The Ridge
Moonstone Pass
The Shaw
The King's Way
Garth
The Avian Islands
Burnt Hill
Marsburg (now a crater)
Kit speaks with familiarity of local place names. This makes Vixen seem real. Just north of here, we have Kirkstone ("Church-stone") Pass (see image) so I can get with Moonstone Pass.
Flandry and Kit are dressed like professional hunters, thus accounting for Flandry's radio, knife and rifle. His unfamiliar accent can be explained away by saying that he is a recent immigrant from the Avian Islands. Once in the city of Garth, he will be able to make trouble, e.g., to organize partisans to disrupt war production by phoning bomb warnings into factories. (A Frederik Forsyth character advises partisans to cycle through town carrying loaves full of rat poison that will be confiscated by occupation troops.)
When a lorry driver asks what they were doing in the mountains at this time of year, Flandry replies:
"'Keep it confidential please, but this is when the cone-tailed radcat comes off the harl. It's dangerous, yes, but we've filled six caches of grummage.'"
-"Hunters of the Sky Cave," IX, pp. 218-219.
Does he mean "Mind your own business" or "We are with the resistance" or both?
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Altho nowhere as fully described and fleshed out as was Aeneas, Dennitza, and Avalon, I've seen enough about Vixen to make me think it has a North American "look" or "feel." Which is not surprising, because I will be expecting real world off Earth colonies to be founded by various ethnic or national groups.
Ad astra! Sean
Vixen not only had a North American feel to me, but an Upper Midwestern one.
I think the use of weird terminology by the "hunter" was a way of discouraging curiosity -- someone talking in the impenetrable jargon of a profession you don't know is off-putting.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Vixen had an upper Midwestern US look to you? Not surprising, because Poul Anderson lived for much of his boyhood in that part of the US.
Ditto, what you said about Flandry's use of peculiar jargon.
Ad astra! Sean
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