Mastodonia (12 page)

“Who says lizards can't be eaten?” he'd demanded. “Or even dinosaur. There are a lot of people who eat lizards. I read about it somewhere. Said they taste like chicken.”

So there we were, standing in a row, with me in the lead and Rila in the middle, Ben bringing up the rear.

“So let's go,” I said. “One thing to remember. We may come out of the other end at night. Through millions of years, the length of the day would vary. And anyhow, Catface can't be all that accurate. At the distance back in time we're traveling, there'll be some error. He's aiming at seventy million years, but there might be an error of several years plus or minus, so you can understand …”

“Asa,” said Ben, “cut out the lecture. Let's go.”

I stepped out, and although I didn't look behind me, I knew the other two were following. I went down the line of bright red stakes, and when I passed the last one it seemed that something tripped me, but in one stride I caught my balance and was in a different place.

“Stay right where you are,” I told the other two. “Keep facing in the same direction. We have to set these stakes out and there can't be any slip-up.”

It wasn't until I'd said all this that I gave myself the time to see where we were. That was something I should have reminded them about before we'd left, and I was in something of a panic that somehow we'd fouled up our direction and our placement. I was remembering the terror I had felt when I had had no idea how to get out of the Pleistocene.

It wasn't night, as I had told them it might be. Rather it was broad daylight, and even if I hadn't known where we were going, I think I would have recognized the late Cretaceous.

It didn't look much different than the Willow Bend we'd left. There were more trees, of course, but they were familiar trees: maples, birches and oaks, with a scattering of evergreens. But directly in front of us grew what appeared to be a huge pineapple with a multitude of fernlike branches sprouting out of it. A cycad, and a more primitive one than I would have expected to find, but the fact remained that only in the Cretaceous, in this latitude, would one find a cycad growing among the familiar trees of home.

“All right,” said Ben. “Let's start pounding in the stakes.”

I half turned and handed one back to him, then unshipped my belt axe and pounded in one myself. Then I walked out a ways and pounded in another. By the time we finished, we had six stakes pounded in a line. Ben walked along the row, pounding each succeeding stake a little deeper than the preceding one.

“There,” he said, “we'll know what direction to go. The taller stakes are nearer home.”

“A cycad,” Rila said to me. “They've always fascinated me. I bought a bunch of fossil ones several years ago.”

“A what?” asked Ben.

“A cycad. That crazy pineapple with a topknot.”

“A pineapple. Yeah, I see it. Is it really a pineapple?”

“No, it's not,” said Rila.

Ben and I shucked out of our packs and eased them to the ground. Rila hung onto her camera junk.

“Now, look here,” said Ben. “You been fooling me. Where are all them dinosaurs?”

“They're around,” said Rila. “For instance, look over there on that ridge. There's a herd of them.”

Ben squinted at the ridge. “But those are small,” he said. “No bigger than sheep.”

“Dinosaurs come in all sizes,” said Rila. “From chicken size on up. Those are herbivores. Too far away to identify.”

She and Ben must have sharper eyes than I do. I could just barely make them out. If some of them had not moved now and then in their grazing, I'd not have seen them at all.

The sun stood straight overhead. The air was warm, but not too warm, and a little breeze was blowing from the west. It reminded me of a day in early June before the summer heat clamped down.

First I had seen the homelike trees, then the cycad. Now I began to notice other things as well. The ground was covered, although not entirely, by dwarf laurel, sassafras and other little shrubs. Grass was growing in scattered patches—rough, tough grass and not too much of it—nothing like the grass of the Pleistocene that tried to cover every square inch of soil. I was surprised at the grass. There shouldn't have been any. According to the textbooks, grass hadn't shown up until much later, several millions of years later. But here it was to show us how wrong we could be. Here and there, at a distance, between the groves of homelike trees, grew small patches of palmetto. We stood, I knew, at the transition point between the early development of the deciduous trees and the dying out of the older, more primitive flora; the two here intermingled. Because the ground cover was not as extensive as it would be some millions of years into the future, when true grasses had developed and taken over, the ground was rough, pocked and runneled by small channels where the soil had washed away in sudden summer showers—if, in fact, this world had anything but summer. It was the kind of ground that could not be trusted. Every minute of the time that we were here, we'd have to watch our step. The shrubs would impede walking, and the channeled ground would offer unsure footing.

