The Wondrous Journals of Dr. Wendell Wellington Wiggins Read online

Well! This startled me, for I had also heard a woman’s voice in my dream: a soothing, deep voice that cooed to me in an unknown language. But admitting this might have frightened the porters into believing that our mission had been cursed, and I simply had to find that vine. I told them that we had likely all eaten some bad Brazil nuts, and made quite a show of setting up the pot over the fire and preparing Gibear’s coffee myself.

  A cloud of uneasiness hovered over our party all day; we went about our vine-seeking business in silence. And then, the next morning, we slept terribly late; it must have been noon when we woke. Usually we spring up before the sun rises! Disturbingly, we had all heard that woman’s voice in our dreams again. Most peculiar. Even I began to worry that our mission had been cursed, and tinkered with the notion of turning back. Our eyes and arms were quite heavy as we broke down our camp and moved farther into the jungle, although at a very sluggish pace.

  “What’s happening?” I asked when the porters lay down our bundles a mere hour later. “Why are we stopping?”

  “We are too tired to move,” they told me—and next thing you knew, we all fell asleep standing right where we were.

  In my standing slumber, I heard that eerie woman’s voice again, except this time I understood her eerie words:

  Sleep, sleep—

  Here with me—

  Sleep, sleep,

  Forever and a day.

  “Yes, yes,” I told myself in my dream. “That sounds lovely. Sleep. How I love a patch of sleep—a nap here, a snore there. Who cares about that bothersome old vine?” I could feel myself falling asleep even more deeply, and the lullaby wrapped itself around me like a snake.

  Then came a distinctly un-lullaby-ish noise:

  Giii-bear!

  Giii-bear!

  Giii-bear!

  I felt a very unsoothing bite on my leg and woke right up; Gibear gave me another nip just for good measure. That creepy voice echoed still in my mind—except this time it seemed to be coming from the ground where I stood. Gibear snarled and pawed at the jungle floor.

  Just then, I had a rather brilliant idea. I plucked some fluff from Gibear’s coat, wadded it up, and stuffed it into my ears. The voice disappeared. I grabbed my shovel and began to dig feverishly. Gibear nipped at the others until they woke up, and soon we were all digging—with tufts of black Gibear fur sticking out of our ears. (What a sight this must have been!) Eventually we hit stone, and this rock contained a very odd F.O.I. of an enormous vine festooned with oversized trumpet-shaped flowers.

  And inside each of those flowers appeared to be the remains of lungs, vocal cords, and a tongue.

  We had found the remains of the legendary Amazonian Whispering Vine.

  From the layers of stone encasing the fossil, I can tell that the plant was approximately five hundred million years old. And this beast was enormous! Two meters6 wide, in its heyday it would have stood up like a cobra about to strike, towering a staggering hundred feet in the air. The trumpet flowers sprouting from its side were likely bright orange, red, or pink, as predator plants often rely on lurid colors to attract victims. And as those complicated fossilized vocal cords indicated, the plant was quite conversant. I am certain that it did not whisper just any old nonsense, either: after all, one could hardly expect a lethal Amazonian Whispering Vine to recite a bunch of nursery rhymes or tell jokes.

  Instead, I believe that the Vine whispered and sang bewitching songs, like the one the porters and I had heard—and, what is worse, the plant somehow managed to infiltrate the dreams of creatures for miles around, catching them during their vulnerable slumber. It called to beasts across the land, who flocked to the Vine’s side and were then lulled into eternal sleep. Why, as we dug into the ground, we found hundreds of different fossils littered around the site—dinosaur skeletons! bird wings! remains of cats, snakes, hogs! If a creature could walk, crawl, or fly, it made the pilgrimage to the Vine.

  And if the plant’s buried fossil was able to have such a powerful effect on us many years later, imagine how powerful the live Vine must have been!

  Now, here is the curious thing: unlike the common predator vine that tried to eat Gibear, the Whispering Vine doesn’t seem to have eaten its prey. So why on earth would it lure in so many victims? My theory: it wanted to be idolized. Yes, I know this sounds odd! But this plant had other human attributes—it was very possible that it could have had the human condition known as narcissism.7 It simply reveled in the strange power it held over the jungle—and, like many incessantly talking humans today, it appeared to love the sound of its own voice above all.

