As Dr. Burrows sloshed along, he had a dreamy look on his face. “You can very easily imagine the beginning of all life in a swamp like this.” He waved his hand overhead. “You’ve got ultraviolet light on tap all day long from the sun, and ample water, at just the right temperature. Think…. Maybe this very swamp was the primordial soup — the exact place where the first unicellular organism was born and then evolved.”
“I would’ve evolved pretty darn quick, too, if it meant I could get out of this place,” Will said, swatting a mosquito on the nape of his neck.
As they left the swamp and returned to solid ground, they found that they were in a forest of thorn-covered acacia trees. Between these was a tangle of thick undergrowth, which made the going much harder until they finally crashed through to what appeared to be a track.
Wide enough to drive a vehicle down, the track was unnaturally straight. Will frowned as he surveyed the short grass covering it. “This isn’t man-made, is it? An old riverbed?” he asked, warily looking around as Elliott caught up.
“I’d say … neither of those,” Dr. Burrows replied.
Will still didn’t like the look of it. He glanced at Elliott, but she seemed perfectly relaxed.
“Ah,” Dr. Burrows exclaimed as he spied something farther down the track and started toward it. As Will and Elliott joined him, they could see that it was a massive pile of animal dung, which, from the wisps of steam rising from it, appeared to be recent. “This is evidently a main thoroughfare for the local fauna,” Dr. Burrows decided. “A well-used animal trail.”
“Yes. See the marks on that trunk,” Elliott pointed out, “where the bark’s been scraped away?”
Will and Dr. Burrows switched their attention from the dung to the tree trunk. A diagonal abrasion went straight through to the white wood beneath, and sap had leaked down the bark and hardened into amber drips. But Dr. Burrows was more interested in the monstrous pile of scat, to which he now returned.
“What could have left that?” Will asked, as his father crouched down and probed it with a stick. “A very big cow? An Antioch?”
“Not a carnivore — I can see the stones from some kind of fruit, and cellulose … bits of undigested vegetation,” Dr. Burrows replied. “We need to investigate this further.”
“What, you mean look for more giant poohs?” Will asked facetiously.
Elliott barely managed to stifle a giggle.
“Don’t be stupid. I meant that we should search for the animal itself,” Dr. Burrows replied curtly. Standing up, he flicked open the top of his compass with undue force and checked the bearing. “And as luck would have it, this is roughly the right direction for us,” he announced. Will and Elliott smiled at each other as Dr. Burrows deliberately avoided looking at either of them, then stalked off down the track.
Bartleby was the first to spot the slow-moving beast some distance up ahead. With an apprehensive meow, he came to a halt, and flattened himself to the ground. Will, Dr. Burrows, and Elliott crept from the trail and hid themselves in the undergrowth.
There was a trumpeting sound and a large gray-skinned animal moved down the trail in their direction. With its heavy limbs and lumbering walk, Will immediately assumed it was some kind of elephant. And there were more of the same kind of animal following behind it in a procession.
Will and Dr. Burrows exchanged amazed glances.
“Probably a family group,” Dr. Burrows whispered. “The ones behind it are younger.”
“But their ears look weird, and what’s wrong with their trunks?” Will asked. “They’re half the length of a normal elephant’s.”
“Nothing’s wrong with them — they’re meant to be like that. Can’t you see the two pairs of tusks?” Dr. Burrows said, breathless with excitement. “Will, don’t you have any idea what these creatures are and how important this is? These creatures are either Gomphotheria or Palaeomastodons. Yes, I reckon they’re Palaeomastodons — early ancestors of elephants from the early Oligocene period. Yet more living fossils!”
“But are they friendly?” Will asked, as the nearest Palaeomastodon, which also happened to be by far the largest, continued to approach them. As it did so, it raised its stubby trunk as if sampling the air.
“It can smell us,” Elliott whispered, raising her rifle.