Ben bent and hoisted his packsack to his shoulder. “We'd better look around for a place to camp,” he said. “Near water, if we can. Somewhere around here we should find a spring. Back home, there used to be a lot of springs. Remember, Asa, when we were boys. But now, with the trees cut down and a lot of the land turned to pasture, most of them have dried up.”

I nodded. “We should find one without too much trouble. I'm trying to get the geography straightened out. The river is still over there, to the west and south, but its course has changed. Look, it runs straight now and hasn't got a bend. It runs straight through the place where Willow Bend will stand.”

“I see,” said Ben. “Everything looks a little fuzzy, but I guess the hills and swales seem pretty much the same. We'll get it straightened out.”

“This is ancient land,” said Rila. “There has been nothing to change it much between now and Willow Bend. No epicontinental seas. No glacial action. The Kansas Sea lies a good many miles to the west of us. Except for possible lakes, we have no big bodies of water in the area. For that reason, we probably won't find sauropods.”

I hoisted my pack and shrugged into it. Rila shifted her camera equipment to a more comfortable position. With Ben in the lead and myself taking up the rear, we moved out. In a patch of shrubbery over to our right, something squeaked and ran, rustling through the underbrush. Perhaps, I thought, a small mammal. There would be a lot of them here, mouse to rabbit size. There probably were rabbits, certainly opossum. Maybe even squirrels. Hiding out against the more vicious beasts that roamed, watching to satisfy an ever-present hunger, these little scurriers would emerge from hiding ten million years or so from now to take over a world left empty by the massive extinction of the reptiles.

Ben led us toward the river, circling to the west. The walking was hard. You had to feel your way. There was a tendency to watch underfoot, to see where you were walking. But if you did that, you couldn't keep close watch, and here was a place where you knew instinctively you had to keep close watch of everything around you.

The gun was growing heavier and more awkward by the minute. I couldn't find a comfortable way to carry it, and I wondered what the hell I'd do if some slavering carnivore should hove in sight and come thundering toward us. The pack was bad enough, but the gun was worse.

A turtle—a huge turtle—poked a head as big as a barrel out of a small grove of birches a few hundred feet away. The turtle poked its head out, paused, blinking at us, then kept coming. At the sight of it emerging from the birches, we froze. Ben brought up his gun halfway to the shoulder.

It looked like a turtle, faintly, but it was not a turtle. It didn't have a shell; it had armor plate. And it kept on coming, blinking at us all the time, a nictitating membrane flickering over and off its eyes. It waddled when it walked, and its short legs held it only a short distance off the ground.

To my right I could hear Rila's camera whirring, but I didn't look at her. I kept looking at the beast.

“It's all right,” I said, hoping I was right. “It's an ankylosaur. It's not a predator.”

By now it was free of the birches—all fifteen feet of it. Its dragging tail had a massive bony club at the end of it.

The camera kept on with its whirring and now old armor-plate had stopped. It grunted at us and lifted that great club of a tail and beat it on the ground.

“I'll be damned,” said Ben. “It's warning us off.”

“It's not scared,” I said. “Not of anything at all. Let one of the carnosaurs have a go at it, and it would give the carnosaur that tail right in the teeth.”

Deliberately the ankylosaur swung about, away from us, and sedately trundled off. Rila lowered her camera. “Let's find that camping site,” said Ben.

A half-hour later we found it, a spring gushing out of a hillside, hidden by a patch of oaks and maples, mighty trees that made me think of an artist's conception of the ancient English forests drawn to illustrate an old edition of Tennyson.

