A Dawn of Mammals Collection

by Lou Cadle

  And this reminded her she still hadn’t had her talk with the girls yet. About sex, and how many women in history had died in childbirth, and about being abstinent, or if not abstinent, very careful. She should do it today, before she forgot again.

  The afternoon was taken up with net repair, more basket-weaving experiments, and marveling over Traveller. Garreth was finally able to put it down near the group, and it stayed right at the edge of the trees, ready to dart back under cover should any of them make a move toward it. Garreth was finally able to eat a late lunch.

  “Is it peeing on you?” Jodi asked him. “When it gets scared?”

  “Hasn’t yet,” Garreth said. “But I guess it might.”

  “How old is it?” she asked.

  Garreth shrugged. They both looked to Hannah.

  She said, “I have no idea. Young, I’d imagine, maybe a couple weeks old? A couple months?”

  Bob said, “If it’s eating on its own, maybe older. Though of course with this species, I can’t say. I know about modern horses. We kept one when we were just married, before the expense of kids made a horse an indulgence we couldn’t afford. The foals stay with their moms for six months. But then they’re large animals, which matters. Hamsters in the classroom, they can be weaned at three weeks. So based on size alone? Somewhere between those.”

  “Depending on evolution,” Garreth said, “So there might be differences between modern time and now, right?”

  “Very true,” Bob said. “We have no idea what nursing periods were like at this point in history. Maybe they’re very short indeed.”

  Jodi said, “Maybe it’d rather be drinking its mother’s milk, but it’s making do.”

  Bob said, “That could be, as well.”

  Jodi said, “I’m glad you rescued him, Garreth. And I’m glad he likes you enough to stick around.”

  “It’s just because I was the first to get to him, I’m sure.”

  Hannah wasn’t sure about that. She suspected the horse had a sense of who was kind and patient. It had picked its protector well.

  Chapter 33

  Within a few days, the horse was integrated into their lives, though it never warmed up to anyone else the way it had to Garreth. It was some form of imprinting, Hannah guessed. To the horse, Garreth was its mother, or the alpha in the herd. It tolerated most of the girls, and Hannah, but even shy Zach and soft-spoken Bob speaking or shifting position made it skitter away. Garreth was the only one it allowed to touch it.

  Irrespective of its lack of affection for her, she ended up grateful to the little creature for showing them another pair of edible foods—and something other than ferns. What it ate, they could eat, it seemed, and for once she had a food tester she didn’t worry about hurting.

  Not that she could hurt it, apparently. When one morning at the lake, she handed Garreth some dark berries she’d found on a bush, and he offered them to the horse, it took one sniff and pulled away, making it obvious it wanted nothing to do with the fruit.

  “It has better instincts than we do,” Garreth said.

  “Or a better nose.”

  “Why don’t we have better instincts? About food, I mean? It seems like evolution would favor someone who could sniff or lick a food and know immediately if it was good or not.”

  “Maybe we do have the ability, but growing up the way you and I did, with sugar-coated cereals and salt poured on everything, we became incapable of paying attention to our own bodies telling us what to eat and what not to.”

  “So we’ve been screwed up by sugar-frosted corn flakes and Coke, you’re saying?”

  “And salty cheese and chips. Pepperoni pizza.”

  “Stop. You’re giving me cravings.”

  She smiled. “Yeah, you have to admit, those are not foods we’re finding growing on bushes.”

  “I’d like to find a pizza bush. The cocoa didn’t work out that well.”

  “No.” They’d tried to do something with the cocoa berries, but either they were unripe, or they were too distant from modern species, or perhaps it was simply that chocolate tasted like crap until it was refined and sweetened, but for whatever reason, it had been awful.

  Dixie came over and said, “Here, Traveller. Come over and make friends.”

  The horse hadn’t taken to Dixie, liking her the least of the females which, as far as Hannah was concerned, showed it had good taste. It continued snuffling along the edge of the vines and keeping a wary eye on her.

  Garreth said, “Try just sitting still and being quiet.”

  “You’re not being quiet.”

