Dinosaurs II

by Gardner Dozoi

  How did we become members of the Corythosaurus family? Well, we stayed on the lumbering creatures’ trail every day and bedded down near them every night. At first, sighting us, the largest males—like four-legged, thirty-foot-tall woodwinds—would blow panicky bassoon notes through the tubes winding from their nostrils through the mazelike hollows in their mohawk crests. These musical alarms echoed back and forth among the tribe, alerting not only our family but every other nearby clan of hadrosaurs to a possible danger. At first, this was flattering, but, later, simply frustrating.

  Button got tired of dogging the Corythosauri. They stank, he said, “like the snake house in the St. Louis Zoo.” He griped about all the mushy green hadrosaur patties along our route. He said that the insects bumbling in clouds around the duckbills—gnats, flies, a few waspish pollinators—were better at “poking our hides than theirs.” He whined that we couldn’t “become duckbills because we don’t eat what they eat!” And he was right. We were living on T-rations, tiny rodentlike mammals that I caught when they were most sluggish, and the pulpy berries of strange shrubs. We often had tight stomachs, loose bowels, borderline dehydration.

  But I kept Button going by ignoring his gripes, by seeing to it that he ate, and by carrying him on my shoulders. Weirdly, it was after hoisting him onto my shoulders that the duckbills stopped running from us at first sight. By that trick, we ceased being two bipedal strangers and became a single honorary hadrosaur.

  When he sat on my shoulders, Button’s dilapidated St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap gave us both the crest and the bill we needed to pass as one of their youngsters. Then, in fact, the Corythosauri let us travel at the heart of their group, with all the other juveniles. There, we were relatively secure from the flesh-eaters—T. rex, Daspletosaurus, and Alberiosaurus—that would track us through the Dakota flood plains or try to intercept us in the lush Canadian woods.

  The Corythosauri did a lot of noisy bassooning. They did it to warn of predators, to let the members of other duckbill clans—Parasaurolophus, Hypacrosaurus, Maiasaura, etc.—know of their nearness (probably to keep them from trespassing on their foraging grounds), and to chase off rival duckbills or timid carnivores.

  Button and I took part in some of these performances with our wooden harmonicas. I’d sound a few notes, echoing the call of an upright male in a register too high to make the imitation precisely accurate, and Button would blow an impromptu score of discordant notes that, totally silencing our duckbill kin, would drift across the landscape like the piping of a drunken demigod.

  Anyway, by the time we had hiked almost five hundred miles, we were adopted members of the family. Or, rather, one adopted member when Button rode my shoulders, but tolerated hangers-on when he didn’t. Trapping small mammals, picking berries, and digging up tubers that we could clean and eat (our T-rations ran out on the twenty-seventh day), we scurried about under the duckbills’ feet, but made ourselves such fixtures in their lives that none of the creatures had any apparent wish to run us off.

  Thus, we came to recognize individuals, and Button—when I asked him to name the creatures—gave most of them the names of his favorite anserine or ducky characters: Daffy, Mother Goose, Howard, Donald, Daisy, Huey, Dewey, Louie, Scrooge McDuckbill. Adult females, because of their bulk, got monikers like Bertha, Mama Mountain, Beverly Big, Hulga, and Quaker Queen. (I helped with some of these.) We spent the better parts of three days baptizing our Corythosauri. Button had such a good time that he wanted me to help him come up with last names, too. I protested that we’d never be able to remember them all. When Button began to sulk, I told him to do the stupid naming himself.

  Anyway, we wound up with three McDuckbills, some O’Mallards, a Gooseley, and a covy of Smiths: Daffy Smith, Mama Mountain Smith, Hulga Smith, etc. If, that is, I remember the baptisms correctly. On the other hand, how could I forget any aspect of the most vivid period of my life?

  ###

  About a month into our trek, we ran into Duckbill Jay McInturff and Bonehead Brett Easley, self-proclaimed “dinosaur men,” hunters who traded “lizard beef and “gator skins”—welcome supplements to a marine-based economy—to the people in the fishing villages along the northern coastal arc of the Great Inland Sea.

