by Douglas Lain
We passed over hills and plains and past swamps and rivers to a lonely little outpost next to a lake. The train pulled off onto a sidetrack, next to a little crew house. The cabin was on the lakeshore, Innes said, and assured me that the lake was safe. The azdryths had been hunted out. I decided that azdryths were probably not long-necked leopards after all.
We took the path towards the lake while the crew moved into their own quarters. The cabins were spread out along a ridge, half-hidden by trees and gardens. A high, electrified fence lined the path and extended around the other side of the ridge, out of sight.
MacArthur ran ahead, and we followed him to one of the larger cabins. It was like a miniature of the General’s house; one story high, but with a courtyard at the center.
Innes asked me if I liked it, and I said yes. I wanted to ask if there was a cook and a gardener here too, but I kept my mouth shut. The train had put me in a bad mood. Innes asked me if I was tired, and she kissed me when I shrugged. Part of me wanted her to get away from me, but once she got started there was no chance of that part winning out.
Afterwards Innes announced that she was hungry and took some rifles out of a bag. She handed me a rifle and a box of shells and took me out hunting thag. I told her I’d never hunted before, but she said just to follow her lead and not make any noise.
There was a gate in the fence behind the cabin, and Innes led the way through it and down the ridge. The slope was a little bit tricky, but I took it slow and managed to get down without falling.
There was a herd of thag browsing the vegetation in the valley below. They were shaggy and horned like the sheep-creatures I had imagined that night in the Interior Air terminal, but they were half again the size of a buffalo, and they weren’t docile. I found that out right away when we were settling in at the edge of the tree line with our rifles. I stepped on a dry branch with my artificial leg, and the twig snapped. The sound echoed through the valley, but the thags knew exactly where it had come from. The nearest one lifted its head and charged.
Innes ran back up the ridge, but I knew I couldn’t keep up with her, so I stayed where I was. My leg didn’t slow down my shooting, so I might as well try to slow the thing down. It was hard to miss. I fired one barrel into its shoulder, and the other into its chest, and then it was nearly on top of me.
I wonder how different you are from us. Does adrenaline pump into your system when you’re in danger? People always ask about fear when they hear stories like this. Were you afraid? There’s never time to be afraid; you just react. Even running away is just instinct. The difference is that if you’re trained, you have another way to react. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to survive. But you might not panic. You might use the flood of adrenaline to sharpen what you hear and smell, and you might learn something, and you might not get killed.
The thing is, if instinct and something else—like pain, like knowing that you can’t do what you were trained to do back in the day because of the leg you lost—if those two things are at odds, you might freeze.
The thag had a good three feet and probably a ton and a half on me. I should have run, I decided, but it was too late. Instead I just fell down. I dropped onto the grass and hoped it would charge over me without crushing me.
Then MacArthur growled and when I looked up I saw the two of them, hyaenodon and thag, tangled in a heap not four feet to my right. Innes pulled at my arm, and we started back up the ridge. I forgot the rifle. Innes shoved me through the gate and called for MacArthur, but it was too late.
The hyaenodon was no match for the thag in size; it just rolled over while MacArthur’s teeth were locked at its throat. MacArthur’s body—all but his jaws—went limp. The thag shambled back and forth trying to dislodge him. It head-butted a tree and brought it crashing down, then charged up the ridge towards us. I backed up a step, and Innes slammed the gate shut.
The thag and the wires made deep indentations in each other while sparks flew. I could smell burnt fur. MacArthur twitched and let go of the thag to writhe in the high grass. For a second I thought he might still be alive.
Then three quick shots rang out. The thag slumped backwards, and its mouth worked, but it made no sound. It fell back to lie next to the hyaenodon.
I put my hand on Innes’s shoulder, thinking I would say something comforting, but she only stood there for a moment before she opened the gate. She took out a long knife and began cutting into the thag.
