"That's where you find the big Indian village sites," he pointed out. "In country like this there's usually a long run of shallows just below the lake where you can build fish traps or spear suckers like we did that time in the crick. Water's likelier to keep open in the winter, too, and you'll find that minks and the like make a habit of following the streams. A fur coat's going to come in mighty handy before the winter's over," he added wryly.
Three days after they had reached the lake the camp was aroused before breakfast by wild yells from the fishermen, who had risen early to try the waters of a small tributary creek at whose mouth they had camped. Tumbling down to the water's edge with spears and clubs, they found Packard and Morelli pointing their rods across the lake and dancing excitedly.
"You're too late!" cried the insurance man. "They just went out of sight around that point."
"What did?" the chorus demanded.
"People. A boat or raft or something with people in it!"
Bedlam broke loose: "What did they look like?" "How many?" "Were they Indians?" "Did they see you?" "Why didn't you stop them?" "Are they coming back?"
Nelson Packard finally made his campaigning voice heard above the babble. "Listen, folks—we don't know who they are or anything about them. We're not even sure they are people, because they were too far away. All we saw was a line in the water that might have been a raft, and on it were some little things that looked like people moving around or rowing. It was moving right along, much too fast for a drifting log, and anyway there isn't any wind this morning. They went out of sight just before you came."
Ronnie Franchot, the nimblest of the crowd, raced for the nearest tree and was halfway up before Zbradovski had reached an even taller one. However, strain as they would, they could see nothing from the top but woods, plains, and mile after mile of empty lake.
"It could have been something swimming," Scherer said. "You can't judge distances over water in light like this, and almost any large animal with a long neck might look like a raft. Look at the sea-serpent stories in our own day."
Nevertheless, for the rest of the day the alleged raft and its occupants monopolized conversation. Even the discovery, in the course of the afternoon's trek, of a herd of huge water-animals disporting and feeding in a shallow bay did not drive the other topic from their minds for long. The creatures were rather like hairy hippopotami. Scherer, from a respectful distance, classified them tentatively as capybaroids and pointed out that if a means could be devised of killing them, they should provide good and plentiful food.
"The climate must be warmer, if they're this far north," he pointed out. "Maybe we'll have a California winter."
"Mr. Aaronson," the prim Miss Hansen commented, "maybe you'd better be designing raincoats instead of fur coats."
That evening, wandering from group to group around the campfire, Bridger came upon the sixth grade teacher deftly at work with a pile of rushes.
"What's that you're doing, Ruth?" he asked. "Making a hat?"
"That's right," the girl answered. "Stick your head down here so I can try it on you."
Bridger obeyed. "Little large," she mused, "but I can fix that. I never thought that course in crafts that Hansen made us all take last summer would be of any use to me."
"Huh? You mean this is for me?" There was something faintly like alarm in the chemist's voice.
"Yes, your serene highness, and you needn't look at it as if it were going to poison you! I know it isn't a high-grade Panama, but all I have to work with is this grass. Nearly everyone has a hat except you; even Julius has that Daniel Boone effect that he made for himself. Remember, we can't afford to have the chairman getting sunstroke."
Bridger got hurriedly to his feet. "Well, ah, uh, thanks a lot. I appreciate it, but, uh, really Aaronson needs a hat much more than I do, with that bald head of his. Still—well, uh, thanks anyway. Excuse me; I've got to see Mort Wilson."
Preparations for departure in the morning were delayed and somewhat enlivened when Elizabeth Friedman discovered a nest of hornets, and vice versa. While they were crowded at the water's edge, watching the chairman and vice-chairman apply blobs of mud to the victim's face and arms, Zbradovski let out a bellow. Another of the water-craft was moving up the lake. It was exactly as Packard described the thing and he and Morelli had seen—a line in the water, and on it figures moving busily about. It was traveling in the opposite direction to the first craft, and like it was soon out of sight.
Hearts beat higher and faster in the crowd. Evidently there were thinking beings in the vicinity—but what sort of beings? A raft suggested savages and savages might not be so glad to see strange human faces.