  (“I know someone else who loves the sound of his own voice, too,” said another voice in my mind—a much less mesmerizing sound this time. After all, it belonged to Mother Wiggins.

  “I do not love the sound of my own voice, Mother,” I grumped.

  “Ha!” she gloated. “I didn’t say who—clearly you have a guilty conscience. By the way, how are you managing to stay so plump in the jungle, with nothing but Brazil nuts to eat?”

  I chose to ignore this question, and soon she went away.)

  Why did the Whispering Vine go extinct? The only real clue we have: the Vine appears to have been chopped into several separate parts, which suggests that it was torn down and cut up by an adversary. Perhaps it met its fate at the hands—or jaws—of a large prehistoric Gibear, who, as you saw, was as impervious to the charms of the Vine as a seal is to cold water. Just why Gibear was not susceptible remains a mystery, in the way that some people are immune to smallpox and typhoid.8

  In any case, he was very happy when we finished inspecting the area, so someone would finally get around to brewing his evening cup of coffee.

  6. Approximately six and a half feet.

  7. “Narcissism” means “excessive self-love, or vanity.”

  8. Two deadly diseases that menaced people during Dr. Wiggins’s lifetime.

  October 1851

  The Amazon Jungle, Brazil

  In Which I Discover … Gargantuan King Mosquitoes (Conopeum Rex)

  What rotten luck! Just as we were about to begin our trek out of the jungle and back to civilization, fever struck—probably malaria. I just knew that I detected a waft of bad air in recent nights!9 Luckily, our supply of quinine10 was not lost in the Whispering Vine rapids disaster.

  Happily, I was not afflicted, but then it fell to me to find a place to build a recovery camp. I appointed Gibear to stay and guard the porters. More rotten luck: I discovered a particularly repulsive swamp nearby; the marshy ground squished beneath my feet and dozens of mosquitoes greeted me with glee.

  I came across a clearing where a curious array of large, domed mounds of soil stood—very intriguing, to say the least. Next thing I knew, I was digging vigorously into those mounds with my shovel, sweat pouring from my brow. Thud. My shovel hit something quite hard—and suddenly the most astonishing thing happened.

  Nearly every mosquito in the entire swamp buzzed over to the clearing and formed a halo over the mound! Thousands of them hovered over me—which, as you can imagine, made me quite nervous. What on earth were they up to? I recall joking to myself that perhaps I had uncovered some sort of mysterious mosquito god.

  Well, since then, I have been reminded that one should never jest or scoff when it comes to Nature’s imagination.

  This is what I found inside that mound: an ancient petrified carcass of an absolutely enormous, gargantuan mosquito, three times the size of a cow. What a fatty! Teensy-tiny little wings sprouted from its back. I giggled as I imagined those poor wings trying to support this insect. But then, as I thought about how the mosquito had actually gotten that big, I stopped laughing.

  After all, mosquitoes dine on blood.

  And these particular mosquitoes had not one but three feeding tubes to facilitate their piggery. I dug around the area and found carcasses in all different stages of development; it appears that the species was born the size of a regular mosquito, but devoured such spectacular amounts of
blood that it grew to the size of a cow, and then a bull, and then an elephant. Far too fat to fly anymore, it had to lump around the jungle on its stomach to forage for food. What a sound that must have made! Wump! Wump! Wump!

  Naturally, this ruckus would have scared away the beasts on which the mosquitoes needed to feed. I can hardly imagine being a jaguar or a monkey and seeing one of those absurd insects wumping across the jungle floor—would anyone in his right mind stick around and wait to be eaten? Most certainly not. It therefore stands to reason that history’s fattest mosquitoes soon faced the prospect of starvation.

  So how did their species persevere?

  Well, fossil evidence shows that the Gargantuan Mosquitoes indeed enjoyed a king-like status in the mosquito kingdom after all—rather like a queen bee reigns over a colony of worker bees. Everyone knows that worker bees—and mosquitoes—have to do what the queen commands. So, when the Gargantuan Mosquitoes grew too fat to forage for their own food, they instructed the regular-sized mosquitoes to go out and get food for them. These regular mosquitoes flew out into the jungle, snacked on the resident animals, and then came back to the swamp of the Gargantuan King Mosquitoes—who rewarded their efforts by eating them up. Looking at the petrified remains of the creatures’ stomachs, one finds that it would have taken roughly a thousand regular mosquitoes every single day to satisfy each Gargantuan King Mosquito.