That’s when I met Kilgore. He was the one that had killed the thag, finally. Not me or poor MacArthur. When he dropped out of the trees, right behind Innes, I screamed—I didn’t shout, I screamed. You know what a Sagoth looks like, but I didn’t. He’s a gorilla, pretty much, only not quite as thick-set, and he walks upright like a human. Not like the Gr-grs, either; his fur is dark, and he doesn’t have the long muzzle. He spoke perfect English. He said he was the game warden there, and he’d heard the shooting and come to see if we needed any assistance.
Innes was slicing at the thag’s flanks and placing the chunks of meat in a bag. I thought she was crying, but I couldn’t tell. She thanked Kilgore, but she didn’t sound very grateful.
I felt like shit. I can’t walk right, so her dog dies, and I can’t help being glad it wasn’t me. As if my life meant more, because he was a dog. A hyaenodon. Scared of a funicular but not an angry bull five times its size. It didn’t make sense. Innes must have been so angry, but she wouldn’t show it. After she cut a few steaks from the thag she told Kilgore to take care of the rest. She still hadn’t looked at him.
He asked her what she would like for him to do with MacArthur. She told Kilgore to bury him, and started back towards the cabin. I started to follow, but Kilgore called me back. He held up the rifle I had left and passed it to me. I thanked him and held out my hand to shake his. He smiled and said that was an American custom, and I said yes, I was an American. He nodded as if that was obvious to anyone.
When I got back to the cabin, I asked Innes if we should invite Kilgore to eat with us. It was like I’d suggested we have MacArthur for breakfast. She actually said, “You can eat with him if you like.” Then she went back to carving up steaks.
I know she was upset, that she probably blamed me for MacArthur, but I couldn’t understand why she would talk about Kilgore like that when he’d saved our lives. It made me think of the gardener whom she’d never acknowledged, of the chef and the porter and the guards. That feeling I’d had in Sari, that all the different sorts of people there were equal parts of something big and important and better, Innes made that into a lie with that one sentence. I almost asked her when she would require my services in the bedroom, but instead I left.
Clouds had come up over the horizon, and they screened the light of the sun, but not the heat. I started walking around the lake. There was a path, but it was wet and muddy, and weeds had grown up around it in spots. There were more giant dragonflies there, bigger than the ones in the mountains. Four-foot wingspans, I’d guess; but there were so many gnats and mosquitoes that the dragonflies must have been overworked. By the time I stopped being blind pissed I was a sweaty mass of bug bait. I kept thinking that the sun would be going down soon, and then I’d remember that it wouldn’t, not ever.
Other girlfriends, sometimes I’d just leave them alone for a couple of days if I got angry, and sometimes it would be OK. There wasn’t any way to do that this time. I couldn’t take the train without Innes, and probably not an Interior Air flight either, so I kept on walking.
It must not have taken as long to circle the lake as I’d thought, because when I walked back into the cabin it was like I hadn’t left. Innes told me dinner was ready and my boots were muddy. I took them off. I almost threw them at her. I almost threw the whole damn leg at her, but I stopped myself and told her I was sorry about MacArthur.
It wasn’t your fault, she told me.
It wasn’t Kilgore’s, either, I said. I told her I didn’t like the way she’d treated him. She told me I didn�
�t understand, and I said OK; explain it to me, then.
She said Kilgore was an employee and not a friend. He was a Sagoth, too, and there was a history there. I told her I wanted to hear it.
So she told me about you. Your people, anyway. The Mahars. Flying lizard-men, eight feet tall, with bony ridges running down the spine. Lizard-women, I mean. Dinosaur women. You’re not as terrifying as she made you sound. She said you used to rule over this part of Pellucidar, that you had dozens of underground cities with thousands of Mahars, Sagoth servants, and human slaves. Until David Innes came and led the humans against you. Drove you out of your cities and sent you on the run. One of the ruined cities was nearby, she said, down one of the hiking trails. Mistra. This place.
