Dinosaur Hunter

by Steve White

  Slowly, slowly, we took the corner.

  ‘Look at that,’ I heard Cheung murmur.

  Sauropods. Not giant Paralititan but elephant-sized Aegyptosaurus, neck to tail, plunging into the creek through holes that blasted in the walls of cypress and rushes. Muddy waters splashed up flanks wrinkled as a rhino’s, scaled as a Komodo dragon’s. One stumbled. Came up bedecked in garlands of green.

  It was like waiting in traffic.

  A small boxy head preceded a long arching neck, an osteoderm-speckled back, an endless tail often overlaid with the head and neck of the following Sauropod. The skiff wallowed in the bow waves angling out from the passing of the Aegyptosaurs until, at last, the final thunder lizard sloshed into and out of the creek and we were sat rocking gently as the waves of its passing faded to ripples.

  While the jigsaw pieces of floating weed coalesced to cover up the black water once more, I nudged us forward.

  It was a bucolic scene that greeted us through the gap rent by the Sauropods in the cypress. In soft and misty morning light, the still dripping Aegyptosaurs were already grazing a meadow of ferns. And they had company. Lurdusaur Iguanodonts. Not the bovine, slender-limbed types we were familiar with but more like horse-headed hippos. Barrel-chested and stout in the arm and leg. Much more at home, like everything here, in the water. They were big, not that much smaller than the Sauropods. Thalassodromeus strutted about them, as comfortable on the ground as in the air, little head-dressed men on bat-winged stilts. They stood out white as they snapped at frogs and lizards and worms, gathered expectantly around the heads of the Lurdusaurs as the herbivores ripped out ferns by the roots and left suddenly homeless creatures squirming and easy for the pterosaurs to snap up.

  We filmed for a while and Cheung sat, the rifle in his lap, taking pictures instead.

  Then, it was time to move on.

  While the creek took us to all points of the compass it slowly wended its way progressively north. The forests and meadows thinned out. Hammocks gave way to slough, mudflats, cypress domes and crocodile wallows, acres of twisted branches, stumps, knees, roots, the creek shallow enough that the skiff would ground occasionally and we’d have to gun the engine and aquaplane over water that was little more than surface tension.

  By late morning the creek had been swallowed up by a vast flat delta punctured by little islands as far as the eye could see. Some had a single tree and a cluster of scrub bushes beneath it; others sported small forests of cypress, home to creatures to whom the island was their entire world with a climate all its own.

  We were deep in the slough now, at the margins of the Bahariya watershed.

  I did a comms check. The drones had us in sight and we waved when one buzzed by, high overhead. Out in the open, we felt vulnerable. The Theropods here, like their prey, were as comfortable in water as they were out of it. And we were now in Spinosaur country.

  The ghillie suits were by now pretty much redundant. The mist was gone and we were under a climbing sun. The suits might have been cooling but they were heavy and they provided little in the way of camouflage out in the flats.

  We stripped them off.

  I took in the sea breeze and the smell of salt and rot. The water was brackish now. There were no longer just cypress domes but stands of mangroves as well. And to the north, there was the silver glimmer of the Tethys.

  Sitting in the bright Cretaceous sun, the mist left behind in the forests and meadows, it was so still and quiet. Just the susurrations of breeze and water. The occasional whisper of leaves in motion.

  It was easy to imagine being the only people on Earth. Which really wasn’t that far from the truth.

  Cheung chewed a power bar while studying the world with binoculars. He pointed and handed them to me.

  ‘In the water just by the nearest island at one o’clock.’

  I focused in. Something sinuously plied the shallows. Small and vaguely serpentine.

  ‘Snake?’

  Cheung had picked up his rifle scope. ‘Croc, maybe?’

  We were both half wrong and half right. It was a snake but was a true croc. It was a terrestrial crocodilian, Libycosuchus. It swam like its semi-aquatic brethren but when it hauled up on the island, its legs were long and straight. It trotted across the mud and vanished into a tangle of cypress roots.

