Tamer_King of Dinosaurs 3

by Michael-Scott Earle

  “Throw me my boots and socks,” I asked her, and she tossed me them before she slipped down Tom’s back.

  “Watch where you step,” I cautioned, but Trel just nodded and then raised herself on her spider-legs so that she could float over the mixture of sand and sharp obsidian.

  “It looks like there is more sand away from the beach,” Trel said as she pointed behind the dune, and I walked over there once I finished putting my shoes on. Sure enough, the lava trail had created a whole riverbed of darkened sand when it flowed down the small mountain to our east, and we soon found a spot where we could scoop up as much sand as we wanted without having to worry about cutting ourselves on the obsidian.

  “This will create excellent water filters,” Trel said after we finished filling up the last jug. “We have everything we need now, but I’d like to continue on this path a bit more north to see if we can find some porous lava rocks.”

  “Ahh,” I said. “Good idea. Those would probably make great filters.”

  “They will,” Trel said, “but they would also be useful for cleaning our bodies, various tools, and dishes. Kacerie mentioned them a few times this morning when we were working on Tom’s saddle, so I’d like to bring her some back.”

  “Sounds good,” I said. “I’m glad you are becoming friends with her.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” Trel asked as she scrunched her perfect nose.

  “That’s actually something I wanted to talk to you about,” I said. “When we have group discussions, you often represent yourself as being the second in command after me.”

  “Uhhh, I am not representing myself. You are in charge, I am your primary lover and wife, I am the smartest one in the camp besides you, and I am also a duchess. I am not telling them things that they already do not know.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s kind of my point. See, Trel, when you talk that way, it kind of makes people feel like shit.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked as her dark eyes narrowed at me.

  “I’ve never really been a leader,” I said. “So, all this stuff is still pretty new to me, but I do know what it is like to have shitty bosses. Something they all have in common is that they constantly remind the people who report to them how much better they are.”

  “Hmmm,” Trel muttered as she looked at her hands. She brushed them together so that the black sand would fall off, but she didn’t look back up at me.

  “Everyone knows you are smart, Trel,” I continued. “Everyone respects you, but if you want to be the boss, they have to love helping you.”

  “And they do love helping you,” she replied as she looked back up to me.

  “Yeah, well, I hope they do. I treat everyone as fairly as I can.”

  “I think I understand what you mean,” she said after a dozen seconds of silence. “Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to compliment them more when they have done a good job. Or when they say something idiotic, I could do a better job of explaining the strategy to them.”

  “No one is perfect,” I said with a shrug. “We are all still learning how to survive. I have this ability to control them.” I gestured to the group of six dinosaurs that stood beside us. “I also have a knack for organizing our tasks and prioritizing them.”

  “Yes, you do,” she said with a laugh. “I’ll admit that I get too distracted by the minutia of my engineering role. Had I been in charge, we would have worked to construct the perfect door to our cave. We would have died because I thought I knew what was best.”

  “But you did listen to me, and now we are alive.” I smiled at her. “If we want to keep surviving, we are all going to need to work together to be a better team. Everyone is going to need to help, but I need your help the most.”

  “Oh?” she asked as she raised a perfect eyebrow.

  “Don’t look so surprised,” I laughed. “You know you are a genius. We couldn’t have built those walls without you.”

  “Or your dinosaurs,” she said with a shrug.

  “Yeah, it’s a team effort. Look at our group now. We have Liahpa and Emerald. We need to find out what they are good at and what they aren’t good at. We have to manage their strengths. You are great with design and building, but you are going to pull your hair out gardening and cooking.”

  “Yeah,” she chuckled. “Soooo boring.”

  “Galmine isn’t going to fight. Sheela is going to fight, but she isn’t creative about building. Kacerie is really excited about doing sanitation stuff, but I can’t see her fighting dinosaurs. Everyone is going to have their stuff that they are a genius at. We have to find out what it is for each of us and figure out how to use it.”

  “Yes,” Trel said with a wide grin. “That is what I am good at. I have plenty of servants at home--”

  “But they aren’t servants,” I interrupted her. “They are teammates. They need to be equal.”

  “How can they be my equal if I am telling them what to do?” Trel asked.

  “Here is an example: Are you going to tell Galmine how to garden?”

  “No,” Trel said with a huff. “So boring.”

  “But why else won’t you tell her how to garden?” I asked.

  “I know nothing of it. She knows how to do it.”

  “Right, but what if you told her that? What if you just said: ‘Galmine, I don’t know anything about gardening, but if you need my help with building something for it, let me know.’ How do you think that would make her feel?”

  “Hmmm,” Trel said as she tapped her finger on her lips. “I am beginning to see what you mean.”

  “You don’t know anything about making soap, but maybe you can help Kacerie figure out a tool or container that will help her. I’m sure there is something you can find for Emerald and Liahpa.”

  “But what if they do something wrong, and they need to be told they were idiots? Some people need that. Or they remain stupid forever.”