Innes said the Empire left your people alone after that, until a generation ago, when you started bombing Imperial cities. Train stations and restaurants and government buildings. Some of the bombings were airborne, and some of those were suicide flights. Some of them were on the ground, and since there was no way for a Mahar to walk into a human city without help, it was obvious that someone was helping you. She said you can’t even speak human language without Sagoths to translate. Only a few Sagoths were caught working with you, but they suspected that there were more.
She said the Empire wiped out the Mahars. They arrested the Sagoth collaborators first, and used focused interrogations to find out where you were hiding. Then they raided your nests and finished you off. It was the only way to do it, she said. The bombings stopped, and the Sagoths were banned from the cities.
I had no reason not to believe Innes’s story, but it bothered me. I didn’t understand why, for one reason. I mean, I don’t like bombs, no matter who’s using them or why. We use bombs in Iraq, and we’ve used bombs before that, and maybe it’s wrong of me to criticize. But I don’t like it. And if you … you shouldn’t have done it. But you also had a reason, and Innes left that out.
Later on Kilgore told me a lot of things that Innes’s story didn’t cover. The Empire didn’t just round up Sagoth collaborators; they rounded up all the Sagoths and put them in camps. What Innes called focused interrogations, Kilgore called random torture. He’d been a child, but he remembered them taking his father away and bringing him back broken. That was the word Kilgore used. His father had owned a successful painting business in Sari, but the Empire took that away. His father died in the camps.
He told me the reason, too. The reason for the attacks. The books, the ones with the instructions for your reproduction. Parthenogenesis, Kilgore called it. The Empire had taken them away, and they wouldn’t give them back. You were dying out, slowly, and you had nothing to negotiate with, nothing to offer them but an end to the bombings.
Did you really think that would work? I mean, you kill a few hundred people, a few thousand, you think they’re going to decide to give you what you want? I’m not saying they should have taken it away, but … could you have learned to live without slaves? Without humans for meat? That’s what they needed to believe, and you weren’t doing anything to convince them. Maybe this is all evolution. You adapted to losing your males, but when the humans rose up you didn’t adapt. You didn’t learn.
I didn’t know all of that then. I don’t think Innes thought she was lying. I think she left out the details because she thought they made it all too confusing, the same way she left out all the details about her family and where she lived back when we were emailing each other. But I didn’t know that then. I listened to her explanations about Kilgore and the Sagoths and I decided there was more to the political situation here, the history, than I had a grasp on. That hadn’t stopped Innes and the General from making comments about Iraq and the US, but I decided I wasn’t going to play that game with her.
The thag steak was excellent; a bit bloody, with a salty aftertaste like it had been marinated. After the steak and the wine and the fight I was about as relaxed as I’d been since arriving. Innes loosened up, too, and told stories about MacArthur when he was a puppy. She cried a little, but quiet, like she didn’t want me to know. We moved to a hammock and talked until we fell asleep. When we woke up we fucked in that half-asleep way, and then we went hunting again.
It felt like we’d gotten through something difficult, like we’d turned some kind of a corner, and for a little while it was good. We ate and drank and talked and fucked and swam and killed thag. I let Innes take the lead on the hunts. She never made a sound until she had a clear shot, and she never missed. I brought down a few myself. It felt good to shoot, to feel that kick against my shoulder. I was learning to stand on the new leg in ways that concrete and carpet hadn’t taught me. One day we went out on the hiking trail Innes had mentioned, and I kept up pretty well. We didn’t go to the ruins, although she pointed them out from an overlook. Two granite towers flanking a staircase leading underground. One of the towers had broken halfway along its height and collapsed, but the other was at least seventy feet high.
Whenever we were out Kilgore would bring in cuts from the latest beast we had killed, until there was enough meat in the solar-powered freezer to feed a battalion. I’m sure he kept an eye out while we were hunting, too, but he stayed out of sight.
I guess I could have measured the time by kills, or bottles of wine, or the number of times we had sex, but in my mind it all runs together until the moment I saw the duckbills.
