by Lou Cadle
Ninety minutes later, she was back at the site of the timegate. Bob, Nari, and Laina had returned.
“Any luck?” Bob said.
“Not with water. I have two potential plants. And I saw a couple types of animals, herbivores.”
“Let’s talk,” Bob said.
She didn’t want to have a serious talk. “Not now.”
“Hannah.”
“Bob, not now, okay? Please.”
“Fine. Can I trust you to quit taking chances like this? Don’t go off alone again.”
“It’s full light out. I could see a long way. I was fine.”
“There are predators out there. Plenty of them.” He held up his hand to forestall questions. “When everybody is back and has reported, I’ll talk about where I think we are.”
Nari said, “I’m thirsty.”
Bob said, “We’ll hope someone found a water source.”
But fifteen minutes later, they all had returned and no one had. Ted said, “There’s a sizeable hill out west that we saw. I guess maybe we could go in that direction, and then from the top we can see more.”
Bob said, “That’s a good idea.”
Zach said, “But what about today? I’m thirsty. I guess everyone is. What do we do?”
“We stay still, I assume,” Bob said, looking at Hannah.
She nodded.
“It’s sunny. We’ll sweat,” Rex said.
Hannah wiggled out of her backpack and pulled out the two Mylar blankets. They weren’t much, but they might provide some shade. “Dig little holes, in a square pattern about four by four. We’ll use our spears as uprights,” she said, without making eye contact with anyone.
She went hunting for pebbles. The blankets didn’t have grommets like a tarp would, so she’d need to tie them to the uprights. She’d use boot laces for that rather than the less reliable grass cordage from the Oligocene.
It took no time at all to put up the first sun shelter. The kids worked out they’d want it angled toward the south, to cast a bigger patch of shade. Two more holes were dug to take advantage of all of the surface area of the Mylar blankets. Hannah sat, barefoot, and watched them complete the job.
They worked well together. Even Dixie pitched in, though it pained Hannah to look anywhere in the girl’s direction. Her face looked worse today, after Hannah’s beating.
Hannah knew she should apologize, but the truth was, she wasn’t sorry. She felt a little ashamed, perhaps, for losing control. But mostly, her heart was busy with her feelings about Garreth, which was an awful stew she feared she would never be free of.
She sat at the edge of the shelter, only partly shaded. Another punishment she could inflict on herself. And she listened while Bob talked about where they had landed.
“I’m fairly certain—and so is Laina—that we went a little more than 20 million years forward. So that puts us in the Eocene, the middle to upper Eocene. And that’s good news in a way.”
“Why?” asked Rex. “Are the predators better?”
“Better at what they do, maybe. But why it’s better for us is that I know it more. From the upper Eocene to the end of the Oligocene, where we were at first: that’s the time of the fossils from the Brown Creek Formation, which is where we were fossil-hunting. I’ve been studying the fossils for years. I’ve hunted for them. Cleaned some, even. Talked with M.J. and his predecessor about them. Read some articles. I’ve been through the museum a hundred times. So we’re armed with some knowledge.”
“And with spears,” Ted said.
“A formidable combination,” Bob said, “if we’re smart.”
Claire said, “Tell us. Everything. About the animals, most of all.”
“Let me start with climate. There are winters, now, and there is ice up at the pole. That’s part of why it’s dryer, that the water is locked up in that ice. There are four big and very separate landmasses, so animals of North America have evolved to be distinct from South America or Asia. The Rockies are still growing, I believe. And that changes the weather, makes it drier here too. From what I saw today, there might be a rainy season, but it wasn’t recent. We’re in a dry time and likely to stay in a dry time the whole month we’re here.”
Rex said, “A month? Is that what you think it’ll take the timegate to appear again, Laina?”
“Yes,” Laina said. “About thirty days this time. I’ll know better when I do some more calculations.”
Bob said, “So we have to find water and shelter to last us for a month.”