  We ran into them because they leapt from the forest through which we were hiking and filled Dewey O’Mallard, a lissome juvenile, with handmade arrows. They shot their arrows, fletched with Hesperornis feathers, from polished bows fashioned from Centrosaurus ribs and strung with rodent gut. The other duckbills yodeled in dismay, reared, thrashed their tails, and trotted off bipedally in twelve different directions at once. I’d been walking four or five animals behind Dewey, with Button on my shoulders, and when Dewey trumpeted and fell, causing general panic, I simply froze.

  The dinosaur men emerged from their natural blinds to butcher Dewey. When they saw Button and me, they started. Then they began asking questions. I took Button, now crying hysterically, from my shoulders. He spat at the men and ran off into the woods. I would have chased him, but the shorter of the two men caught my arm and squeezed it threateningly.

  I spent that night with the two dinosaur men. They made camp near Dewey’s corpse, tying me to a cycad with a rope of hand-woven horsetail fibers. Why were they tying me? Why weren’t they helping me find Button? As they field-dressed Dewey, I shouted, “Button, come back!” realizing, even as I yelled, that it would be stupid for him to return to the uncertain situation he had instinctively fled. I shut up.

  McInturff and Easley, who had politely introduced themselves, built a fire and roasted over it a white-skinned portion of their kill. They tried to get me to eat with them, but I refused, not because I wasn’t hungry or despised dinosaur flesh, but because Button and I had named Dewey. How could I turn cannibal?

  Despite their Wild West nicknames, Duckbill Jay and Bonehead Brett weren’t uneducated yahoos. (To receive permission to use a discontinuity lock, you couldn’t be.) But they had separated themselves from other pioneers, dressed up in spiked Nodosaurus-hide vests, duckbill-skin leggings, and opossum-belly moccasins, and begun a two-man trading company inspired by North America’s rugged trappers of the early 1800s. Playing these parts, they had come to believe that a selfish lawlessness was their birthright.

  Unable to coax me to eat, McInturff, a slender, sandy-haired man with a splotchy beard, and Easley, a simian gnome with a high, domed forehead, tried to talk me into joining them. They could use another set of hands, and I’d learn to make arrows, shoot a bow, skin Parkosauri, butcher duckbills, and sew “fine lizardly duds”—if I let them teach me. They’d also help me find Button so that he, too, could benefit from their woodsy self-improvement program.

  I talked to the hunters, without agreeing to this proposal. So they began to ignore me. Easley left the clearing and returned a little later with a half-grown panoplosaur to which was rigged a travois. On this sled, they piled the hide, bones, and butchered flesh of Dewey, after conscientiously treating the meat with sea salt. Then they ambled over to the cycad to which I was bound.

  “Any idea where those flute-crests of yours happen to be going, Master Gregson?” McInturff said.

  “No, sir.”

  “Four months from now, the middle of June, they’ll hit the Arctic rim, the shore of what Holocene-huggers used to call the Beaufort Sea.”

  “Holocene-huggers?”

  “Stay-at-homes,” Easley said. “Baseline-Lubbers.”

  “You want to traipse eighteen hundred more miles, kid? That’s what’s in store for you.”

  “Why?” I said. “Why do they go there?”

  “It’s a duckbill rookery,” McInturff said. “A breeding site. Quite a ways to go to watch a bunch of lizards screw.”

  “Or,” Easley said, “you could link up with some bone-heads in the Yukon and tail them across the land bridge into Old Mongolia.”

  “Where are we now?” I asked.

  “Montana,” McInturff said. “If Montana existed.”

&n
bsp; “Its relative vicinity,” Easley said. “Given tectonic drift, beaucoups of climatic changes, and the passage of several million years.”

  I had no idea what to reply. The dinosaur men put out their fire, lay down under the chaotically arrayed stars, drifted off to sleep. Or so I thought. For, shortly after lying down, McInturff and Easley arose again, walked over, unbound my hands, and, in the alien woods, far from any human settlement, took turns poking my backside. I repeatedly cried out, but my tormentors only laughed. When dawn came, they debated whether to kill me or leave me tied up for a passing carnivore. They decided that the second option would free them of guilt and give a human-size predator—a dromaeosaur or a stenonychosaur—several hours of amusing exercise.

  “Wish you’d change our mind,” Bonehead Brett Easley said. He prodded the sleepy panoplosaur out of its doze.

