"Howard Waldrop - The Ugly Chickens" - читать интересную книгу автора (Waldrop Howard)

you found it. It was said, even so, that prolonged boiling did not
improve the flavor.

That being said, the dodos might have lasted, except that the Dutch, and
later the French, colonized the Mascarenes. These islands became
plantations and dumping-places for religious refugees. Sugar cane and
other exotic crops were raised there.

With the colonists came cats, dogs, hogs, and the cunning Rattus
norvegicus and the Rhesus monkey from Ceylon. What dodos the
hungry sailors left were chased down (they were dumb and stupid, but
they could run when they felt like it) by dogs in the open. They were
killed by cats as they sat on their nests. Their eggs were stolen and
eaten by monkeys, rats, and hogs. And they competed with the pigs for
all the low-growing goodies of the islands.

The last Mauritius dodo was seen in 1681, less than a hundred years
after man first saw them. The last white dodo walked off the history
books around 1720. The solitaires of Rodriguez and Reunion, last of
the genus as well as the species, may have lasted until 1790. Nobody
knows.

Scientists suddenly looked around and found no more of the Didine
birds alive, anywhere.


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This part of the country was degenerate before the first Snopes ever
saw it. This road hadn't been paved until the late fifties, and it was a
main road between two county seats. That didn't mean it went through
civilized country. I'd traveled for miles and seen nothing but dirt banks
red as Billy Carter's neck and an occasional church. I expected to see
Burma Shave signs, but realized this road had probably never had them.

I almost missed the turn-off onto the dirt and gravel road the man back
at the service station had marked. It led onto the highway from
nowhere, a lane out of a field. I turned down it and a rock the size of a
golf ball flew up over the hood and put a crack three inches long in the

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windshield of the rent-a-car I'd gotten in Grenada.

It was a hot muggy day for this early. The view was obscured in a
cloud of dust every time the gravel thinned. About a mile down the
road, the gravel gave out completely. The roadway turned into a rutted
dirt pathway, just wider than the car, hemmed in on both sides by a
sagging three-strand barbed-wire fence.