Ted said, “And food.”
“And food,” Bob said, “though I don’t think that will be a problem. In fact, if we can find water, I think there will be loads of fish. There’s a really famous fossil formation in Colorado from this time, and hundreds of fishes were fossilized in it. So if we can find it, Rex, you can do your thing with the net, and Claire can fish to her heart’s content from the bank. In fact, we all might make poles and do that.”
Jodi said, “There’s plenty of grass to weave into cordage.”
The grass was too dry for that, Hannah thought, but she couldn’t move herself to speak the thought aloud. No matter. If they found water, they’d find wet enough grass too.
Bob said, “On to animals then. There are really big animals, the first rhinos. There’s this thing called the Uintathores robustum, which is the size of a hippo.”
“Predator?” Ted asked.
“No, a grazer, but you wouldn’t want it to sit on you. It weighs close to five thousand pounds. And there’s the brontothere too, another fat grazer that might trample us.”
“What are the predators, then?” Ted said.
“There are a lot—and that’s just what we know of. There are hyaenodons, of various sizes, from ten pounds on up to a hundred. There are nimravids, though smaller than the ones we encountered before. Think more bobcat-sized than tiger-sized. And they don’t look very much like cats yet. There are packs of dogs, early dogs like hesperocyons, which will look closer to weasels to our eyes, I think, than dogs.”
“Is there anything to eat? Animal-wise, I mean?” Ted asked.
“Plenty. Oreodonts, eohippus, all sorts of deer-like critters,” Bob said.
“No horses,” Jodi said, sounding miserable. “I couldn’t eat horses.”
There was silence. Hannah knew they were all thinking of Garreth again, and his taming of the Paleocene horse he had named Traveller. And they were all thinking, she had no doubt, of Dixie’s cruelty to Garreth when it died.
Memories like that erased any shame Hannah felt over hitting Dixie. And they just made her miss Garreth more.
“Anyway,” Bob said, clearing his throat. “Once again, water is the trick to that. In a world this dry, animals will go to the water, at dawn and at dusk, and maybe all day long, to drink. It’s there we’ll hunt.”
Rex said, “But so will the predators, right?”
“Some of them,” Bob said. “So we need to find water and build a shelter and keep a fire going.”
Hannah cleared her throat. “Wildfire risk.”
“Sure,” said Bob. “It’s dry here, so we’ll be careful about that.”
Hannah was relieved when she felt the attention of the others shift back to him. She really wanted to be alone, with no eyes on her, no judging stares, no looks of sadness.
Bob went on. “We’ll have to build a fire ring carefully, and cut down all the fuel around it. We don’t want to set the world around us on fire, that’s for sure.”
“So how do we find this water?” Dixie said the first words she had said in front of Hannah in twenty-four hours.
Bob said, “I guess the hill your group saw is the best chance. Anyone else see anything that looked like a hopeful sign?”
No one spoke up.
“For now, let’s rest, then. We’ll get moving again late, about three.”
“That means we sleep again without any shelter,” Claire said. “Is that safe?”
“No,” Bob said. “We can light a
fire if we find fuel, which might help drive off predators. But for one more night, at least, we are going to have to chance sleeping under the stars. So full watches again, two people at once.”
For the next four hours, they sat still as the sun rose to zenith and beyond. The kids went out in pairs to relieve themselves, though not often, for no one had so much liquid left in their body that there was much left to urinate out. Hannah kept an eye on her hands, where she had tested the medicine bush. She thought the sage plant might be okay for flavoring, though it wouldn’t provide much in the way of calories, and went ahead and tried it on her free hand. Her other hand had stopped being numb, but the effect had lasted a good while. Fifteen minutes, maybe, and then it faded out over an hour more.
When she felt like talking again, she’d mention the plant to Bob. And she hadn’t told him much about the animals she had seen, either.