  The tide was low as we started north again. We followed the deep moats that surrounded the islands and the creeks that spidered around them. The water was murky and beige, rich with sediment, thick with detritus. I caught the occasional glitter of fish, darting into the shadow of the skiff. Darting away again.

  And sometimes there was the shadow of something bigger.

  While we paused to check our position, there came a clunk and the skiff juddered. Out of some primal instinct, I grabbed the sides and held on for dear life.

  Something very large broke the surface just a few feet to our right. A big fish. We never saw what it was and couldn’t even guess the type.

  It was easy to feel isolated and vulnerable here.

  The little creeks solidified into a broader watercourse that led us amongst an archipelago of larger islands thick with mangroves and spike rushes. Pneumatophores, the mangroves’ breathing roots, rose like clusters of wooden snorkels from the green water, sometimes hemming us in. It was worse when the waters turned to swamp and thick tangled masses of stilt roots, furred slick with grey periphyton. The maze of roots and branches arched over us and it was so still and magically quiet. Nothing big could hide here, so thick were the mangroves, so we sat and looked about us in wonder. Dragonflies of iridescent red and sapphire hovered and thrummed about us or sat jewel-like on the waxy leaves. Pretty red crabs busied themselves in the mud.

  And finally, we left the fairyland to its invertebrate rulers and were presented with tidal flats, the waters now turquoise and emerald where it was just moistening the plains of mud and scum. The islands marching to the sea grew progressively small and all about us were endless stands of mangrove.

  Pterosaurs circled to the north-east. Just a few but enough to pique our interest. We weaved amongst the mangroves until we saw a huge fish beached on a little island no bigger than the average living room. It was the biggest fish I’d ever seen. A Paranogmius. Twice the length of the skiff. It was mainly head, spine and tail. The rest had been eaten. What little meat was left might have been a juicy pink once but was now black with flies which blew up in clouds when the jabbing beak of the pterosaurs attending the funeral feast speared a scrap here, jerked a slither there, stretching it until the fish snapped away.

  The pterosaurs, half a dozen or so Thalassodromeus and little Siroccopteryx, crept gingerly about the mud, fingers blackened with it, gloriously white wings splattered into modern art. The latter type stood away from the more raptorial Thalassodromeus who would screech and threaten if one came too near.

  The waters parted.

  ‘Wow,’ said Cheung, a masterful understatement.

  The Aegyptosuchus was twice as long as the island. Its narrow jaws were as long as I would have been lying down beside it. Its long, fluid body was plated in staves of bony armour, layers of it, like a samurai’s. Its flanks were more like walls tiled in oval-shaped porcelain. Its tail was long enough to be an animal in and of itself, ridged and plated the way a dragon’s might be.

  It slid, implacable, up the muddy beach, unconcerned by all about it. The pterosaurs scrambled, a rush of wings to the sky. A horror movie soundtrack of screams and hisses accompanied them until only the flies remained to trouble the dead fish. But even they scattered when the Aegyptosuchus snapped its jaws shut around the fish’s tail and shook the carcass. A kindling of soft bones snapped and the crocodile gave one gulp, gave two, and a good third of the body was gone. It took the fish’s spine. Shook that too, until the head snapped away, by default or design. The Aegyptosuchus rolled its canoe-sized head and crunched them shut on the fish head. Its throat pouch hung heavy as it swallowed its catch then it jerked its head back
and swallowed the head down.

  The croc toothed the spine again but maybe that was unappetizing, for it abandoned it and rolled its head to bite at nothing. With nothing but stinking mud left to tempt it, the mammoth crocodilian sat for a while, but the mangroves were casting shadows and with not even the sun to bathe in, it turned slow as a battleship and slipped into the water whence it came.

  There was a heart-stopping moment as the skiff rocked with the passage of the Aegyptosuchus but its shadow headed west and there was soon no sign of crocodile, pterosaurs or fish but for the flies supping on the abandoned spine and the few scraps and juices left in the mud.

  Excitement over, we sailed on. The water turned greener and greener, more and more salty. Large islands became few, small islands, many. And finally the cypress was gone and all that remained was mangrove flats. To the north, the horizon was the pure emerald green of the ocean, set beneath towering cumulus clouds of pure white.