  “Yeah, Master Gregson,” Duckbill Jay McInturff said. “We could make good use of you.”

  Guffawing, they left. The woods moved with a hundred balmy winds. A half-hour after the dinosaur men had vanished, Button came running into the clearing to untie me.

  ###

  It took us most of the day, but using the tell-tale spoors of shredded vegetation and sour-smelling Corythosaurus patties, we tracked our family—Scrooge McDuckbill, Mama Mountain Smith, etc.—to a clearing in the Montana forest. There we tried to rejoin them. But our arrival spooked them, and it was two more days, Button on my shoulders like a tiny maharajah, before we could catch up again, reconvince the duckbills of our harmlessness, and resume our communal trek northwestward.

  Long-distance dinosaurs, I reflected. We’re going to walk all the way to the Arctic rim with them. Why?

  Because the Gregsons had always been loners, because I had good reason not to trust any of the human beings over here, and because we had already forged a workable bond with our “flute crests.” Besides, I didn’t want to homestead, and there was no one around—close to hand, anyway—to tell us we couldn’t attempt anything we damned well pleased.

  So Button and I traveled on foot all the way to a beautiful peninsula on the Beaufort Sea, where we heard the duckbills bassoon their melancholy lovesongs and watched hundreds of giant lizards of several different species languidly screw. The males’ upright bodies struggled athwart the females’ crouching forms, while the tribes’ befuddled juveniles looked on almost as gaped-beaked as Button and I. The skies were bluer than blue, the breezes were softer than mammal fur, and the orgasmic bleats of some of the lovesick duckbills were like thunder claps.

  Button was dumbstruck, fascinated.

  “Sex education,” I told him. “Pay attention. Better this way than a few others I can think of.”

  The males in the mild Arctic forest blew rousing solos and showed off their crests. Those with the deepest voices and the most elaborate skull ornaments were the busiest, reproductively speaking, but there were so many dinosaurs in the rim woods, foraging and colliding, that in less than a month Button and I could see through the shredded gaps as if a defoliant had been applied. We saw boneheads—macho pachycephaiosaurs half the size of our duckbills banging their helmeted-looking skulls in forest sections already wholly stripped of undergrowth. The clangor was spooky, as were the combatants’ strategic bellows.

  Button and I stayed out of the way, fishing off the coast, gathering berries, trapping muskratlike creatures on the banks of muddy inlets, and keeping a lookout for the human hunters that prowled the edges of the herbivore breeding grounds. We did well staying clear of godzillas like T. rex and the Daspletosaurs, but, more than once, we narrowly avoided being kicked to tatters by an eleven-foot-tall midnight skulker called—I’ve since learned—Dromiceiomimus. Resembling a cross between an ostrich and a chameleon, this beast could run like the anchor on a relay team. And so Button and I began weaving tree platforms and shinnying upstairs to sleep out of harm’s way.

  Sexed out and hungry for fresh vegetation, our Corythosaurus clan stayed in its breeding haunts only until late July, at which time Scrooge McDuckbill, Daffy Smith, and Donald Gooseley led the group southeastward. Button and I, more comfortable with these lummoxy herbivores than apart from them, tagged along again.

  In October, catching the placental odor of the Great Inland Sea, the gravid females (including Quaker Queen, Beverly Big, Mama Mountain, Hulga, Bertha, and several demure ladies from clans that had joined us after our run-in with McInturff and Easley) split off from the unperturbed males and led their youngsters into a coastal region of northern Montana. We went with the females rather than with the males because the females, seeing Button and me as one more gawky kid, matter-of-factly mother-henned us on this journey. Their bodies gave us protection, while their clarinet squeaks and oboe moans offered frankly unambiguous advice.

  Then, at an ancestral hatching ground, they dug out mud-banked nests that had fallen in, or fashioned new nests near the old ones. Working hard, the ladies built these nests at least a body-length apart; each nest was about eight feet in diameter and four feet deep at the center of its bowl. When the nests were complete, the female duckbills squatted above the bowls and carefully deposited their eggs (as few as twelve, as many as twenty-four) in concentric rings inside the drying pits. Then they left, cropped ferns and other plant materials, waddled back, and conscientiously covered their tough-skinned eggs.

