From a Forest of Marvels Skip Horack (bio) “In such circumstances we may be face to face with a unicorn and not know for sure that we are. We know that a certain animal with a mane is a horse and that a certain animal with horns is a bull. We do not know what the unicorn looks like.” —Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings The Ituri Forest. An emerald map-splash in the upper reaches of the Congo River basin. Today or the past century or millennia ago. Hyraxes make their final nocturnal shrieks before the horizon begins to brighten in the east, darkness peeling away with the steady spin of the world until the glittering pinpricks of other planets and stars are erased by a spreading blue. Beneath the floating latticework of a lofty treetop canopy the stunted understory takes form. A grand, damp terrarium of impossible greens and compounded browns, a sun-dappled dance of shadow and light. The okapi, a mature bull, passed the night resting on bent legs between the flanking buttress roots of a giant ironwood. Morning now, the day slowly moving from warm to hot. He lifts his giraffid head, fills his nostrils with the deep scent of dirt sugared by the faint perfume of a nearby blooming. There are the warblings of birds and the calls of primates. The constant buzzing of insects. A quarter ton. Five feet tall at the shoulders. The bull rocks forward then backward, rising on black hooves to commence a silent, solitary wander through his domain within that immense rainforest. A home range marbled with game trails and the tannic waters of babbling creeks. He browses a foliage-choked clearing created long before his birth by the booming collapse of a lightning-struck teak. Always wary, always vigilant, but the soft ground gives way in an eruption of leaves. He feels himself falling. Feels himself being swallowed. The world goes on spinning if this creature is stolen from here. And the world will go on if he simply dies in this pit. If a stalking leopard drops onto the broad sweep of his chocolate back, sinks fangs into his quivering stretch of neck. If the men who dug that hole in the forest come and slaughter him for food, craft ornaments and adornments from the zebra-like hide of his forelegs and hind-quarters. [End Page 149] Accept, even, that the okapi killed in this sanctum of tropical woodland is the endling, the last of his species. The world we know will persist. The okapi waits—confused, desperate, defenseless—but, yes, the world we know goes on. ________ 1841. Denbigh, Wales. In the beginning: a baby listed in the birth register of St. Hilary’s Church as “John Rowlands, bastard.” Abandoned in infancy by an impoverished and disgraced mother, lad John spent most of his childhood in the harsh, overcrowded conditions of a workhouse for the poor. Then, at eighteen, this squat but hard-charging boy, an excellent student and a lover of maps—perhaps supposing anything was better than the existence he had known, perhaps seeking to shake the stigma of illegitimacy and reinvent himself—emigrated to the United States. In New Orleans he obtained employment with a wealthy cotton broker, and out of respect and gratitude (or purely the practical shrewdness that would guide so many of his decisions and actions) he took the man’s first and last name, assumed the local accent, began denying he was a foreigner. When the Civil War erupted a few years later Henry Stanley enlisted with the Confederate Army. Captured in Tennessee at the Battle of Shiloh, and imprisoned outside of Chicago in the notorious Camp Douglas, he took the oath of the United States and switched his allegiance to the Union, serving first in the US Army and then in the Navy. As a record keeper on the USS Minnesota, Stanley learned skills he hoped might facilitate a career as a freelance journalist, and in 1865 he jumped ship in New England to pursue that vocation. To give his byline a certain gravitas he had been contemplating adopting a middle name, and he would...