  “He’s already used to me,” Garreth pointed out. “Give him some time to get used to you.”

  Dixie walked toward the horse, and it backed into the trees, keeping its distance.

  “No, not like that. Don’t approach it,” Garreth said. “Sit over there, like where Hannah is, and let it approach you.”

  “But it doesn’t,” Dixie said.

  “Just be patient. It will.”

  “Who made you the expert on extinct horses?” she said.

  Garreth shrugged and looked away. “Traveller himself, I guess. Excuse me.” And he went into the forest, following the horse, which had walked away from the loud voices.

  “Dixie,” Hannah said. “Why do you antagonize him?” What she meant was, why are you so mean? Particularly to Garreth?

  Dixie looked at her. “Who, the horse?”

  “Don’t be obtuse.”

  “Big word, coming from you.”

  “It means falsely stupid,” Hannah said. “In this case.”

  “I know what it means. God, why are you bothering me?”

  “You walked over here,” Hannah pointed out. “Are the bottles full yet?” Dixie’s job today was to filter water to drink while they fished.

  “We haven’t even finished the stuff from the pool yet,” she said, and turned her back on Hannah and climbed back up the bank, to where the bottles were lined up.

  As Laina seemed to be getting more withdrawn, Dixie seemed to be getting more unpleasant. Were people breaking, or becoming more of who they were at their core? It was hard to keep up an act for long, particularly under these conditions. Hannah had no idea which it was, but she felt unease, as if the group was headed toward some breaking point, some fracture in the network of connections.

  Those connections helped keep them alive. It was Hannah’s job to nurture them. And she was trying to, even in her clumsy attempts to get Dixie to be less unkind to Garreth.

  Maybe I’m taking the wrong approach. Because she liked Garreth and not Dixie, she was defending him. Maybe what I need to do is imagine I’m on Dixie’s side, and offer her sympathy. Hannah could feel her body recoiling from that thought. Dixie’s worldview was not a place she felt drawn to visit. But it wasn’t about Hannah’s own proclivities, her own likes and dislikes, was it? It was about trying to keep the group together, a functioning whole.

  I’ll think about it more tonight.

  Hannah set herself to digging more clams. They seemed to have repopulated the beach since the early harvest. On the high bank, the net team fished. Dixie babysat the water bottles and helped with the net when Rex called on her. Jodi and Zach were seated near the water bottles, working on making more spears, experimenting with finding a way to lash on a dental pick with vines to give them a spear point. Laina was on the lower end of the beach, supposedly weaving baskets, but she spent as much time scratching formulas into the sand. Claire was fishing.

  Hannah got down on her knees with a stout digging stick, right at water’s edge, and looked for clams, just to have more variety in their diet. She dug into the sand at the lake’s bottom and brought up a handful of dirt and sand, sifting it for clams. Or mussels, or whatever they were, bivalves of some kind. The tiny ones, no bigger than a fingertip, she tossed back in, willing them to grow up in a hurry.

  She wanted to try simmering the clams now that she had a cooking vessel. They might be more tender, simmered just to
doneness. When she had a double handful gathered, she built a little dirt levee right at the lake’s edge, splashed some water into it, and kept them alive in that, where she could collect them all more easily at the end of the morning’s food-gathering work.

  Traveller came walking up to her side and nosed at her collection of clams. He had no interest in meat, as Garreth had already discovered, and these little hard rock-like objects appealed to him not at all. Delicately, he lapped at the lake’s waters, standing not two feet from her. She paused in her work so as not to startle him. His long, naked tail swung back and forth, snakelike, every time he took a step. A counterbalance, maybe, to the shifting weight. He had five toes, ending in square claws. Not hooves yet, but they would be, one day, in his descendants, if his species had some. They could as easily be a dead end as the species that led to modern horses.

  He took another step, into the water up past his feet, and bent his head to take another drink.

  Garreth said, “How’s the fishing, Claire?”

  Traveller took another step, and another.

  Hannah saw the shadow in the water, and thought for a moment it was Traveller’s shadow. But then she saw a ridge of tissue break the surface. She said, “Traveller!” and lunged for him.