There was no further delay. Every minute's march was bringing them closer to the place to which the mysterious boatmen had gone, and from which they were returning. Then, rounding a wooded point, they saw it, and every heart was filled with a mixture of hope and fear.
They were looking at the spillway of an enormous dam, from the upstream side. A walk ran across it, connecting two massive square towers nearly a mile apart that marked the ends of the dam. As they watched, two hunched figures moved slowly along the walk and disappeared into the farther tower.
Well, thought Bridger, there they are—now what to we do about it? Nobody looks very anxious to make any advances.
"Nelson," he said, "you're our diplomat; you can be our ambassador. Abner, I've seen you demonstrating Indian sign-talk; you come along too. We'll go to the tower on this end and try to make friends. The rest of you stay out of sight here in the trees, and if anything happens to us, or we don't come back, get out of here as fast as you can. Emiil—I'm leaving you in charge."
The three men set out at once on a detour that took them well out of sight of the dam until they reached the edge of an expanse of waist-high brake-ferns which stretched up to the base of the nearer tower. It was built of neatly fitted logs, with a thatched roof. A wooden apparatus vaguely like a small crane was mounted on the parapet of the dam near its base, and moving about it were the same hunched figures they had seen on the dam.
"They seem infernally busy about something," Barnes remarked in a low voice. "And who in tarnation would be wearing fur coats in July?"
"Russians, I'll bet!" said Packard. "Do you suppose those God-damned Reds have—hey! What's that?"
Above the subdued roar of the water over the spillway they heard a short, sharp whistle followed by a sound as of a stick dragged along a picket fence.
"Sounds like a ratchet mechanism," Bridger observed.
"Maybe it's something to do with that gadget . . ."
He was interrupted by a loud whang, and a stone the size of his head soared from the tower and plumped into the ferns in front of them. Barnes and Parker dived out of sight among the brakes. Bridger took out his handkerchief and waved it frantically over his head.
"Hi!" he yelled. "We're friends!"
There was the rattle of the ratchet, another whang, and a second stone came whizzing after the first. Bridger ducked barely in time. The missile grazed his new straw hat and sent it spinning into the ferns. The envoys needed no further hints. Burrowing as deep into the ferns as they could, they beat a hasty retreat toward the nearest patch of woods. Several more stones landed near them before they were out of range or the unknown marksmen decided to stop searching the brakes for their callers.
Back in the shelter of the woods they found the party both curious as to what they had found and ribald at the haste of their retreat. The past and present dictators of their little nation had not come off too well on their first diplomatic mission.
". . . and then they started throwing rocks at us with a catapult, so we stayed not on the order of our going," Bridger explained with a strained attempt at levity. "We'd better make a detour and strike the river below the dam. Then we can send someone back to scout around the dam from below and find out what our hostile friends are up to. I don't think they are coming after us; if they were, they'd have shown up before th
is."
They struck the outlet of the lake about half a mile downstream from the towers, and put another mile behind them before Bridger felt safe in stopping. When everybody was busy with his or her appointed task, under Scherer's watchful eye, Bridger summoned Zbradovski and slipped away into the underbrush. Reaching the field of brakes, they followed the trail which the three scouts had beaten down that morning, traveling on hands and knees to keep out of sight of the creatures on the dam. It was slow and painful going, and both men were soon driven nearly wild by the clouds of flies and mosquitoes which hovered around their heads and settled on their exposed skin. As they neared the tower they plastered themselves still closer to the ground, raising their heads cautiously from time to time to reconnoiter.
Forcing his way through the thick vegetation, Bridger thought suddenly: We must be making a rumpus like a herd of elephants! I'll bet they spotted the ferns waving half an hour ago. Oh Lord—why can't we all have brains when we need 'em?
"Sneeze!" he called.
"Yeah?" The collegian was somewhere ahead.
"Take it easy. They can see our trail in the ferns." He rose cautiously to his knees, only to flop back with his heart pounding madly. One of the fur-clad whatsits was moving along the battlements of the tower, staring intently in their direction.