  It was blazing hot, but at last there was a sea breeze. I had to take off my rebreather and take in the cool smell in deep drafts. Pure, unadulterated air. Cheung and I slathered on more sun cream. His olive skin was already darkening to a rich milk chocolate brown. My arms were ochre, and I shook out my hair. I let it ripple in the breeze and for a moment it was like being in a South Pacific dream. I could so easily have lain down in the skiff and let its gentle rocking lull me to sleep.

  But now was not the time.

  We didn’t have far to go now and the route was more as the pterosaur flew rather than the twists and bends of the creeks. I opened the throttle and the bow lifted as the skiff aquaplaned across the flats.

  We passed over deep channels amongst the mangroves, skipping across them to take solace in the ankle-or knee-deep shallows, where no marine predator could surprise us and any terrestrial one was visible from a mile off.

  The moving map showed where to go and the imagery from the drone showed us what to expect except when a pterosaur took a dislike to it and its controller had to zoom away to avoid damage to either party.

  Cheung was watching with binoculars. He saw the pterosaurs first. They hung in the cobalt sky. They could just as easily have been gulls, albatrosses, at this distance, but they weren’t.

  The slowly swirling mobile of white wings spun about our destination.

  Cheung raised a fist and I slowed. The water ahead was an expanse of emerald, a finger of sea probing in from the coast. This wasn’t a channel. There were waves and it was wide. We could tell by the line of mangroves that marked its edge. Real coastal waters.

  There was nothing on the map to mark the depth but it was deep enough, we knew, to take the draft of a shark or a Polycotylid, or even a Pliosaur.

  Speed was of the essence. Get across as fast as we could. The threat was hitting something. The skiff was tough. Its keel was coloured like a dead tree, of little interest to any predator. But a collision at speed could tip the boat. Send us spilling into the water. We might hit a log. Or we might hit something a little more animated, with jaws as broad as my outstretched arms.

  Cheung studied the waters. I absently toyed with the throttle. The silenced engine made no more noise than a sad sigh, but it was louder than the wind and that was the only sound I could hear. The sea breathing.

  Finally, he looked back.

  ‘Gun it,’ he said.

  I pushed the rudder over and spun the skiff about, taking us back the way we’d come then slowly brought us back to face emerald expanse of seawater.

  I gunned it.

  The skiff picked up speed, bow riding high. Cheung sat back, hands gripping the sides. We were going flat out when we hit sea. The waves were small but they thumped against the speeding hull and the skiff began to buck a little as it planed across the water. My eyes were fixed firmly on the mangroves but Cheung leant from one side to the next. Searching, searching, searching.

  But the waters were quiet and we had speed, and then we blasted between the mangroves and I let go the throttle. The skiff slid to a halt but not before there came the rattle of outstretched roots, snapped by our passage.

  Cheung smiled. ‘Phew.’

  I laughed back.

  But I checked the map and there were many channels to cross before we made our destination and who knew what we’d find there.

  It was time to take it slow.

  We crossed the open channels at the narrowest points we could find, ever cautious, Cheung scoping the waters for trouble but finding none.

  And slowly we drew ever nearer the place we would hunt those scavengers. We could see the ever-circling pterosaurs then hear them, and once their caws came to us, we stopped on a wide open flat dotted with sprigs of mangrove to consult each other and FOB Deliverance.

  We watched the imagery from the drones first. The Paralititan carcasses were piled against the seaward side of one of the larger islands; two of the bodies had clogged a channel.

  There were no Theropods but the waters around the dead Sauropods seethed. Sharks, dozens of them. Their hazy teardrop-shaped shadows cruised the shallows but there were other shapes, giants far bigger than the sharks. Gars and bichirs, adaptable enough to tolerate brackish, even salt water, had followed the scent of dead flesh from the creeks and bayous, and came out into the open tidal flats of the watershed on the prowl. Tails and fins and great armoured bodies thrashed and churned the water pink with blood and foam, as they tore into the giant carcasses. A beautiful shark, Cretolamna, shuddered as its tail lashed back and forth, driving the shark’s head deep into a gut cavity, blood boiling out. Horned hybodont sharks jostled the Cretolamna, thrashing their heads back and forth as they tore at intestines and stomach, the water green with the Sauropod’s semi-digested plant matter.

