Thursday, March the 9th, 2006

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Epoch of Snares

We all know that there was an age known as the Epoch of Snares, but it is surprising how little is generally known about it. This was a time when giant badger-like beings roamed the hills of the earth, when the oceans were deeper, darker, and more terrifying than they are now, and when only the very bravest of souls volunteered to crew the enormous primitive container ships that plied across those seas.

It was an age of seething murderousness, of great cosmic shifts, of roaring winds that uprooted the few pitiful scrags of vegetation that struggled for life in soil that was not soil as we know it today. In the Epoch of Snares, soil was much more friable, and crumbly, and sometimes even very crumbly. It seldom had the compactness or density to hold a plant secure from the biting winds, the same winds whose intense coldness seemed somehow to inspire the giant badger-like beings up in the hills. There were more hills then, higher, more rounded, covering vast expanses.

In those times shoes had not been invented. Hard to imagine that the fierce and burly sailors on those container ships did everything they had to do in bare feet, or sometimes wearing sock-like wrappings. We no longer know how such things were made, from what materials, with what technology, for all the wrappings that were ever worn have perished, and our only evidence is some briskly-scribbled drawings done with the aid of a clairvoyant whose brews, when taken in sufficient quantities, enabled her to picture the past. Or so she claimed.

Men and women were outnumbered by pelicans in those days. Some estimates say there were two hundred pelicans to every person, but these were not our modern pelicans. They came in all sizes, some as tiny as hamsters, others bigger than the biggest of the giant badger-like beings that roamed the windswept hills. Some would have it that a huge asteroid from a faraway galaxy, lumbered with millions upon millions of eggs, smashed into the earth, and the impact scattered these alien eggs and from them the pelicans hatched, but this is a frankly ludicrous theory, and one not given credence when one considers that it was propounded by a gibbering maniac chained to the wall of a cellar in a bleak and derelict village. That maniac is my brother, so I know whereof I speak.

Indeed, so assiduous have my studies been these last fifty years that I believe I know more about the Epoch of Snares than anyone else alive. I know what freight was carried in those primitive container ships that crossed ceaselessly from shore to shore. Bales. A staggering number of bales of every size and description, handled and watched over with infinite care by those fearsome, fearless sailors, a special breed, so different from the weedy landlubbers who vied for scarce resources with innumerable pelicans, and so nearly lost the struggle. But of course the pelicans were all but wiped out in just one winter, and even I do not know how that happened.

The Epoch of Snares is notable, too, because it was an era when only one type of cloud appeared in the sky, namely the anvil cloud. The anvil cloud is the description for the upper portion of a towering cumulonimbus, mostly ice, which forms high in thunderstorms, and there were constant thunderstorms at that time. People did not then fear thunder and lightning, as many do today, nor did the pelicans fear the wrack and roar of storms, but what do you think it was that had all those giant badger-like beings charging back and forth over the hills? Terror, is the answer, terror of thunder in particular. These strange beasts' ears were hypersensitive, could hear things that people and pelicans could not, and whatever it was they heard in the thunder filled them with fear, and so they would be forever seeking a place of safety, but never finding one, for they never came down from the high hills.

The badger-beings, too, died out, but not at the same time as the pelicans. Geological upheavals have flattened many of the hills where they crashed around in panic, and no one has yet found any trace of their bones. Perhaps it is true what my brother says, that the badger-beings never existed, were but a vapour in the brain of some historical fantasist, but I doubt he can be right about that and so hopelessly, ridiculously wrong about the pelicans. I hope you will concur.

As we have seen, the people of that time had no shoes. Nor did they have saints. As far as I have been able to ascertain they did not have what we would today think of as a religion. To be sure, they subscribed to a cosmogony, they had some dim, dull-witted inkling of how the earth and the heavens, the sun and moon and stars, and anvil clouds, all fitted together, but it was not one I have wasted time trying to understand, for it was clearly idiotic. I have in my pouch a diagram made by that clairvoyant I mentioned earlier, which purports to show the universe as understood in the Epoch of Snares, but it is a slapdash diagram and, I feel, only muddies waters already murky enough.

And why, everyone asks, sooner or later, is this long-ago age known as the Epoch of Snares? Why not the Epoch of Bales, of Badger-beings, of Interplanetary Pelicans? Why not the Epoch of Enormous Primitive Container Ships That Plied Across The Seas? Why not, indeed, the Epoch of No Shoes? Go to the bleak and derelict village, enter that dark dank cellar, approach the gibbering maniac chained to the wall. Ask my brother. He will tell you.