"...a splendidly antlered wapiti..." (p. 203)
An elk but I never heard it called a wapiti before.
"...an eagle hovered. He caught on his wings the sunlight..." (p. 204)
Another hovering bird of prey.
"I heard an owl hoot to his love. In royal blue, Venus kindled. The air sharpened..." (p. 207)
Three senses in quick succession.
"...the Milky Way would be a white cataract..." (ibid.)
"...when Jupiter rose there would be a perfect glade across the water." (ibid.)
Readers might be able to recognize Poul Anderson's style even without being told the author's name.
2 comments:
What Europeans call an elk is what we here in North America call a moose. American
'elk' is a large form of red deer.
What happened is that when English settlers arrived in North America, the European elk had been extinct in England for some time (even in Scotland since about 900 CE), so they had only vague ideas of what it looked like.
When they saw something that looked like a deer buyt much bigger than the deer they were used to, they decided it was an 'elk'.
When they came into contact with the moose, they used the Algonquian term.
Wapiti is the Algonquian name for what we call 'elk'.
Kaor, Paul!
And again that bafflingly idiosyncratic use of "glade" by Anderson! The few times he used that word with the ordinary meaning of an open space within a wooded area really caught my eye.
Ad astra! Sean
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