  “So you make me out to be the bad guy,” I said with a shrug.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let’s say you are working on a project with Kacerie, and you want to tell her that she is an idiot. Well, don’t do that. Instead, say something like; ‘I really want you to do a good job with this so it impresses Victor.’ Or you can say ‘I don’t want to make Victor mad, so we have to re-do this a different way.’ Or whatever. You just make it seem like you're not the one leaning on them, it is me, and you are just trying to help them.”

  “Hmmm,” Trel said as she nodded. “I can do that. It feels even more clever, since I am getting what I want, yet they don’t understand that I am manipulating them.”

  “Well, yeah, but I mean no manipulations and stuff.” I laughed, and she smiled with me. “We just want everyone to feel like they have a place and are contributing. I can see us having a city, and we need everyone to be able to work together.”

  “A city?” Trel asked with surprise on her face.

  “Yeah.” I shrugged my shoulders. “I’d like to save as many people as we can and bring them in. Maybe it won’t be a city, but I can see us having a few hundred people. We have to think about the big picture stuff. We’ll need to have people managing teams for all the stuff that we do right now. We’ll need way more huts, plumbing, food sources, and organization.”

  “I like your vision,” Trel said.

  “Instead of being a duchess because you were born one, you would be a duchess because you are a leader that everyone can count on to either solve their problems or find someone else that can solve their problems. I can’t do it all myself, and I’m counting on you, Sheela, Galmine, Kacerie, Liahpa, and Emerald to help me.”

  “But we don’t know Liahpa and Emerald. They might not be suited to the tasks.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” I said with a shrug. “We can use everyone that isn’t violent and wants to cooperate. Some might be suited to leadership more than others, but I have a good feeling about Liahpa.”

  “She seems full of herself, and she insults you,” Trel hissed
.

  “Yeah, but she is brave and strong. I don’t really care what she thinks about me as long as she is a good worker and is trustworthy.”

  “Her words bother me,” Trel said. “She needs to understand how amazing you are.”

  “She’ll come around,” I said as I winked at her. “Sometimes it takes a bit longer for some people.”

  Trel laughed, but I thought again about the floating silver woman touching my erection and wondered if she was going to be able to overcome her fear of me.

  “Alright,” I said. “We should probably head back to the--” my words caught in my mouth as I noticed movement in the distance beyond Trel. I hissed and the spider woman quickly followed me when I jumped out of the lava trail and crouched down behind the slope of nearby sand.

  In the distance, maybe a quarter of a mile away, was a group of biped creatures walking toward the ocean. They were obviously survivors, and we had spotted them before they had seen us.

  Chapter 10

  “See them?” I asked Trel as I looked north toward the ocean. I couldn’t see the exact details of their features, but the largest of the trio looked male because of the broad shoulders and thick legs, and the other two looked female because of the curve of their asses and long dark hair. The male’s skin was a dark gray color, one of the women had red skin the color of rose petals, and the other woman’s skin was a light olive-tan. The women were wearing bikini type suits that looked like Sheela’s outfit, and the man wore shorts that fell to his knees but was bare-chested.

  The three figures carried a large net, and I watched them wade chest deep into the water before they threw the net deeper in with a coordinated effort. It looked like there were some sort of flotation devices on the corners of the net, and the three figures soon walked out of the waves, shook themselves free of the water, and then moved to a rope that attached to the net. The man pulled a hammer from his shorts, and he pounded a stake into the sand to secure the rope. Then they casually walked away from the net and eastward to where they had come from.

  “They probably leave the net there for most of the day to catch fish,” I whispered, even though I knew that the three in the distance couldn’t hear me.

  “They are moving back into the jungle,” Trel said.

  “Yeah,” I replied as I watched them. “Notice how they don’t look around? They aren’t worried. They either haven’t been attacked yet, or they’ve fought and won a bunch.”

  “What should we do?” Trel asked as she turned to me.

  “I want to follow them,” I said.

  “It will be dangerous,” Trel hissed.

  “Yeah.” I shrugged, “but I want to see where their camp is. Maybe they will trade with us.”

  “What could we possibly want from them?” Trel huffed.

  “I bet they have a ton of saltwater fish,” I laughed.

  “Bah. We have plenty of food.”

  “Don’t you want to see their fort?” I asked. “Maybe you’ll get some design ideas for ours. What if they have a better setup than we do?”

  Trel frowned and then sighed. “That’s impossible, of course. However, I won’t pretend to have thought of everything. I suppose I could learn from even a poorly built camp.”

  “And we do have a trike that we can ride away on, and a crew of five troodons we can set to attack mode.” I gestured to the tiger-striped dinos, and Scoob let out a hoot of agreement.

  “How should we approach?” Trel asked as we watched the three figures walk toward the jungle. As they got closer, my eyes seemed to pick out a slight break in the foliage there. It looked like it might have been a path, and I was proven correct a few seconds later when they just walked into the green canopy without any sort of ducking or brushing aside of leaves movement.

  “We’ll jump on Tom, ride over with everyone, and then sneak down that road behind them,” I said as I sprung to my feet and climbed up the trike’s side. Trel followed me up to the saddle, and we were soon trotting across the sand.