  The regular mosquitoes appear to have become quite fed up with the arrangement eventually. After all, what were they getting out of it? Nothing happy, that is for certain. So one day—perhaps while the Gargantuan King Mosquitoes enjoyed a post-snack nap in their swamp—the regular mosquitoes did the unthinkable: they disobeyed their orders and fled en masse, leaving the bloated Kings to fend for themselves. And, having nothing else to eat, the bloated insects attacked each other—I found dozens of their carcasses in attack position, often partly eaten.

  And that was the end of the species.

  I eventually found a place for the recovery camp, and everyone on my team is recuperating nicely. While they sleep and regain their strength, I sketch and study the behemoth swamp creatures. And I keep thinking about that queer mosquito halo. Why had these contemporary insects gathered to honor the memory of the very creatures that had practically eaten them into oblivion? Perhaps they felt guilty about letting the King Mosquitoes languish and were trying to make amends.

  But people today are the same way: in any given “it’s either us or them” situation, they’ll save themselves every time. If there’s one thing all species have in common, it’s the instinct of “me first.”

  9. In 1851, it was still thought that malaria—a terrible fever often acquired by people who dwelled in hot climates—was caused by bad night air. The word “malaria” comes from the Italian phrase mal’aria, or “bad air.” We now know that malaria is spread by mosquitoes—a fact that would not be discovered until 1880. It is especially ironic that Dr. Wiggins did not know that mosquitoes play a role in malaria fever, considering what happens next in this tale.

  10. Quinine is a drug that was first discovered in nearby Peru by indigenous Indian tribes, who, in turn, introduced it to Spanish missionaries. It is still considered one of the most effective drugs to counter malaria—a further example of the sorts of things we can learn from ancient cultures.

  May 1852

  The Caribbean Sea

  In Which I Discover … Skull-Head Hover Fish

  (Calvaria Suspensus Piscis)

  Well! After an extremely hot and mosquito-filled year in the jungle, that chapter has come to an end, and a new one begins. With all of North America to explore, I decided it was time to move on, pronto. Gibear and I bid farewell to our Brazilian team, and were lucky enough to secure passage on a fishing boat heading across the bright blue Caribbean Sea to Mexico.

  I set up a little hammock on the deck and planned to be lazy on the voyage. But old Mother Wiggins was right: somehow I had managed to stay rather plump even while traipsing about in the jungle; that feeble hammock stretched right down to the deck, plunking me rudely onto the planks below.

  As it turns out, the idea of having a laze was really quite silly. After all, for the man whose mission is to understand Nature, there is no such thing as a holiday, as long as he remains in Nature. Even out here at sea, I have just come across another astonishing discovery, and this is how it happened.

  Several evenings ago, we anchored the ship next to a tiny, uncharted palm-covered island for the night. Some of the deckhands leaped over the side of the boat with fishing nets to procure dinner for the evening. Gibear grew quite excited by the commotion and decided to catapult himself into the sea as well.

  “Gibear—you fool!” I cried, and without even thinking, I leaped in after him. Gibear is a jungle creature—how could I be sure that he could swim? What if he was gobbled up by a shark? (And then, as I sailed through the air toward the water, the thought occurred to me: What if I was gobbled up by a shark? Or worse, stung by a jellyfish? Ugh—how I detest jellyfish! They just happen to be the sole creature on this planet that makes my stomach turn.)

  Waves washed Gibear toward the island, dunking him under the water over and over again. I grabbed the near-drowned animal, placed him on my head, and paddled over to the beach. (I was quite proud of myself; after all, marathon swimming is hardly my strong suit. I am more of a bobber.) As the two of us crawled onto the shore, gasping for breath, something unusual caught my attention: an R.O.I. (Rock of Interest) protruding from the sand. I brushed it off and had a closer look.