At some level, she knew she had to get a grip on herself, to start functioning again, but she couldn’t. When her mind drifted, it drifted to Garreth’s last moments, and to her moments alone with his broken body on the shelf of rock. She tried to remember instead other scenes from his time with her. Taming the horse. When he’d had his feelings hurt by Dixie. Back in the saber tooth’s time, when he’d been as brave as any of them fighting off the animal. She tried to remember what he’d said about his family. He had two parents, still together, she thought, but she didn’t remember if he’d mentioned siblings or not. If they ever got back to modern times, she’d have to tell the parents.
And what would she tell them? Everything? Of his terrible death? No, she wouldn’t. Nor would she mention stripping his body of clothes. She’d only talk of his bravery, and his decency, and say he had died a hero, which he had.
He hadn’t been the one of them with the least fear. That was surely Ted, who jumped in before he thought, and seemed to have not much awareness of his own mortality. But for those of them who were more timid by nature—Nari, Zach, Rex—every time they fought, every time they hunted, it was an act of profound bravery. The more scared you were, the more brave you had to be to act in spite of the fear.
Garreth had been brave. She realized she was crying again, and she really shouldn’t. It wasn’t bringing him back, and it was draining her body of water she didn’t have to spare. Stop it. It’s self-indulgence. She forced herself to silently add numbers again, to force her mind from the grief.
The day was still warm when they broke down the blanket shelter and packed it away. Everyone took up their spears—and the one club—and walked together to the west.
At dusk, they stopped in the lee of a hill to stay out of the dry wind that had picked up. All of them had gathered up what sticks and dried dung they had seen while walking. They built a small fire and set their night watch. Tired after last night’s sleepless hours and the hike, Hannah fell asleep quickly. She was woken up several hours later to take her watch.
When she had built up the fire, a number of insects came to the light. She was surprised to see a bat swoop upon them for a meal. Before this moment, she had no idea bats had been on the earth for so long.
In the distance, she heard a howl. A second answered it. The early dogs that Bob had mentioned? Or something else? They were a long ways off, whatever they were, but the sound was a reminder. Out there somewhere, animals with fangs and claws were hunting other animals.
Human animals would make them as good a meal as any other.
Chapter 3
The instant the eastern sky began to show some color, Hannah rose and walked into the grass, feeling for dew. The thirst was terrible now. None of them had had anything to drink yesterday, and the walk through the dry world had cost them moisture. Her mouth felt tacky, her tongue swollen. Even a mouthful of dew soaked into the bandana would help.
But though she got down on hands and knees and felt around carefully, in five different spots, there wasn’t a hint of moisture.
They got moving quickly, to take advantage of the coolest hours of daylight and approached the top of the hill soon after 8:00. All ten of them stood and scanned in every direction. But there was no sign of water. Not a patch of green trees, not a line of blue, not a low-hanging fog.
All they could see was dry grass, and another hill to the west, higher.
Ted said, “I guess we should climb that one too.”
“Without water?” Dixie said.
Her voice still set Hannah’s teeth on edge.
Bob said, “Yes, without water. We need to find some, and I can’t think of any better way to do that than to find the highest land and spot some in the distance. Hannah? Any better ideas?”
When the kids all turned to her, she felt herself shrinking back, not wanting their stares, or their expectations of her. She just wanted to be left alone.
But it was not to be. They climbed down the slope of the hill, and Bob fell behind until he was walking alongside her. “Slow up,” he said. “I want to talk.”
Hannah did not. But she could think of no way to refuse that didn’t require talking.
When Claire turned to glance at them and came to a stop, Bob waved her on ahead. She got the message, and she hurried to catch up to the main group.
Bob, speaking softly enough that the conversation was private, said, “Hannah, you need to snap out of it.”
Right. Like it was that easy. She shook her head.
“I know you’re sad. I’m sad. We’re all sad. Garreth’s loss—” He shook his head and bit his lips, taking a moment before finishing, “His death is a terrible loss. Everyone feels it. And I know you feel it deeply because you feel responsible for it.”