The gigantic beast kept coming and then, some sixty feet away, it chose a tree stump to make a display of its strength. With a bellow, it whipped its head to one side, striking its more prominent upper tusks against the rotten stump, which toppled over with a dull thud.
Peering out from behind Elliott, Bartleby made a deep growling noise in the back of his throat.
“Shh!” she said.
Maybe it was because he was so alarmed by the sight of the animal, but the Hunter suddenly did the last thing any of them expected. He leaped out from the undergrowth and landed right in the middle of the trail. His back was arched and the muscles in his shoulders bunched as he hissed loudly at the Palaeomastodon.
“Bartleby!” Will cried.
There was a moment when Bartleby, although he was dwarfed by the larger animal, locked eyes with the Palaeomas-todon. Then the Palaeomastodon let out a bellow and, moving more quickly than Will had seen it do before, reared its head around and began to tramp away.
“Preservation instinct!” Dr. Burrows laughed. “I bet the nearest thing it can compare Bartleby with is a jaguar or saber-toothed tiger, and it doesn’t want to tangle with him! It thinks he’s too much of a threat.”
Will wasn’t amused. “Get back here right now, you daft cat!” he chided the Hunter.
About the Author
Coauthors RODERICK GORDON and BRIAN WILLIAMS first met at college in London and have remained friends ever since. Gordon now lives with his wife and children in a crumbling stone farmhouse in Norfolk, England; Williams, an independent filmmaker, haunts the streets of London’s East End, twirling his impressive mustache and muttering directives to an invisible assistant. FREEFALL is the third book in the New York Times bestselling TUNNELS series. The fourth, CLOSER, will be published in hardcover in Spring 2011.
THEY FELL FOR FREEFALL!
“Gordon and Williams are one of the world’s hottest writing teams.” St. Paul Pioneer Press
“The perfect adventure in which to completely bury oneself.” www.kidsreads.com
“Propelled by chases, attacks, explosions, cunning deceptions, and acts of heroism and stupid bravado.” School Library Journal
THEY DUG DEEPER!
“An amazing world … with astonishing twists and surprises hiding around every darkened corner.” www.teenreads.com
“What a story. Seriously awesome. True thrills and adventure.” www.apatchworkofbooks.com
THEY DUG TUNNELS!
* “Compelling.”
Booklist, starred review
“Thrilling.”
The Columbus Dispatch
COMING SOON!
CLOSER
Copyright
Text copyright ©
2010 by Roderick Gordon.
Cover art © 2010 by David Wyatt
Interior illustrations: Cutlass and Halberd,
Martha’s Crossbow, Martha’s Shack, Stethoscope, Loop Snakes,
Speeding Launch, Old Telephone, Dominion Phials, Mrs. Tantrumi, Mrs.
Burrows, Quagga, and Three Skulls © 2010 by Roderick Gordon; Old Styx at
Pore, Bartleby, Rockets, Coprolite, Cutlasses, Submarine, Bright, Old Radio, Shopping
Cart, Birds, Pyramids, Sten Gun, Stalker Dog, and chapter-ending spots © 2010 by Brian
Williams. “The Origin of the Colony” text copyright © 2010 by Roderick Gordon. Excerpt from
Closer copyright © 2010 by Roderick Gordon. Illustration of Will and Bartleby © 2011 by Kirill Barybin.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permissio
n of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC, CHICKEN HOUSE, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc. www.schoIastic.com Originally published in hardcover in 2010 by Chicken House, an imprint of Scholastic Inc.
Excerpt from “East Coker” in FOUR QUARTETS, copyright 1940 by T.S. Eliot and renewed 1968 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
Song lyrics from “From Safety to Where …?” by Joy Division, copyright © 1979 Universal Music Publishing Ltd.
Excerpt from Free Fall, by William Golding, copyright © 1959 (London: Faber & Faber), reprinted with permission.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
eISBN: 978-0-545-38128-4
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