Fit the Seventh: The Hunt
Snarks are strange creatures. Though rare and elusive, they are hard to miss, the way they carry around bathing machines and other unwieldy objects far too big for them. They were generally harmless, not incredibly bright, and altogether just about the least dangerous things to be found on Snark Island.
If, that is, Snarks could indeed be found on Snark Island.
Alice didn't know the strange sounds that came from the swamps, or the small, fleet creatures that dove out of the path as the hunting party approached.
"The most likely places to find snarks are the beaches or the crags," Mag declared.
"I thought that they are almost never found there," said Tweedledum.
"But they are never found almost anywhere else," Tweedledee countered.
"Maybe because everyone was looking for them in the wrong place," argued Tweedledum.
Tarrant weighed in. "Well, keep your eye out for them wherever we are, just to be on the safe side."
"There is no safe side here," Mag mumbled almost inaudibly.
Tweedledum scratched his head. "What precisely do these snark thingies look like?"
"Ye'll know one when ye see one."
"If it's the last thing you know."
They searched all day with no success. Mists came and went in the dim woods and fickle sunlit patches of bare rock. They searched high and low, over boulders and under trees, in caves and in ponds, and finally returned to the boat for the night.
Alice took a short walk around the deck before bed. She found Mag standing at the railing, looking out over the island, its mountains bathed in moonlight.
"What are you looking at?"
Mag's black-and-white, birdlike features turned toward her. "Hush," she whispered softly. "Listen."
Alice listened. At first all she heard was the splashing of the waves and the creaking of the boat as it rocked, but then she began to hear other things, long, low sounds coming from the island, hauntingly living sounds. Lots of them.
"What are they?"
"I have absolutely no idea."
Mag turned and left, leaving Alice alone in the night with the haunting sounds from the island.
They had been searching over the island for days, and though they had come across many strange creatures, a snark was still frustratingly elusive.
Alice was starting to entertain doubts that snarks existed at all. These doubts were not entertaining.
And the longer they spent looking, the more she worried about Mirana. Would snark salad really cure her?
She and Mag were making their way through a canyon deep in the heart of the island. The gray stone of its walls towered so high Alice could barely believe they were real. Scraggly trees poking out of cracks on the cliff face looked bizarrely like toys against the immensity of it all.
"I begin to fear we'll never find a snark," Mag sighed.
"But what will we do if we don't?" Alice wondered. "And how do we know snark will cure the Queen?"
"Because nothing else has," Mag stated.
Alice only hoped that she was right.
They came to a cave at the base of the canyon wall. There was a mat of grasses and moss at the entrance of the cave that looked like it had been recently disturbed.
"If I were a Snark, I think I'd live in that cave," Alice stated.
"I suppose so. It would be a good place to keep out of the rain." She frowned at the cave. "We should come back with a torch and the others to search it."
Alice smiled and started toward it. "I'll be right back."
"I don't think you should go in there. It's large enough for something very big to dwell inside and too dark to know if one is."
"It's not so dark."
Mag sprinted after her. "I really don't think you should go in there alone, Alice."
"Then come with me."
"I don't think we should go in there at all. It looks like it might rain."
Alice was already at the mouth of the cave. The interior was dim, and it didn't look like there was anything inside.
She took a few steps in.
And then, all of a sudden, the mass of moss and grass gave way beneath her feet. With a startled yelp, she fell several yards and crashed.
The mosses broke her fall somewhat, and after a few moments she decided the fall hadn't broken any of her bones.
She looked up. She was at the bottom of a square pit that looked like it had been hewn from the hard dirt of the canyon's bed.
Mag's silhouette appeared against the rectangle of clouds visible through the mouth of the pit.
"It seems something made a trap here," Alice stated. "Could you find some rope or branch to help me climb out?"
"You know, someone as beamish as you should really not be hunting Snarks," Mag said. "Sometimes Snarks are Boojums, and if you meet a Boojum you would most certainly vanish away, Miss Alice."
"But this isn't a Boojum, it's a pit," Alice pointed out.
"Vanish away, all the same," Mag said, and there was something in her voice, some undertone of malice, that suddenly alerted Alice to what had made this pit and covered it with a thin mat of moss and grass.
"It looks like rain," Mag added, "and I have a feeling this little canyon is prone to flood."
She disappeared from the window of clouds.
"Mag!" Alice shouted. "Margaret, what are you doing?"
But she was answered with silence, and in minutes it was a silence so deep she was sure she was alone in the canyon, and began examining the walls of the pit for a means to escape.