"Pssst, Chief—here's your lid," came Zbradovski's whisper.
"Okay, Sneeze, I'll be right over." Bridger inched along on his belly to where the young man lay, his fuzzy pink face peering through the ferns in the direction of the dam. He was wearing the Pierne girl's hat, Bridger noted with a twinge of annoyance.
"There he goes again," Zbradovski murmured. Bridger rose until he could see through the waving ferns. "He has a tail," he said, "and that fur is part of him, and he's carrying a sharpened wooden pole for a spear. Civilized animals, by all that's holy!"
The sentry on the tower disappeared again. He must be near-sighted like most wild animals, Bridger thought, or he'd certainly have seen the ferns moving. I can't get over the idea—civilized animals! Lord, we've come a long way from 1939!
"No use trying to get any closer from this side," he told Zbradovski. "He'll be hidden by the loom of the tower. Let's sneak around to the downstream side and try to spot one going across the dam."
The two men found a convenient clump of alders close to the end of the vast timber-and-masonry structure. At this distance the huge logs appeared to have been hacked off to a roughly conical point. Finally activity appeared among the dam-dwellers. A small group came out of the tower onto the walk, and presently the heads of others, evidently on a raft or boat, appeared beyond them on the lake side. The boatmen tied up their craft and filed into the tower, carrying bundles of something that looked like slabs of bark.
"Beavers!" Bridger muttered. "And they must weigh two or three hundred pounds. We've seen some screwy things so far, but a race of civilized, man-sized beavers beats—uff!" A large biting fly had driven its beak into his ankle, and he dared not move quickly for fear of attracting the beaveroids' attention. By the time the beavers had disappeared the fly had had its fill and departed. Bridger expressed some shocking opinions of the whole order of Diptera.
It was past sundown when they started back to camp. Halfway there they met a search party which, Scherer informed him, the women had insisted on sending out. Bridger accepted the information in silence.
At the council that evening the problem of the beaveroids was discussed actively but with little promise of practical results.
"They just a'n't friendly," Barnes insisted. "Back home when a neighbor gets like that best you can do is leave him be."
"I'll tell you what," Macdonald offered. "We ought to kidnap one of the things and hold it prisoner for a while until the professors learn to talk to it and tell it we're friendly."
"Yeah," agreed Morelli, "and I nominate Mr. Ronald Franchot as kidnapper-in-chief." The picture of the slender Franchot trying to abduct one of the burly rodents broke the session up in guffaws of laughter.
Zbradovski expressed the thought for the night as they prepared for bed. "What's to prevent them from sending a posse after us?" he demanded. "I tell you, I've seen the things up close, and I wouldn't want to tackle one with anything less than a Springfield!" Although Bridger doubled the watch that night, nothing untoward happened.
Early the next morning a raft with four of the beaveroids was seen going downstream past the camp, its occupants rowing from a standing position. The people watched it out of sight from the shelter of the undergrowth.
"That settles it," Bridger decided. "If they navigate below the dam, they must have a city or something farther down. Our chances of establishing communication may not be any better than here, but they couldn't be much worse. Here we know we're not welcome. We'd better move on."
The river ahead of them swept out of sight in a broad curve around a low hill to the east. Bridger decided that time and effort would be saved by cutting across the saddle in back of this knoll and striking the stream again further down. Almost at once, however, they ran into another old burn thickly overgrown with blackberry canes and witch-hopples which made progress slow and tedious. By the time they won through into a forest of virgin hardwoods, where they could see for hundreds of yards between the huge, lichen-spotted trees, it was nearly noon. The woods grew steadily more open, and finally they came out into a clearing where a few scattered trees rose from the long grass.
Wilson scouting ahead in his usual place, let out a piercing yell: "Eeyow! Hold everything!" In the middle of the clearing an armadillo the size of a young rhinoceros was fighting a sharp-nosed carnivore the size of a lion. The creature was not cat, from the shape of its feet, which were more like those of a raccoon. It had a rather bushy tail and small ears, and moved with amazing agility for a beast of its size, leaping in to slash with knife-edged canines and out again before the armadillo could rake it with its claws.