  I took a path that was near the jungle with hopes that the group wouldn’t be able to see through the thick leaves. A good two minutes had passed in the time it took us to get on Tom and ride over there, so I doubted the trio was still hanging around. The trike did make a bit of noise when he ran, but the sand was pretty soft, and I didn’t think they’d be able to hear him over the sound of the wind, ocean, and from the distance that I guessed they might have already walked through the trees.

  I parked Tom a few dozen feet right of the jungle path that the trio walked into, and then I instructed Fred and Shaggy to run on the path for a few dozen feet and let out a hoot if they saw anything. This was my first attempt at trying to get one of my dinosaurs to communicate feedback to me, and I gestured for Trel to wait next to me until they returned. The two males returned after a few seconds, and I took their lack of hooting to mean that they hadn’t seen the trio.

  “Alright,” I said to Trel, and we moved into the jungle behind the trio of unknown survivors.

  The trail was dark, and we couldn’t see the sky through the tall cover of wide leaved trees overhead. I ordered Tom to stay back and wait for us, but then I had Velma and Daphne each sneak through the jungle some twenty feet ahead of us while Scoob took point. Shaggy and Fred walked next to Trel and me, and I figured we’d be pretty safe from surprise attack. It was quite possible that this was one of my stupider ideas, but this was the first proof of another band of survivors, and I wanted to know what we might be up against. This surveillance could mean the difference between life and death for us, so I had to figure out how advanced their camp technology was, and how many people they had.

  The path twisted and turned through the dark jungle for what felt like an hour, but was probably only five minutes. The sounds of birds filled the trees over our heads, and the distant cries of pterodactyls sounded from above those calls, but I couldn’t hear anything else besides the sound of my heart slamming in my eardrums.

  My hand rested on the axe in my belt, but I didn’t want to pull it out in case one of these people saw us. If they did get the jump on Trel and me, I wanted to have a chance to talk my way out of the meeting, and having an axe in my hand wouldn’t really help my case if I was trying to tell them that I was looking to trade.

  The jungle around us began to thin some, and the path sloped upward at a mild angle. I soon saw a break in the cover and spied an open field up ahead. I called Velma and Daphne back to us, and we paused at the edge of the tree line so we could study the terrain ahead.

  The open field continued to slope uphill for about a hundred yards, but where it crested I saw the tops of high gorge walls on each side. The path continued in that direction, but there was no real cover for us, so if anyone from this other tribe were looking in this direction, they would see us.

  “Hmmm,” I muttered as I looked at the grass of the field. It was tall, and while I didn’t think it was high enough for Trel and me to crawl through without notice, I thought the troodons might be able to use it for cover.

  I commanded Scoob to crouch down low and slither through the grass like a snake. He did so, and his dark orange striped feathers almost instantly blended in with the green.

  “How did he do that?” Trel asked.

  “We have these creatures on my world named tigers,” I said. “They have coloring very similar to our new pals, and they can sneak through tall grass or jungle easily. Something about the stripe patterns makes them blend in with their surroundings. Even orange feathers in green grass.” I ordered the rest of the troodons to slip into the grass, and then I cautiously stepped out of the jungle and walked up the trail.

  I half expected to get attacked, or for someone to scream an alarm, but no one seemed to see us, so I motioned for Trel to follow me, and we carefully walked up the slope toward the crest of the hill. We crouched low when we reached the top, and my eyes easily found the other tribe’s fort.

  The hill rolled down at a bit of a steeper angle, and then the path mo
ved to the left wall of the gorge. This path wound around the wall of the gorge in a hair-pin style shape, and then it ended at a hollowed-out cave that sat about fifty feet below our position on the other wall of the gorge. As I stood up slightly so I could see down the hill better, I realized that this was more of a volcanic hole than a gorge, since the drop to my right looked like it went down about a hundred feet before meeting a turquoise lake.

  The mouth of the hollowed-out cave was filled with a block of large stones that looked like they might have been joined with black tree sap. The job looked a bit sloppy, but it did look really easy to defend. Because the fort was positioned into the sheer wall, there were only two ways to get in: There was the narrow path that wrapped around the canyon’s hairpin shape, or there was the rope bridge that extended from the mouth of the cave and joined the edge of the cliff beneath us on the hill. The bridge was about seventy feet long, and it looked to be made entirely out of plant cordage. I was sure it was safe, but it was swinging a bit wildly, and I saw the red-skinned woman step off it near the gate of her fort.

  The other woman and man were about ten feet ahead of her, and they greeted a purple-skinned figure at the entrance to their fort. This new survivor was much taller than the other three, but it was hard to tell its sex from this distance. The being did have a long, monkey-like tail, which it flipped through the air as it spoke briefly to the other three people that we had followed.

  Then the four of them walked inside of their fort.

  “Those stones are cut perfectly,” Trel observed, and I studied them for a few seconds before nodding.

  “They might have someone with an ability to cut rocks.”

  “That would make our own walls close to indestructible,” Trel said. “I could add wood beams on the back to reinforce them, but there would be nothing that the dinosaurs could do to get inside.”

  “I like the rope bridge, too,” I said as I watched it swing. “It has its disadvantages since it looks a bit janky, but if anyone tried to attack them, they could just cut it.”

  “There is still the path on the left,” Trel said.