  Although I tried to discourage him, warning that he could get trampled or sat upon, Button got involved. He carried dripping loads of vegetation back to the hatching grounds to help Beverly Big and Quaker Queen incubate their lizardlings. And when their eggs broke open and baby hadrosaurs poked their beaked noggins out, Button not only helped the mama duckbills feed them, but sometimes crawled into the muck-filled nests and hunkered among the squeaking youngsters. No mother seemed to resent his presence, but what almost cured Button of this behavior was having Quaker Queen drop a bolus of well-chewed fruit on him. Even that accident didn’t keep him from stalking the mud bridges between nests, though, watching and waiting as our dinosaur siblings rapidly grew.

  ###

  Button and I stayed with our Corythosauri for more than three years (if “years” beyond a discontinuity divide have any meaning). We migrated seasonally with our duckbill family, going from south to north in the “winter” and from north to south toward the end of “summer.” We saw the hadrosaurs mate in their breeding grounds, and, after the females had laid their eggs, we stayed in the muddy hatching grounds like bumbling midwives-in-training.

  On each seasonal trek, we saw animals for whom we had developed great affection—Daffy, Bertha, a host of nameless youngsters—run down and murdered by the T-kings and the Albertosauri that opportunistically dogged our marches. During our third year with the duckbills, in fact, I figured out that only sixty-four of over eight hundred hatchlings made it out of the nest and less than half the survivors reached the Arctic breeding grounds with their adult relatives. Agility, stealth, and even simple puniness often saved Button and me, but the hadrosaurs weren’t so lucky. Many of those that didn’t fall to predators succumbed to parasites, accidents, or mysterious diseases. The forests and uplands of the Late Cretaceous could be beautiful, but life there wasn’t always pretty. (Maybe our folks, escaping it so soon, had known true mercy.)

  As for human pioneers from the blasted twenty-second century, A.D., Button and I had no desire to consort with them. At times, we saw smoke from their villages; and, on each of our migrations, bands of human nomads, archers in lizard-skin clothing, helped the T-kings cull the weakest members of the herds, whether duckbills, boneheads, fleet-footed hypsilophodonts, or horned dinosaurs. In large bands, though, the archers sometimes risked everything and went after a Tyrannosaurus. Once, from a mountainside in eastern Alberta, Button and I watched a dozen Lilliputian archers surround and kill an enraged Gulliver of a T-king. Neither of us was sorry, but it isn’t always true that the killer of your greatest enemy is automatically your friend.

  McInturff and Easley came into our lives again
the year that Button—who had long ago given up talking in favor of playing duckbill calls on his harmonica—turned eight. Along with nine or ten other raiders, they targeted the duckbills’ Montana hatching grounds, shooed off as many of the mothers as possible, and killed all those inclined to defend their nests. The men were egg gathering, for reasons I never fully understood—restocking the fishing villages’ larders, providing a caulking substance for boats—and Button and I escaped only because the men came into the nesting grounds shouting, banging bones together, and blowing Triceratops trumpets. There was no need for stealth; they wanted the females to flee. So Button and I hurried out of there along with the more timid hadrosaur mothers.

  The next day, I crept back to the area to see what was going on. On a wooded hillside above the main nesting floor, I found an egg that had long ago petrified, hefted it as if it were an ancient cannonball, and duck-walked with it to an overlook where the activity of the nest raiders was all too visible. Easley, his bald pate gleaming like a bleached pachycephalosaur skull, was urging his men to gather eggs more quickly, wrap them in ferns, and stack them gently in their shark-skin sacks.

  The sight of Easley’s head was an insupportable annoyance. I raised myself to a crouch, took aim, and catapulted my petrified egg straight at his head. The egg dropped like a stone, smashing his skull and knocking him into one of the hollowed-out nests. He died instantly. All his underlings began to shout and scan the hillside. I made no effort to elude discovery. Three or four of them scrambled up the overlook’s slope, wrestled me down, secured my hands with horsetail fibers, and frog-marched me back down to the hatching site to meet Duckbill Jay McInturff.

  “I remember you,” McInturff said. “Brett and I had a chance to kill you once. I’ll bet Brett’s sorry we didn’t do it.”