For all its ponderous armor the latter animal was remarkably quick also. It wheeled to keep its head and shoulders toward its attacker and countered every lunge with a round-arm swing of its long fore-claws. The carnivore was already bleeding from a scalp-wound, but apart from a slashed leg the armadillo did not seem at all inconvenienced.
As the people scrambled into their phalanx formation to ward off any possible attack, the combatants sprang apart, quite as surprised as the human beings. The carnivore studied them with bright, intelligent eyes for a few seconds, then bounded off into the forest. The armadillo pivoted and trotted off in the opposite direction, the joints of its armor rattling at every step.
"Whew!" cried Barnes. "That was a little too warm for me. I can remember when North America was a nice safe continent to go gallivantin' around in, except for a few rattlesnakes and grizzly bears and such that got peeved if you bothered them."
" 'Sall right Abner, we haven't been eaten yet," boomed Scherer. He suddenly recalled that two of their number had been eaten, and turned red. "Wonder what that thing with the bushy tail was," he mumbled. "Looked like a mongoose. Those teeth—hey!" His eyes bulged as he grabbed at Bridger's arm. "Look!"
Apes—huge, black, hairy apes—were dropping out of the trees on all sides of them. They carried coils of rope and a variety of strange-looking implements whose purpose nobody had time to figure out. One hairy giant leveled something at them that looked vaguely like a machine-gun and whirred busily; whatever it was, it was no death-ray, for nothing happened.
Eleanor Hooper and two of the other dancers had strung their bows at sight of the mongoosoid; they drew arrows to their chins and let fly.
"Hey!" Bridger yelled. "Wait till we find out if they're hostile!"
But the damage was done. One of the arrows struck a particularly villainous anthropoid in the thigh and the others whizzed close enough to make the apes duck. The wounded creature shrieked a command and two others ran forward dragging a huge net with weighted edges, which they flung deftly over the entire crowd.
Bunched in t
heir phalanx they made a perfect target; before they knew what had happened they were entangled in the heavy net, and a dozen of the apes dove after it, crushing the people to the ground in a struggling, yelling heap. Then the anthropoids proceeded methodically to extract their prisoners from under the net, one by one, disarm them, tie their wrists behind them, and slip nooses around their necks. Those who tried to kick or scratch were gently slapped until they subsided.
When at last the people were all secured, they were towed a quarter of a mile through the woods to where a huge wagon stood among the trees. The vehicle contained a number of wooden chests and boxes; these the apes pushed about until they had made two rows with narrow spaces between. The captives were wedged in on these improvised benches, a long rope passed through their bound wrists and fastened at both ends, and their ankles lashed securely to rings on the boxes.
One of the apes appeared leading a huge animal whose appearance made the people's spines bristle. The thing vaguely resembled a wild boar, with its discshaped snout, cloven hoofs, and thick coat of stiff black hair, but it stood seven or eight feet high at the shoulder and its hair rose in an erect mane over its humped shoulders, making it look even huger than it was. Two great white curling tusks protruded from its mouth.
Evidently their captors had no intention of feeding them to this monstrous pig, for they jockeyed it into position at the front of the wagon, slipped a leather harness over its back, and let it stand, docilely snoofing at the ground. The rest of the gear was piled into the wagon on top of the prisoners, one ape climbed into the front seat, and the rest hoisted themselves to precarious seats along its sides. The driver tapped the pig-animal's back with a long pole and gibbered at it, and the wagon started with a lurch. The remaining apes trotted alongside.
8
"GENUS HOMO"
After a few minutes, when the immediate fear of extinction had subsided, the calmer members of the party began to notice things. The apes talked among themselves in high, penetrating voices which sounded odd coming from those immense black chests. It was obviously an intelligent language, full of throaty consonants rather like coughing and retching sounds. They took turns riding and walking, studying the people with bright little eyes and jabbering away all the while.
Genus Homo Page 8
