Tuesday May 11th, 1937 Another two solid days with no time to write – we have been out with the Spontoon Guides, helping them with “Nature trails”. That is, putting our tracking skills to good use on every surface from sand beaches to sheer rock on Main Island. Miss Blande gave us her best poker-playing expression as she explained that Guides need to know this in case any of their charges wander off unexpectedly and get lost. Yes. Well. Having seen the way the Spontoon Guides train, the idea of a tour-boat tourist wandering off without his Guide knowing about it is as likely as a watermelon getting lost on a saucer. I remember Vostok where that native Sasquatch lady found us after two days’ tracking even though we had done all the standard tricks in the book to avoid that happening. It is one thing to track someone through an empty landscape where every broken twig and crushed leaf points to the quarry, but the hardest task is when a dozen other furs have been wandering around for their own reasons. Spotting not just that there is a trail, but whose, is a task to set a Songmark third-year! It was exceedingly tricky, and not the sort of thing one could put down in a textbook. Which is presumably how we were tracked on Vostok, the Native girl not having read the books we had learned our evading from. Still, in the past two days we learned quite a bit. Nightfall found us a long way from anywhere (as far as anywhere on Main Island gets) on the West-facing coast with very few trails. It is easy to see why there are no villages on this side, as the land slopes straight down to the sea with poor landing for canoes and little room to put a garden plot unless one confines one’s crops to vines and climbing beans. Miss Blande simply told us she would meet us there in the morning, and left us to it. Actually, by now such things hardly surprise us. Few things do – possibly being taken to Casino Island and booked into luxurious rooms at the Grand or the Marleybone Hotel would, but not being left to shift for ourselves in a wilderness area at zero notice. We all carry two ever-full waterbottles, and this time Molly’s has nothing but water in it. Half an hour later we were on the beach digging for shellfish while Ada tried her luck with a fish spear in the rock pools. Shellfish is what she calls “treff” and she is not meant to eat it unless she really is in danger of starving which as ever a two-day survival exercise is not. Still, she says she is relaxed about her religion’s diet rules compared with Hannah Meyer, of whom she says “if she was any more Observant, she’d need her own observatory.” Definitely a relaxing evening – in that we have fires to tend, clams to roast in the embers and shelters to put up but compared with cramming textbooks or jogging round the dry dunes that is luxury. Ada only found one small fish that came up to her specifications, but traded a dozen large clams for one of those new “Songmark bars” that Helen was carrying. She is as good at hunting shellfish as any of us, whether or not she can eat them; our Tutors mark us on our abilities after all. It was a pleasant time once we had food and a cheerful fire going. Strictly speaking Miss Blande had not told us to stay exactly where she left us, but nobody wanted to risk losing marks heading over the main ridge of the island in search of a meal at the nearest village. The second day was much the same, tracking and being tracked. Scent is more useful in the woods where it tends to linger rather than being blown away. Most of the scent traces are not from the furs themselves (a tracker counts herself lucky if the target has been eating chilli or popatohi for lunch) but from the disturbed vegetation, turned-up soil and such. Brushing out one’s visible tracks is all very convincing in the films and might work in snow or on a sandy beach, but on most surfaces that just leaves a bigger disturbed area scenting of freshly churned soil. Still, we are advised that perfumed soaps, grooming oil or especially smoking can be detected a hundred yards off in a wood by most furs, and many who are brought up with Native traditions can reliably scent it three times that far away. That explains why the Guides keep beating us at the task, although not all of them are canines who have reputedly the best noses. Back to Songmark for a more substantial hot meal and shower, both much appreciated! Wednesday May 12th, 1937 A day of surprises – and indeed shocks. Fortunately not for us. Father Dominicus’s school is in exceeding hot water with the Althing! The first we heard about it was the front headlines in the Spontoon Mirror, which managed to get this as a “scoop” before the Daily Elele (or at least it did not wait around long enough to verify its stories. The Mirror is reputed to have screaming headlines as its priority and if they turn out to be wrong, issue a small-font retraction at the bottom of page seventeen the following