“It's perfect,” said Ben. “We have protection. None of the big stuff can get at us easily, here among the trees.”

“Maybe we're overestimating the ferocity of the carnosaurs,” I told him. “Maybe they don't go for you on sight. We'll seem strange to them, not like their usual prey. They might shy off from us. And another thing—there may not be many of them about.”

“Even so,” insisted Ben, “we won't take any chances. We all stick together. No one goes wandering off. And we don't take a thing for granted. When we get the camp set up, we'll test-fire the guns.”

We quickly got the camp set up (a simple camp, with two small tents pitched underneath the trees), a fire pit dug, dead wood chopped, brought in and stacked, and our kits unpacked.

“You and I will take turns standing guard tonight,” Ben said to me. “We don't want something blundering in on us.”

With the camp all tidy, Ben and I test-fired the guns.

“The thing to do,” said Ben, “is to hang in there easy. Don't get tense, don't stiffen up. Hold the butt to your shoulder, but don't hug it too tight. There has to be a little play, but you have to have control of it so the butt doesn't bounce off your shoulder and clip you on the chin. And lean into it. Not too far, but lean into it.”

Ben had no trouble. He'd fired big-caliber before, but none as big as the ones we carried. With me, it was a bit different. I'd never fired anything bigger than a .22, but I remembered what Ben had told me, and it didn't go too badly. The first shot almost took my shoulder off and drove me back a step or two, but it didn't knock me over. The second shot was better. The third seemed quite natural. The fourth and last shot, I didn't even notice the recoil. The big lone birch tree we had used as a target was chewed up by the impact of the bullets.

“That's good,” said Ben approvingly. “You can't let it hurt you too much. If you let it wallop you too hard, if you don't stand up to it, you become afraid of it and you flinch each time you fire it. When that happens, you might just as well throw it at whatever's coming at you. Flinching, you can't hit the broad side of a barn at thirty paces.”

“Asa,” Rila said softly, off to one side.

I turned and saw that she was sitting cross-legged on the ground, her elbows resting on her knees to hold the binoculars steady. “Come take a look,” she said. “There's a lot of stuff out there. Small groups and loners, but they blend into the background and are hard to see. Look over there, just to the left of the little group of four trees on the ridge running back from the river.”

She handed me the binoculars, but they were so heavy that standing, I couldn't hold them steady. I had to sit down and use my knees to support my elbows, as she had been doing.

It took a while to pinpoint what she wanted me to see, but finally I caught the thing in the field and fiddled with the adjustment wheels to bring it more sharply into focus. It was in a squatting position, resting, reared back with its knees flexed so that its great tail gave it support. The huge body was almost upright and the ugly head kept swinging from side to side as if keeping watch of the countryside.

“What do you think?” asked Rila. “A tyrannosaur?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I can't be sure.”

The trouble, of course, was that no one could be sure. All we had ever seen of any of the dinosaurs were their bones, plus, in a few instances, fossil mummies with part of the skin intact. Our visual impressions of them came from artists' conceptions, which were fine, so far as they went, but couldn't even pretend to be sure of many details.

“Not rex,” I said. “The forelegs are too big. Maybe a trionychid. Maybe another kind of tyrannosaur we've never found a fossil of; we can't be sure we've found the fossils of all the different kinds of tyrannosaurs. But whatever he is, he's a big brute. Sitting up there resting, taking it easy, looking around for something that's worth his while to gobble up.”

I kept on watching the brute. Except for his swinging head, he did not stir.

“The forelegs are too well developed,” said Rila. “That's what puzzled me. If we were a few million years farther back, I'd be tempted to say it's an allosaur. But up here there aren't supposed to be any allosaurs. They died out long ago.”

“Maybe not,” I told her. “We're acting as if we knew the entire history of the dinosaurs from the fossils we have found. If we find one dinosaur in an old stratum and find him in none after that, we're inclined to say he became extinct. What could happen is that we simply failed to look in the right place to find him in the younger strata. Allosaurs could have existed up to the very end.”