“I am responsible,” she said.
“Because you emerged as our leader? I’m a leader too, you know. I tell those parents when their kids are in class with me, when they go on a field trip with me, that I’ll keep them safe. I failed. I failed Garreth, and I failed his parents, who, as you can imagine from the person he was, are very nice people. They’ll be devastated. What you feel? That’s not one percentage of what they’ll feel. And I feel like crap too.” His voice had risen, and he took a moment to calm himself with some deep breaths.
Hannah was grateful for the silence.
Ahead, a black bird flew from her left to her right, dipping down, then flapping hard to get up again, then dipping. It spied a bush and made for it, settling down, making the branch bounce slowly.
“So can you?” Bob asked.
“Can I what?”
“Hannah!” He spoke loudly enough that Claire’s head half-turned toward them again. “Can you get it together? We need your skills. We need you fully present. There are dangers here. We’re lucky we haven’t encountered any animals yet.”
“I did.”
“What? And you didn’t think to tell us?”
She shrugged.
“What were they?”
She described the animals she had seen close up.
“Maybe pantodonts,” he said. “But I’m not sure. They weren’t aggressive at all?”
She shook her head. The bird she had noticed took off from the bush, flying on to the north, becoming a speck in the blue sky.
“Okay, fine. Take the rest of the walk to be like this. But I expect you to snap yourself out of it by the time we settle down to rest for the hot part of the day. Figure out something useful to tell the group. Something about water or defense or shelter. They’re wearing down. Make them feel hope. Make them want to keep walking, despite their thirst, and tiredness, and grief. Got it?”
She nodded. She understood what he was saying. But she feared she had run out of pep talks.
Before noon, they stopped, and they set up the sunshades again. There were a few clouds gathering in the western sky, and it looked as if they might develop into rain clouds, in time.
The way her tongue felt in her mouth, it had better not be much time. The thirst was beginning to take up more of her thoughts than her internal berating of herself, than her memories of Garreth, than
the grief. Over the morning the thirst had grown from nagging to demanding to overwhelming.
She said, after the shelter was set, “We need not to talk. Talking dries out our mouths even more. So just sit here, and we’ll wait for the heat to pass. Maybe the clouds will block the sun, if we’re lucky.”
Bob leaned forward and shot her a dirty look. She could read his expression: “That’s it?”
It was all she had in her.
The clouds did build, and they covered the sun, and they were able to get going again by 2:00 that afternoon.
The crest of the next hill drew closer and closer.
Ted was ahead, no more than twenty yards from the hillcrest, when the first animal came racing over and straight at him.
Chapter 4
The animal looked medium-sized at first. But as it swerved toward Ted, she realized it wasn’t. The creature had a long, long snout, and a humped back like a bison’s, and a darker patch of bristled fur that ran down its spine. It had hooves that pounded the dry grass, kicking up dust, and as it opened its mouth, she saw the rows of thick but sharp teeth.
Definitely not a grazing animal.
Had it gone for anyone but Ted, she feared she might have witnessed another death. But Ted was a terrific natural athlete, and as it bore down on him, he leapt to the side, hitting the ground and rolling up without a pause, his spear in his hands.
“There are more!” he yelled. The kids had all frozen for a moment at the animal’s charge, and now they gripped their spears and made ready for a fight, some of them pairing up back to back, and some lunging for the creature, who was trying to slow for a turn, but it had so much momentum it kept on going.
Nari seemed frozen in place. She had her spear gripped at port arms, but she didn’t move as the animal came toward her. Jodi took three fast steps and hauled back with her club and swung it at the animal’s head.
The crack was loud, but it didn’t fell the animal. It kept moving, swerving away from Jodi only a few inches. From the other side, Rex grabbed Nari’s arm and yanked her, barely getting her out of the way of the charging monster.