day.) It seems that Father Dominicus was rather too keen on supporting public decency – specifically ours. The bald facts were that he had gone to the Police as a Concerned Citizen, carrying a sample of opium that had been obtained from a Songmark girl. It all looked damning indeed for us – especially when the police called one of our class in and with a star-nosed mole present got the true facts. At which point the Spontoon Mirror’s tale took an unusual twist. In the first place, the sample was perfectly legitimately loaned by the hospital, being carried over here all signed for to familiarise the second-years with the scent and appearance of illicit drugs. After all, a Songmark graduate may take all sorts of transport jobs and if the fur who wrote the cargo manifest claims it is really “native incense” we need to know if they are fibbing. We have seen all sorts of materials one really does not want to get stopped at Customs with, and the police and hospital acknowledge we have never lost a grain of it loaned to our custody. One of Father Dominicus’ girls heard about it – and Masie Thynne, Beryl’s old school chum, was despatched to “remove it from illicit circulation”. This involved picking a Songmark blazer pocket whilst on a shared water taxi, and substituting an ounce of similarly coloured modelling clay so nobody noticed too soon. So – things seem to have rather seriously backfired. Masie was brought in and testified Father Dominicus had personally issued the orders. With a Police registered star-nosed mole questioning her, she could hardly deny it. It looks as if a rather devastating plot has backfired. I note Irma Bundt is looking rather pleased with herself, and indeed her dorm admitted for the first time were tasked with working on the problem. Molly’s comment was that we may have laid a landmine covered with a glittering prize – but the Ave Argentum did not have to jump on it. Well! We shall definitely be following that story with interest. Our day left us too busy to do much speculating though; the Spontoon motor bicycle association kindly loaned us their machines again and we had a loud and fast-paced morning. This time it was on Eastern rather than Main Island – presumably now the tour-boat tourists are here and Guides are escorting them round specially built unspoiled native villages, the Spontoonies there have hidden their gramophones, taken down their radio aerials for the season and requested nobody race around their freshly surfaced Native gravel roads on loud and powerful motor bicycles. Not a very thatched-hut and hula-dancing tourist experience, I have to admit, but Eastern Island is fair game. This spring Molly has been practicing cycling hard in her own time (and falling off hard on occasions) generally at the far end of the runway where there are few passers-by and plenty of concrete perimeter tracks with little traffic on them. It is embarrassing for a full-grown doe to be seen falling off a bicycle. Still, she has persevered and today she had her first go on a motor bicycle. Definitely more to her taste, being extravagantly loud and fast. She stayed on it too, which is just as well. I hardly think there is a mode of transport we have not tried, between us. Madeleine X has ridden in that motorised “monowheel” one of her country-furs rocks and rolls around Casino Island in, and Sophie D’artagnan reports she has tried stilts that the folk in the “Landes” region of South-west France use to get around the marshes. Li Han has flown here from her homeland in commercial airships, my dorm added skis, tracked vehicles and sledges to the list in Antarctica, and Jasbir has ridden four-legged camels and elephants back in Utterly Pradesh. Her sister Meera is very keen on the local “Goddard club” whose rockets are regularly soaring out over Moon Island (it is a military reservation anyway and the Tourist Ministry has not complained as far as we know) so one day she might step aboard a developed version of her test vehicles. The junior years have high standards to follow, as in Antarctica my dorm ticked off the last continent on Earth to be visited by Songmark girls. Finding new continents will need a rather long journey, unless one believes in the big entrance portals near the Poles leading to inner worlds. Interestingly, Meera says they may be getting quite a lead on rocketry as the Germans have gone very quiet about it. Ten years ago they were red-hot for the idea with articles in all the journals (we have seen “The Girl in the Moon” at the Casino Island picture-house for which the film makers commissioned actual rocketeers for special effects and realistic ideas) but nowadays one hardly hears a thing. She is in touch still with her old school of Roedean on the English South Coast, where she spent her fifth and sixth-form days as a leading light of the similar “Congreve Club”. They have already launched rockets across the Solent to the Isle of