  And it wasn’t just fish. Huge crocodilians, not just Aegyptosuchus but mighty Sacrosuchids with blue-black metal-looking backs, ignored the sharks and the gars, but fought each other for the best feeding spots.

  And not just fish and crocs… Marine reptiles had come in from the warm shallows of the Tethys; Pliosaurs with jaws and teeth bigger than any crocs, flying in with a stately cetacean grace on paddles bigger than the skiff. They were big enough to ignore the biggest crocs, sharks that under more normal circumstances stood a chance of more likely being prey. There were three of them, dominating the scene, staying down to feed, surfacing only to take a breath, otherwise nothing more than massive ambulatory shapes swallowed up by blood and silt and sharks.

  There were a few Polycotylids, smaller, more nimble but more nervous, darting in and about the melee, more hopeful of grabbing a scrap or two than fighting it out close in to a carcass.

  There were flashes of silver too, as shoals of fish swept in to snap up bloody detritus then darted away.

  Strutting about the carcasses where they broke the surface were the folded kite shapes of pterosaurs; Thalassodromeus and the great Alanqa, with their 25ft wingspans. The former was bolder, more aggressive, feeding right at the zone where water met flesh and they would use their sharp beaks to drive off sharks too curious or too blinded by meat lust that came too close to the pterosaurs.

  All in all, it could easily have been some vision of Hell. But it looked like a scavenging Theropod heaven and it’s where we needed to be.

  But we certainly didn’t want to be on that island. We needed somewhere where we could observe the action, not end up being part of it. So, we checked the map and talked to the FOB, who were intensely nervous and wanted to launch the Pink Team.

  Call it ego. Call it bad karma. Call it stupidity. Call it what you like, but we declined. No, we were not going to get that close. We were not that stupid. Yes, we were being careful. Yes, we remembered our training. Yes, we were taking all precautionary measures.

  We went back to the map.

  There was one island not far from the carcasses, a little to the north-west of the bodies. It was big, big enough for a water-filled hollow at its heart, sans predators, and with a small nesting colony of Siroccopteryx around one en
d. The mangroves formed a dense fringe about its roughly oval shape. We could beach and set up on the south side then wait it out.

  The FOB remarked on the soundness of the plan but pointed out that it was now early afternoon and our window of opportunity for sitting, sweating, hot and insect-assaulted while we waited for a Theropod not to show up at all, was closing fast; that we would soon have to leave if we didn’t want to be navigating the skiff through the dense Bahariya Everglades at dusk and then night. A moonless one at that.

  A valid point, Cheung and I agreed. But we had a hide and food and water enough for a night under the stars.

  The FOB offered to once more launch the Pink Team and ferry us back to base.

  This back and forthing was interrupted by one of the drone operators. She’d spotted something of interest to the south.

  On the drone’s camera came Spinosaurus.

  We watched enthralled. The war colours it carried on its sail told us it was a male. He was huge, and he was why we had come to the Bahariya. Too much Jurassic Park III as children. And it was clearly coming our way, following the dead scents northward.

  That was all the convincing we needed.

  The trip to the island would require time spent in open water so we asked the drone operators to check the route. It was a somewhat futile exercise; what might be clear five minutes before could easily harbour a shark or croc by the time we were passing. I, however, was keen to gauge the odds of running into trouble.

  The drone crept overhead and we studied the imagery. The waters were beige or jade green. Not a shadow to be seen.

  We decided to chance it. The drone paced us as we took it fast across the flats, faster across open water. Darting across one of the fingers of sea, baitfish were stewing at the surface, their tiny bodies glittering as they leapt from the water with a sizzle.

  Something was down there.

  I twisted the throttle into the red and skiff flew.

  Just as we hit the flats, Cheung pointed over my shoulder. I slowed and looked back.