We were down in the thag canyon; the herd was gathered at the far end, nearer the lake at the base of the cliff opposite. Some of the calves were chasing each other along the shore, splashing in the shallows. Innes and I leaned against a fallen tree and watched. We didn’t talk. There was a lot of other noise—the insects, the birds, the thag bellowing—but if I closed my eyes I could pretend that my breath was just the air moving. I wanted to tell Innes not to break the quiet, but that would have defeated the purpose.
Then there was this honking that came bouncing off the stone and the water. The thag got really agitated and started bellowing all at once. I opened my eyes and saw that the herd was circling, and some of the larger bulls were moving to the spot where the valley narrowed. A group of brown and tan dinosaurs were there, bending down to snatch up huge swaths of the long grass, then straightening up on their hind legs to look out beyond the angry thag. The dinosaurs had thick bills, with orange-and-black lumps above them. Enlarged sinuses, maybe. I figured that was where the honking came from.
Once the thag had crowded around the calves and the weaker ones, the bulls charged the newcomers. The duckbills were three times the size of the thag, I’d say, but every time one of them was challenged it would retreat around the bend. Mostly the duckbills seemed interested in grabbing up as much grass as they could before they were chased off, and they were mowing down a fair amount of it in a short time.
So I’m sitting there watching this, and Innes stands up and says she’s tired, we should head back. I just looked at her. These are the first dinosaurs I’ve ever seen, and she’s tired.
I told her I wanted to watch for a while. She said they were just gryps doing what gryps did, but it was fine if I wanted to watch. I hate to admit it, but she was kind of right. The gryps teased the thag for a while and then slunk back around the bend. Still. That was the first time I wished I had a camera with me here.
That changed things for me. Here I was in this world with so much more possibility than my own, and I was seeing it from the inside of a fence. So I’ve seen a duckbilled dinosaur; I still haven’t seen a stegosaurus, or an allosaurus, or a brachiosaur. When I told Innes later that I wanted to see more dinosaurs, she told me I didn’t. She said dinosaurs either tried to eat you or they just stood around eating plants. One was too much excitement and the other was none at all. It wasn’t worth the trip, and besides, Eisenhower—another storm—was on its way, and she’d have to be back in Sari soon.
I didn’t want to go back to Sari, but that had become one more in a long list of things we didn’t bring up. When I thought about that list, that’s when I realized
that it wasn’t going to work between us. It wasn’t any one big thing. The sex was still great, and we didn’t say any more stupid things. At least nothing really stupid. We all say stupid things sometimes, right? And that was the problem, in a way—I think, at the start, she’d had her guard down most of the way, and then she saw that she was upsetting me, so she started being careful about what she said. I think you can only get so far that way. I was doing it, too. I wanted to talk about things like the Sagoths and the Gr-grs and politics and war, but then I would think about all the ways that conversation could go badly. If it did come up Innes would change the subject or say she didn’t know enough about it. That expression she’d worn on the website, where she’d looked so intense and challenging, I had yet to see it in person. I guess it was just a look.
I could have pushed it, I know, but the truth is I wasn’t sure we were worth the energy. It seemed pretty clear that we had gone about as far as we were going to go. I would go back home, after a week or a year, and we would email for a while and that would be it.
I was thinking about that one day when I went out for a walk along the fence. Innes had fallen asleep, and my legs—the one I still had, and the phantom one—were restless. I had walked to the hiking trail and was on my way back when Kilgore showed up. He told me that some thipdars had been spotted in the area, so I should watch the skies. He said thipdars were what I might know as pteranadons, winged dinosaurs, and so the fence would be no deterrent to them.
I thanked him for the warning, and then I asked him where he lived. None of the cabins seemed quite right for a game warden. He gave me sort of an appraising look and told me that he lived here in the ruins. His ancestors had lived here, he said, and it was a part of his legacy. I think he was talking about you, but I didn’t know that then. When I asked him if he lived alone he just said he didn’t have a wife.
