—or at least, there are very few guides available to non-Australians. I assumed the Thirty-Sixers would have plenty, since they’d been studying their home continent since before their official inception as a group, and no organization larger than three or four people can survive for long on nothing but oral traditions. I was hoping to come home from my visit with some of those guides to add to the family collection. In the meantime, I had to make do with Grandpa Thomas’ guide to the cryptozoological flora and fauna of Australia and New Zealand, which Dad had sent via overnight mail when I called to tell him that I was going home with Shelby. The book had been written before Grandpa Thomas met Grandma Alice, so it was almost certainly out of date. It was also the best resource I had.
I leaned back in my seat and opened the guide to the chapter on drop bears, which included some sketches that made me want to ask the pilot to turn the plane around. Give me a nice normal waheela or wendigo any day: drop bears were
freaky
.
(Yes, “give me a nice normal thing that I can find where I come from” is a statement drenched in colonialism and privilege: it supposes that the ecosystem that the speaker comes from is normal, and all other ecosystems are somehow weird or flawed. At the same time, Australia basically holds the copyright on “weird ecosystem.” The only place where you’re going to find weirder things is at the bottom of the ocean, and no one suggests that you go there for a fun family vacation.)
According to the guide, where we were going we would be contending with drop bears, bunyips, Queensland tigers, and other lovely, predatory things that I wasn’t used to seeing on a regular basis. There were also species of coatl, although Grandpa didn’t call them that, and garrinna, the marsupial equivalent of the miniature griffin. That was nice. I was already missing Crow more than a little.
I turned the page, and kept reading.
My grandfather—Thomas Price, the man who gave my family its name, along with the recessive genes that somehow resulted in my youngest sister being almost six inches taller than any of the other women in our family, and don’t think
that
hasn’t caused its share of resentment—was originally from England, but traveled a lot before settling down in Buckley Township, Michigan, where he married my grandmother and was eventually sucked into a dimensional portal leading to who-knows-where. (Grandma Alice is still looking for him, and continues to insist that he’s not dead, even though it’s been more than sixty years. Hope springs eternal, I guess, and is rarely questioned when it’s harbored by a woman whose idea of “Hello” sometimes involves frag grenades.)
Grandpa Thomas had been a member of the Covenant of St. George. Not that he’d fit in very well, being the sort to question authority whenever he could get a word in edgewise. His travels had been the Covenant’s last-ditch attempt to find
something
he could do to make himself useful: roam the world documenting the cryptid populations they had failed to find or eradicate, and then come home to England with his notes, making them available to the newest generation of monster-killing bastards in need of easy targets. Instead, he’d sworn up and down that he hadn’t seen hide nor hair of anything “unnatural” while he was traveling, and that he was ready for a nice, sedentary assignment.
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