Wight (three miles over the water) and hope to be sending airmail the twenty-three miles to France one day soon. Having a reliable rocket-post would be quite an achievement, something able to deliver in minutes regardless of fog or howling gales that keep aircraft grounded and ships trapped in their harbours. Getting the system to work would be troublesome – a rocket to travel thirty miles carrying a mailbag would be biggish and the greenhouse-owners of the Pas de Calais might have a few unpleasant surprises before its inventors can guarantee accurate postal deliveries. As no two of the motor-bicycles loaned by the Club were identical, the whole day could be spent swapping round so everyone had a go at them all and indeed we did. Strictly speaking they were not all club machines – at least I doubt anyone races machines with side-cars unless they have a separate event. Still, they are rather useful machines as partly enclosed side-cars let an observer use free paw to read a map or use binoculars whilst moving, a feat exceedingly difficult for a pillion rider as we all discovered last term. It is quite a thrill, getting accustomed to motor bicycles in a Spontoon summer. It would be less so in mud and pouring rain, but on a hot day the cooling wind in one’s fur at speed is most refreshing and it is surprisingly hard exercise wrestling the heavier machines around the bends at speed. If only folk could make a decent silencer! Difficult things to produce according to most of the mechanic’s journals we have read. Molly has designed a silencer for the T-Gewehr but not built it – her most promising design is the size of a gallon jar, would last about two shots, prevent her fitting her beloved bayonet and still not work very well. An excellent evening – we had textbooks to revise (current directories of world airports and their services – it may not be many months until some of us will need to know the nearest spot in Africa or South America there is an agency with the engine spare parts we urgently need) but there is no hard and fast rule about having to do it in the classroom. A cooling breeze off the central waters had most of the third-years revising whilst out on the grass outside the dorm – quite a pastoral sight. Beryl is the only one of us who has the evening edition of the Daily Elele delivered, and for ten cowries apiece loaned it out to anyone who was interested enough in the continuing tale of Father Dominicus vs. Songmark. Jasbir and Sophie said the money was well invested just to hear what the Interior Ministry had to say to the Althing in today’s session. Attempted Entrapment is not a listed criminal offence in the Spontoon laws, Beryl says, which is just as well. Sophie D’artagnan nodded pleasantly and noted in a rather abstract way that only on the fourth attempt did the “Reverend Father” take the baited hook. Of course, such hooks had to be far from obvious and it might be the first attempts were never even noticed, let alone refused. Actually Beryl claims the trick was not entrapment at all, legally, and can quote cases in Spontoonie law that we could check up on if we cared to. I know Harold has half a room of neatly indexed records. To be fair to Beryl, she does sometimes tell the truth. Just last week she was quizzed by that Crusader Dorm about it – and claimed it is a religious obligation to tell at least one convincing lie and one disbelieved truth every day. Their walking lie-detector Isabella conceded that was something she believed – but when she asked if the statement itself was the lie or the truth, Beryl just smiled and said “no comment”, leaving our only star-nosed mole trembling in shell-shock from what Beryl calls a “logic bomb.” Thursday May 13th, 1937 Just when the tourists had booked all the deck-chairs on South Island – the rains came down again. At least they did not come in as a dreary grey English style rain but a rather spectacular, exotic tropical drenching complete with thunderstorms. Helen says tourists from Nevada and Arizona are probably out in it taking pictures as pleased as anything. Naturally, our Tutors had us out in it. Nothing devastatingly difficult but we had an exercise in emergency shelter building. Having been issued with a random collection of old tarpaulins and string such as might be found at random in the untidy back of someone else’s aircraft, we went out with a stack of old dry cardboard boxes and were tasked with putting them in shelter before they were soaked to pulp. Not a job where we had time to sit back and consider the problem, nor to try a few different approaches. Actually, Maria managed to win us the top marks. Everyone else was scrambling to find something to use as tent poles (thoughtfully not included by our Tutors) but she realised she would literally stand in for one – at least long enough for us to put the shelter up around her and winning us a breathing space long enough to find something