  At the same instant, so did the crocogator. She saw the jaws open, as her hand reached for Traveller’s flanks. She felt her fingertips just touch his fur, and then there was a terrible splash.

  The tail was the last she felt of him, whipping through her hand. He was gone.

  Gone forever.

  “Traveller?” Garreth said.

  She hoped he hadn’t seen it. Hannah turned her head to see him and Claire both staring in horror.

  Then Garreth was splashing into the lake. “Traveller,” he screamed, reaching down. He fell to his knees. The splashing he was doing was putting him at risk. Traveller wouldn’t have made a mouthful for the size of predator she has just seen.

  She got up and took two quick steps, as Garreth was lunging for the murky water, ready to dive into it. She got him by the waist and hauled him backward.

  But he fought her, and the weeks of hard work had made him strong, had turned him from a boy into a man. He was about to tear out of her arms when Claire got there, stepping into deeper water just beyond him, and pushing him back toward shore. Between the two of them, they got him back to dry land.

  “Keep going,” Hannah said to Claire, and they kept wrestling him along until they were halfway up the beach.

  Then he just collapsed, falling out of her grip. He curled up and moaned, a heart-rending sound of pain and loss. Then he began to sob.

  Claire was down by his side before Hannah could move, her arms around him. He cried and cried, the sound pulling tears from Hannah’s own eyes. She cried not for Traveller—he might have had that fate anyway—but for Garreth.

  The net team was in the middle of pulling in a haul, but they had frozen. The others had stopped their work and had started this way, but something about the tableau, of Garreth so utterly lost in grief, had stopped them from stepping over this way. People simply stood and watched. In a moment, a few turned away, as if to give Garreth some privacy to grieve. Jodi’s face was a mask of sympathy, and there were tears in her eyes too.

  Hannah felt helpless. There was nothing she could do to ease his pain. Nothing she could do to bring the animal back. Nothing at all, except witness. She wiped at her own tears, but more came just behind them.

  Chapter 34

  His sobbing seemed to have no end. After ten minutes, Claire looked at her, as helpless-looking as Hannah felt, and Hannah shrugged. She didn’t know what to do either.

  Some of the others had begun to look uncomfortable. It was an uncomfortable feeling, to watch someone experiencing unfiltered emotion for such a long while. Hannah could bear it more than most, she thought, probably because of her sister, who had no filters, no ability to see that others were bothered and that social convention demanded some other behavior. If she had been sad, or angry, or happy, her tears or rages or laughter could last a half-hour sometimes. And there had been nothing to do but to wait them out.

  But she knew because of her sister that there had to be some human limit, some animal limit, to emotion at this level. Hannah knew he’d wind down. So she sat down by him and motioned Claire up, mouthing, “Thank you,” and letting the girl take a break. Claire scooted a few feet away, and Hannah put her arms around Garreth, rocking him lightly, waiting for his tears to pass.

  He might be mourning more than the animal, after all. Home. Family. Friends. Lost forever.

  Dixie said, “For fuck’s sake, Garreth. Man up. Quit sniveling like a little girl.”

  For an instant, no one said a thing. No one even moved. Hannah had stopped her rocking, frozen with disbelief.

  Then they almost all said something, at once. Hannah couldn’t. She felt kicked in the stomach by the girl’s words. Garreth looked up, stunned into silence. And he must feel a thousand times as hurt. But his sobs stopped.

  She could feel him shaking with them, but he clamped his mouth shut.

  “It’s okay,” Hannah said softly. “It’s okay to cry. Dixie doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

  Dixie said, “Why do you all care about that stupid animal? It didn’t even like me.”

  Jodi said, “Dixie, nobody likes you. Get a clue.”

  Nari said, “I do,” but she sounded sad to admit it.

  Garreth, voice strangled, managed to get out, “I do too.” Tear tracks stained his face.

  Dixie scoffed. “Yeah, like that’s doing me any good.”

  Bob said, “Dixie!” He was obviously horrified.

