（外文电子版资料）Wolfe, Gene - The island of Dr. Death.pdfVIP

file:///F|/rah/Gene%20Wolfe/Wolfe%20Island%20of%20Dr%20Death.txt VERSION 0.5 dtd 032600 THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR DEATH AND OTHER STORIES Gene Wolfe Winter comes to water as well as land, though there are no leaves to fall. The waves that were a bright, hard blue yesterday under a fading sky today are green, opaque, and cold. If you are a boy not wanted in the house you walk the beach for hours, feeling the winter that has come in the night; sand blowing across your shoes, spray wet- ting the legs of your corduroys. You turn your back to the sea, and with the sharp end of a stick found half buried write in the wet sand Tackman Babcock. Then you go home, knowing that behind you the Atlan- tic is destroying your work. Home is the big house on Settlers Island, but Settlers Island, so called, is not really an island and for that rea- son is not named or accurately delineated on maps. Smash a barnacle with a stone and you will see inside the shape from which the beautiful barnacle goose takes its name. There is a thin and flaccid organ which is the gooses neck and the molluscs siphon, and a shapeless body with tiny wings. Settlers Island is like that. The goose neck is a strip of land down which a county road runs. By whim, the mapmakers usually exaggerate the width of this and give no information to indicate that it is scarcely above the high tide. Thus Settlers Island appears to be a mere protuberance on the coast, not re quiring a nameand since the village of eight or ten houses has none, nothing shows on the map but the spider line of road terminating at the sea. The village has no name, but home has two: a near and a far designation. On the island, and on the mainland nearby, it is called the Seaview place because in die ear- liest years of the century it was operated as a resort hotel. Mama calls it The House of 31 February; and that is on her stationery and is presumably used by her friends in New York and Phila