more permanent. One certainly learns to appreciate the smallest scraps of relaxation in the Songmark third year. Many folk would curse their luck being stuck in a tent with the torrential rain hammering deafeningly on the fabric. But having finished ours first, half an hour’s rest in shelter before having to pack everything up and head back was very sweet. If cardboard would not have survived outside for long this morning, newspaper certainly would have been worse off – so it was lunchtime before we got to read the Native edition of the Daily Elele. The Althing was debating this month anyway whether to extend Father Dominicus’ license to teach here another year – certain events brought the debate forward a week and decidedly swung the vote against him. The Elele mentions the casting vote in favour last year had been that of the disgraced ex-Police Chief Pickering, and refrains from (much) further comment. Actually I feel quite sorry for the Ave Argentum, nearly a hundred girls who were uprooted once already what with the Spanish war raging and exiled half way round the world to get here. At least it looks like the school is surviving to carry on elsewhere, even if not around the Nimitz Sea. Hopefully somewhere like Mixteca with a more compatible local religion and society will offer them a place, and at least they have until September to find a new home. Molly gave a fiendish grin, popped her knuckles and commented that now is where the fun starts – the opposition have no reason now to hold back (she says) and the gloves are bound to come off. If this Masie Thynne has gloves like her former classmate Beryl, that will be an improvement – I would not have thought one could fit two pounds of steel mesh and packed lead shot in a pair of elegant white evening gloves without spoiling their looks, but evidently the girls of Saint T’s know some very special artistes in the realm of haute-couture - or would that be bas-couture? Beryl has said she favours fashion houses neither in Paris or Milan but somewhere in between. The criminal quarter of Marseilles is a place she has spoken of longingly on quite a few occasions. After a hot shower and lunch (rather nice salted fish, taro leaf and rice) we further consoled ourselves that today was a good day to be in the classroom. It is rare that our dear Tutors let us waste unpleasant weather sitting indoors, but evidently there is a lot of class work still to get through and this morning was our ration of getting drenched to the skin. Truly Songmark builds moral character despite not concentrating on it as my old school did; at least it promoted Unselfishness as Helen growled that anyone was welcome to have her ration. Maria has interesting news from Italy, with the first real test in the desert of the improved tankette fleet. Well, about twenty of them at least. The Italians took the radical idea she suggested of getting independent engineers from various countries (mostly Vostok but Britain, Germany and America were asked) to see what could be done about the existing two thousand tankettes that are becoming an embarassment. The usual result was an engineer pointing and breaking up with laughter, but about a dozen finished re-workings followed. They have a full technology exchange with Vostok (being at the opposite sides of the planet the two nations are, in the worst case, at least safe from each other) and some of the lightweight armour ideas are interesting. Without totally replacing the tracks, suspension, engine and transmission any increase in weight robs the vehicle of its sole surviving assets, speed and mobility. Maria says Vostok have a patent armour system of thin outer plates of extremely hard though brittle steel bonded to a thick, tough plate of magnesium alloy that is far more capable than the weight per square foot of either material alone. The CV33 is decidedly a vehicle for mouse and shrew crew-furs rather than bears, equines and similar. Maria says the most successful rebuilds were the ones with all the additions on the outside; the eight-pack of Vostok aircraft rockets on the Modello R(37) and the Italian aircraft cannon on the top on a unique ball mounting rather than in a turret on the Modello K(37) that have been approved for production right away. Furs say many hard things about Il Puce, but once he makes a decision he gets things moving without sending anything off to committee. Maria says that works very well on the occasions he is right, but means “the wheels come off” at record speed when he is not. Friday May 14th, 1937 After the rain, the sun came out as if to catch up for lost time. The tourists will be taking snapshots of each other standing on absolutely steaming pavements with swirling steam rising tail-high in the blazing sunshine. We were very glad to be in full Summer uniform as we headed over to Casino Island to the hospital, escorting some second-years there for a first-aid course. If I