The Camp of the Dog (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)
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Algernon Blackwood
Algernon Henry Blackwood, CBE (1869–1951), was an English broadcasting narrator, journalist, novelist, and short story writer, and among the most prolific ghost story writers in the history of the genre. The literary critic S. T. Joshi stated, “His work is more consistently meritorious than any weird writer’s except Dunsany’s” and that his short story collection Incredible Adventures (1914) “may be the premier weird collection of this or any other century.”
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The Camp of the Dog (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) - Algernon Blackwood
The Camp of the Dog
By Algernon Blackwood
A Cryptofiction Classic
Copyright © 2013 Read Books Ltd.
This book is copyright and may not be
reproduced or copied in any way without
the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
Introduction
The genre of cryptofiction has grown up in the shadow of its older brothers, science fiction and fantasy. While the latter two continue to move towards the mainstream of literary tastes – as evidenced by reaction to modern series such as Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle and George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire – many readers have probably never even heard of cryptofiction. Odd, when one considers that some of the most famous authors in the Western tradition have dabbled in cryptofiction, and that even today works of cryptofiction frequently feature on bestseller lists.
Cryptofiction takes its name from another, non-literary practice: cryptozoology. Cryptozoology is generally regarded as a pseudoscience by mainstream scientists, relying as it does upon anecdotal, often unverifiable evidence. However, it still boasts many enthusiasts, and continues to exert considerable artistic allure. Focused on the search for animals whose existence has not been established – who are literally kryptos, Greek for hidden
– cryptozoology traces its roots to the work of the 19th-century Dutch zoologist Anthonie Cornelis Oudemans (1858-1943). Oudemans’ 1892 work, The Great Sea Serpent, was a collected study of global sea serpent sightings, which hypothesised that all these serpents might stem from a previously unknown species of giant seal.
Around the same time that Oudemans’ work came to prominence, cryptozoology experienced its early crossovers with the fiction of the day. Following in the footsteps of Jules Verne’s famous Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) – which featured a mysterious giant sea monster – the 1890s saw an explosion of cryptofictional short stories, such as Rudyard Kipling’s A Matter of Fact
(1892) and H. G. Wells’ The Sea Raiders
(1896). Into the 20th-century, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) centred on an expedition to a plateau of the Amazon basin where prehistoric animals continued to thrive, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot (1924) picked up a similar theme, featuring not just dinosaurs but also Neanderthals. Less than a decade later, a prehistoric ape took centre stage in the 1933 film King Kong.
The fifties witnessed what was probably the heyday of cryptozoology. It was in 1955 that Belgian-French zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans – known as the father of cryptozoology
– published his On the Track of Unknown Animals, in which he both coined the field’s name and mapped out its intellectual boundaries. Four years later, Willy Ley’s popular Exotic Zoology (1959) was published, featuring discussion of the Yeti and sea serpents. To modern cryptozoology enthusiasts, these works are still seen as the subject’s defining texts.
While the popularity of cryptozoology has surely waned since the fifties – perhaps mainly due to the the ongoing non-discovery of creatures such as Bigfoot, the Yeti, and the Loch Ness Monster – cryptofiction may well be more popular than ever. The towering cryptofiction text of the modern era is undoubtedly Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel, Jurassic Park. It was Crichton’s book which helped trigger a renaissance in cryptofiction, which saw the publication of works such as John Darnton’s Neanderthal (1996), Phillip Kerr’s Esau (1996), Frank E. Peretti’s Monster (2006), and Steve Alten’s Meg series. 2005 even saw a $207 million remake of the original cryptofiction movie, King Kong.
Ultimately, then, despite its obscured and messy roots, the genre of cryptofiction may just be more alive than ever. One wonders why this is: perhaps it stems from an attempt to inject some mystery and wonder back into a natural world that is largely discovered and pacified; perhaps it has to do with modern readers being more sympathetic to creatures that at least have some vague basis in scientific fact. Whatever the reason, cryptofiction is here to stay, and the stories in this collection map the development of a genre which is as strange as it is fascinating.
The Camp of the Dog
by Algernon Blackwood
I
Islands of all shapes and sizes troop northward from Stockholm by the hundred, and the little steamer that threads their intricate mazes in summer leaves the traveller in a somewhat bewildered state as regards the points of the compass when it reaches the end of its journey at Waxholm. But it is only after Waxholm that the true islands begin, so to speak, to run wild, and start up the coast on their tangled course of a hundred miles of deserted loveliness, and it was in the very heart of this delightful confusion that we pitched our tents for a summer holiday. A veritable wilderness of islands lay about us: from the mere round button of a rock that bore a single fir, to the mountainous stretch of a square mile, densely wooded, and bounded by precipitous cliffs; so close together often that a strip of water ran between no wider than a country lane, or, again, so far that an expanse stretched like the open sea for miles.
Although the larger islands boasted farms and fishing stations, the majority were uninhabited. Carpeted with moss and heather, their coast-lines showed a series of ravines and clefts and little sandy bays, with a growth of splendid pine-woods that came down to the water’s edge and led the eye through unknown depths of shadow and mystery into the very heart of primitive forest.
The particular islands to which we had camping rights by virtue of paying a nominal sum to a Stockholm merchant lay together in a picturesque group far beyond the reach of the steamer, one being a mere reef with a fringe of fairy-like birches, and two others, cliff-bound monsters rising with wooded heads out of the sea. The fourth, which we selected because it enclosed a little lagoon suitable for anchorage, bathing, night-lines, and what-not, shall have what description is necessary as the story proceeds; but, so far as paying rent was concerned, we might equally well have pitched our tents on any one of a hundred others that clustered about us as thickly as a swarm of bees.
It was in the blaze of an evening in July, the air clear as crystal, the sea a cobalt blue, when we left the steamer on the borders of civilisation and sailed away with maps, compasses, and provisions for the little group of dots in the Skägård that were to be our home for the next two months. The dinghy and my Canadian canoe trailed behind us, with tents and dunnage carefully piled aboard, and when the point of cliff intervened to hide the steamer and the Waxholm hotel we realised for the first time that the horror of trains and houses was far behind us, the fever of men and cities, the weariness of streets and confined spaces. The wilderness opened up on all sides into endless blue reaches, and the map and compasses were so frequently called into requisition that we went astray more often than not and progress was enchantingly slow. It took us, for instance, two whole days to find our crescent-shaped home, and the camps we made on the way were so fascinating that we left them with difficulty and regret, for each island seemed more desirable than the one before it, and over all lay the spell of haunting peace, remoteness from the turmoil of the world, and the freedom of open and desolate spaces.
And so many of these spots of world-beauty have I sought out and dwelt in, that in my mind remains only a composite memory of their faces, a true map of heaven, as it were, from which this particular one stands forth with unusual sharpness because of the strange things that happened there, and also, I think, because anything in which John Silence played a part has a habit of fixing itself in the mind with a living and lasting quality of vividness.
For the moment, however, Dr. Silence was not of the party. Some private case in the interior of Hungary claimed his attention, and it was not till later — the 15th of August, to be exact — that I had arranged to meet him in Berlin and then return to London together for our harvest of winter work. All the members of our party, however, were known to him