  Hannah found that her fists were clenched against the urge to walk over and slap the girl. She forced them to relax. She said, to Dixie, through gritted teeth, “I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and say you’re being rude because you’re sad too.” When Dixie opened her mouth, Hannah said, “And if you want to make it through the next ten minutes alive, I’d suggest you shut the hell up, right now. If you can’t manage compassion, and you can’t manage to be quiet, take a hike and spew your nastiness where no one can hear you. Get away from the rest of us.”

  “You can’t—”

  “Dixie!” said Bob, and his voice was a command that stopped everyone. “Get up. Come with me.”

  Jodi said, sotto voce, “And don’t hurry back.” She went over to sit by Garreth and put her arm around Hannah’s. “I’m sorry,” she said. Tears were still running down her face too, but Garreth’s sobs were tapering off, his shoulders no longer shaking.

  The group was still shaken by the loss of the horse, shaken by Garreth’s display of emotion, and now just as shaken by Dixie’s cruelty to Garreth. Zach was looking the direction Dixie had left and was shaking his head sadly. Nari was crying now, and Claire was obviously fighting new tears.

  Hannah’s own emotions were in a whirl too. She felt terrible for Garreth, for everyone. She had liked the strange little creature too, and was sad at its demise. But mostly, she felt the burden of guilt for letting it happen. She knew it would come to this. Watching Garreth’s sobs rack his body, feeling them under her arms, she had been well aware that his misery was her responsibility. She should have said that first day, “Leave the horse where it is. It’ll find its herd, or it won’t. It’s none of our business.”

  It would have seemed hardhearted of her then. But now, it was obvious that it would have been much kinder.

  “I’m sorry,” Garreth whispered. “I know it was just a pet.” He wiped his nose on his shirt sleeve. It did little enough good. Snot had run down his chin too.

  Hannah wiped his chin with her own shirt sleeve. “It’s okay to feel sad. It’s okay to cry.”

  “I just lost it, sorry.” His words were choked. “I didn’t mean to cry.”

  “Everybody’s sad,” Jodi said. “We just aren’t brave enough to cry out loud, some of us.”

  “I’m not brave
,” Garreth managed. A new welling of tears ran down his face, and he hung his head.

  Hannah could see the shame in the gesture, and cursed Dixie all over again. What had possessed the girl?

  “Garreth, I’m sorry,” Hannah said.

  He wiped his eyes again. “It’s not your fault.”

  “Your pain is.”

  He shook his head. “You didn’t eat him.” His face spasmed in pain at the word. “It’s nature’s way, right?” The question sounded a little desperate.

  “It is. But that doesn’t make it hurt any less.”

  “We had a dog die. When I was nine. I cried then too.”

  “Sure, anyone would.”

  “I was nine,” he said. “I’m not nine now.”

  “We’re all nine years old when it comes to grief,” she said. “Honest.”

  He tried a smile, but it didn’t get very far. “I’m a mess. Do you think it’s safe to wash my face? At the lake.”

  Jodi said, “Don’t.” She jumped up. “I’ll get you filtered water.”

  She ran up and grabbed one of the half-gallon bottles of water and brought it back.

  Garreth gently pushed Hannah away, and she scooted back, giving him some space.

  “Thank you, Jodi,” he said.

  Jodi stood, obviously wanting to help, and obviously unsure what she could do for him.

  Back on the bank, the net team was finishing pulling in their catch.

  Claire went to retrieve her fishing pole, which was hanging half over the lake’s edge.

  Everything was returning to normal. But everything had changed.

  Dixie. That girl.

  Chapter 35

  Something had to be done about Dixie. First off, she was going to apologize to Garreth for being so cruel, or Hannah swore she’d feed the little witch to the crocogator herself, hold her under the lake until it took her.

  Of course she would do no such thing, but it was an awfully pleasant fantasy.

  Bob had the girl, off somewhere in the woods, and she hoped he was giving her an earful. It wasn’t just the one cruelty. It was the pattern of cruelty toward Garreth, whose only crime had been to have an unrequited crush on the girl. But it was more than that, a hundred petty crimes, beginning with showing up dressed wrong for the fossil-hunting outing in the first place.