had to wear the full Songmark formal blazer today I think they would find it empty on the pavement in the middle of a feline-shaped evaporating puddle! Our own classes were rather heavy on severe and violent injuries, mostly working from textbooks as thankfully there was nobody carried in with compound or complex fractures this morning. Some of the photographs were definitely unnerving – one of a foot-paw crushed by a falling engine block will definitely stay with me (and make me triple-check the chain hoist every time I use one, which is no bad thing.) Some of the first-years were complaining about the weight of the steel lined and toe-capped Songmark boots last term; a quick look at that photograph should change their opinions. The other alarming sight was on the return trip with the second-years, naturally including Florence Farmington’s dorm. The tourist “custom” displays were in full swing with a fine selection of native gentleman dancers, particularly the Pacific’s only collection of limbo dancers. The tourists kept seeing newsreels with tropical beaches, palm trees and the like with limbo dancers and the fact that it was filmed in the Caribbean evidently escaped them when they asked the Tourist Board some years ago where the Spontoon limbo dancing was held. A most – athletic display indeed, and one we halted downwind to watch for a good five minutes. I must admit, the folk of the Nimitz Sea have seen all the right films and practiced extremely hard. There was a young otter gentleman who certainly must have the Tourist Board happy as he literally bent over backwards to entertain. Unlike most sports, at such dances what one might call the lowest score wins. My eyes were somewhat crossed I must admit, and my tail decidedly twitching. The mood was broken when Molly elbowed me in the ribs and gestured towards Florence and her dorm. Of the second years I would expect three of them to have their tails flat down in disinterest, but not Florence. And yet she did. It hiked up considerably when the next Native dance troupe arrived, an all girl group including two quite stunningly built red vixens who could be Gilda’s cousins for all I know. Theirs was a more traditional Pacific dance, one we know well – “the palm sway”. From what I have heard, this end of the season the more innocuous dances are done, at least from the Spontoonie point of view. By the end of August the satirical hulas get danced, not that the Euro crowds could recognise “the dance of the sunburned tourist.” Which is probably just as well. Only the best actors can order their tails just where they want them, and none can command them to lock sideways (not that such could be shown on stage or film, except for places that show Miss Melson’s productions) any more than they can genuinely sneeze on demand. Though even Madeleine X, who has the well-deserved reputation of “starched shorts” was unconsciously flagging a touch at the sight of the limbo dancers, Florence did not. Molly’s look at her and at me spoke volumes. It is hard to believe Molly being right about a fur’s basic chemistry being changed like that, but I suppose there is a first time for everything. I have enough to worry about without Florence, who seems to have got exactly what she asked for and is not currently complaining. A Songmark girl learns to look after her own affairs, in every sense of the word. (Later) An hour’s hard swimming and diving off Eastern Island was the usual way our Tutors keep us on our toes and panting with exhaustion after a too-sedentary morning. I expect some of the furs training for last year’s Olympics had no more exercise than we are having – a final polish, so to speak. Thinking of polishing, our Tutors asked me to give the first-year class an hour-long talk on social traditions, at the least the ones I know. Songmark girls may be up to their tail-roots in mud on some occasions and dripping with engine oil on others, but it is a useful skill to be able to get along in polite society. I know Meera has no trouble that way and indeed the sleuth Nancy Rote is from a good family, but many of the others have not had my advantages. Rosa Marquetta the anarcho-surrealist at least held off heckling till I called for questions. Hers were actually quite well thought of – various customs do seem to exist “because they are the custom”. Back for a treat – the second-years were given a project of Industrial Espionage – to find the secret of the chilli at Mahanish’s and reverse-engineer it for Songmark this suppertime. A bold attempt, and one I would award ninety percent for authenticity and a hundred for enthusiasm! Songmark’s icebox ran out of ice tonight, but personally I needed none of it. Water is no real use anyway, as I learned in my first year at Saint Winifred’s what one needs is something like bread that soaks up the oil that carries the chilli heat. Washing oil off with cold water is proverbially difficult. next |