  Well, thank goodness Gibear hadn’t jumped into the sea a hundred million years earlier, for this rock contained fossilized evidence of a most alarming ancient sea creature. In fact, I can hardly recall when I last saw something so eerie and lethal. First of all, its remains revealed that this creature was an ancestor to the vile contemporary jellyfish. (Jellyfish! Horrors. Of course it would have to be jellyfish-related.) But instead of a viscous, mushroom-shaped head, this miserable fiend sported a jelly-like skull with hundreds of nearly invisible tentacles branching out beneath. As a result, I have named the species Skull-Head Hover Fish.

  But there is more to tell. At night this creature’s skull glowed and gave off a warm, inviting gold light. Usually one sees this sort of nocturnal-light attribute in lower species, such as algae—or in terrestrial creatures like fireflies. But biology does not lie: the creatures’ fossilized innards display proof of this reflex. Attracted to the glow, fish would swim toward the Skull-Head—and promptly become tangled in those venom-laced tentacles, which paralyzed the prey. The Skull-Head would then devour the fish for supper, digesting them through its tendrils. (One can see clear evidence of digestive systems in the tentacles—oh, how it makes me blanch even to think about meeting such a fate.)

  All jellyfish live in colonies, and, judging by the number of fossils I uncovered, the Skull-Head Hover Fish of the Caribbean were no exception. Why, the beach was absolutely riddled with them. By the thousands, they hovered in the sea like an army of ghosts, waiting for their victims. On moonless nights, one could probably see their underwater glow from many miles away—as though the moon itself had fallen from the sky into the sea and still shone beneath the surface.

  Additional fossilized evidence on the beach shows that the drama of the Skull-Head Hover Fish ended once ancient humans came onto the stage. These primitive people had yet to learn about fire, and they likely spent every night lurking around in the dark, grumpily wishing they could see each other. So imagine their excitement when they discovered the Skull-Head Hover Fish. They built boats and great fishing nets, and it appears that they paddled out into the sea when the sun went down each night and scooped up the glowing creatures by the dozens.

  Everyone knows what happens when you take a fish out of water: it dies. Yet the ancient humans continued to harvest the Skull-Head Hover Fish anyway, in the hope that the fish might survive to light up the nighttime world back on land. (I found extremely old netting imprin
ts in the rocks around hundreds of Skull-Head fossils, indicating hundreds of ill-fated catches.) Soon there was no longer any nighttime glow either on land or in the sea: the Skull-Head Hover Fish had been made extinct, and the ancient humans were back to square one.

  Will we ever be free from the blight of wishful thinking?

  Journal No. 2

  North America

  April 1853

  The Valley of Mexico

  In Which I Discover … Goldeaters

  (Exesoris ab Aurum)

  Gibear has acquired some peculiarly human habits since we arrived in Mexico. After our fishing boat deposited us on the Mexican coast, we tagged along with a cattle drive until we reached the outskirts of Mexico City. There we moved into a modest little hotel, and I set about replenishing our supplies.

  This is when the trouble began. Yes, my pet already had that peculiar coffee-drinking habit, but things have gotten rather out of hand. He immediately took a shine to the hotel linens and insisted on sleeping right smack in the middle of the bed. And then, every morning, I would wake up and find him doing laps in a suds-filled bathtub! Also of note: Gibear even took to frequenting a nearby barber for a weekly fur lather and trim. The last straw: he grew quite accustomed to drinking café con leche11 in the hotel restaurant, and now that we are on the road again, he all but sneers at regular coffee.

  Yes, we are once again on an expedition in the wild, sleeping under the stars—this time in the vast Valley of Mexico. This country was as high on my list of exploration sites as the Amazon, for it has been home to some of the world’s most ancient civilizations.12 Yet until Gibear and I came along, no one knew exactly how ancient.

  Heat baked the Valley as we hiked from Mexico City to investigate various ruins; the air we breathed in was almost as hot as the air we breathed out. This trip was more expensive than my other expeditions: I had to hire not only a small team of porters to tote our provisions, but also several gunmen to protect us. Mexico is a rather unpredictable place these days.13 Why, on our very first night camping in the Valley, a pack of bandits attacked us! Gibear and I dove under the wagon and huddled there; bullets zinged past us on all sides. My gunmen eventually drove off the bandits, and, miraculously, the only casualty was our water barrel. Several bullets had cut right through the bottom of it, draining nearly all the water before we were able to stop it up again. We needed to refill it quickly, and our maps showed that the nearest river was three to five days away: the average amount of time a human can survive without water.