The channel separating them from the mainland might have been more than a mile, but there was a clear view of the opposite shore. They were looking at the mouth of a large river, its brown waters emptying sluggishly into the sea.
“An island. A Goddamn tropical island.” Dr. Shanker stood with shoulders slumped, leaning on his stick. “I was hoping you were wrong.”
“We’ll build a boat,” Julian said, surprising himself with the simplicity of the words.
“A boat?” Dr. Shanker now looked incredulous. “With what—sticks? And what kind of monsters live in that water?”
But Julian’s mind was on the distant river. It came from the west, he was sure. From the higher, dryer ground where the Rocky Mountains were being born. And it led into the heart of a seething wilderness that no human had seen.
A low rumble, barely heard, interrupted his musings. Hilda appeared beside him and he realized the sound came from her chest.
“Whitney,” Dr. Shanker said, casually. “We’re not alone.”
Julian turned his eyes from the shore and stared at the bushes behind him. Something was hiding there watching—a large animal, crouching in the mud.
He caught the glitter of sun from its eye.
Hilda crouched, her hair on end and her ears back, and then suddenly lunged toward the bush with a snarl.
At the same instant the creature burst from cover and ran. Julian was horrified by the size of this animal that had been hiding only ten feet away. It was larger than an African elephant. Its great tridactyl hind feet splashed through the marsh and sent a spray of mud in all directions, while it balanced by touching the ground now and then with its smaller forefeet.
The two men turned to run; but Julian stopped and clutched at Shanker’s arm. “Wait,” he said. “Let’s not panic and get ourselves lost. It won’t hurt us.”
“Oh yeah?” Dr. Shanker sounded uncertain, but he paused and turned with Julian.
As the enormous creature lumbered off, Hilda barking her head off behind it, they could see plainly that it was an adult counterpart to the mangled body they’d found. It was a dull greenish-brown all over, blending perfectly with its surroundings. The back was marked with faint yellow vertical stripes, as if mimicking the dappling of sunlight in the forest, and the belly was plastered with mud.
For Julian, what gave away the type of animal was the shape of the head: the large eyes placed to the sides, giving it that frightened appearance of game, and the snout flattened into a wide bill. Suddenly it trumpeted as it ran, a great honking noise like a goose amplified ten times. Hilda came to a skidding halt, turned, and ran back to Dr. Shanker with her tail between her legs.
At the warning cry, the area all around burst into life. More of the creatures bolted from ferny patches, leaped from behind bushes, and even stood up in plain sight, where they should have been easy to see if it weren’t for the marvelous camouflage. Julian and Shanker had been standing in the middle of a small herd. None were as large as the first one, and a few of them seemed to be quite small, Hilda’s size, skittering through the mud, trying to keep pace with the adults as they splashed away and disappeared into the trees. Within thirty seconds the area was silent again.
“Hadrosaurs,” Julian said in an awed voice, once his heart had slowed a bit. “Probably Edmontosaurus. There was no crest on the head.” I’ve just seen my first live dinosaur, he thought, and had to suppress a hysterical giggle.
Dr. Shanker did not seem overawed. “Hm. Herbivores, I take it? What’s a herd of such huge things doing on this tiny island?”
Julian thought for a while as they stood gazing across the water. “They probably swam over from the mainland to escape the large predators,” he said at last. “Given the island’s size and the dominance of Deinosuchus, it’s unlikely any large carnivorous dinosaurs live here.”
“Meaning they’re all waiting for us over there,” Dr. Shanker said, nodding across the stretch of water. He turned away, heading back, and Julian silently followed.
SEVEN
Most dinosaurs had four digits on the hand and three on the foot. For Troodon, however, only two digits touched the ground, leaving a distinctive print. The third toe curved up, supporting a hooked blade, one of the creature’s main offensive weapons. Although this animal averaged only about 50 kilograms, the size of a wolf, it was probably a highly effective and intelligent hunter. Judging by the size of the brain case, it was among the smartest of all dinosaurs. With its very large eye sockets, Troodon probably had keen vision in low light, enabling it to hunt at dawn and at dusk, and in the dim light of the forest.
—Julian Whitney, Lectures on Cretaceous Ecology
It took Frank two days to make the journey to the western side of the island, moving slowly a short distance at a time with frequent pauses, and resting in the middle of the day. He remained alert and full of succinct advice; advice that they now knew was worth listening to. He seemed to know a great deal about survival in the wilderness.
It would have been better for the healing process if Frank had kept still for a week, but all had a common urge to get away from the beach and the giant crocodiles. They were also relieved to begin the thousand-mile journey, albeit a slow beginning, because by doing so they had made a decision, and felt their determination would keep them going. Frank was immensely cheered by the prospect of a river journey, at least at the outset. His leg might heal while they paddled upstream on a raft. Julian didn’t point out that the river on the mainland might be very short, or make a turn and take them in quite the wrong direction.
Yariko and Dr. Shanker built a crude shelter on dry ground, far enough from the edmontosaur swamp to be safe from flies, with fallen branches and fern fronds. The group spent four days there, in the end, and everyone felt better “inside,” although they knew the shelter would be meaningless to a predator. Frank kept both the gun and the VHF radio near him; he’d grasp them if there was a noise like an animal approaching. Otherwise, he sat next to the shelter making spears and various tools, or so he said. He’d get a small fire going to blacken the ends of straight sticks, which he’d then chop at with a stone, scattering charred wood everywhere.
Yariko became the water collector. She’d found an empty turtle shell about eighteen inches across that made an excellent pot for boiling water. With Julian’s knowledge they managed a reasonable diet that included roasted mammals, a very few plant stems, and tubers. But it was Dr. Shanker who was the best cook among them: once he made a mammal stew, complete with crisp plant stems and a leafy spice, that was almost tasty, although not entirely free of fur.
Yariko was also the weapons master. She claimed to have watched her father at his bow-making hobby, and despite her colleague’s derisive snorts, she determinedly collected sticks and vines and tried all sorts of arrangements, without any success. Julian would return to the camp and find the two of them sitting there, Frank surrounded by chips of stone or wood shavings, Yariko looking sadly at a tangle of braided vine and broken stick.
“This is hard work, this living like a caveman!” Yariko exclaimed on the second morning in their new camp, as she tried to chip wood with an axe of sorts created by Frank. Sweat was dripping off her upper lip and her T-shirt was soaked. Her hands were scratched and bleeding, her hair in its messy braid held bits of leaves and a twig, and dried mud flaked off her jeans every time she moved. Julian thought she’d never looked so beautiful, or so determined.
Yariko swung the makeshift axe again and the stone head flew off, fortunately missing Julian, and landed in a thicket. She finished the swing with the handle and then sat down on the branch she was trying to cut, and laughed.
“Stone age indeed. Do you know,” she said, rubbing her arm across her forehead and leaving a streak of dirt in the sweat, “I’ve spent so much time lately inside a lab, living in my head with computers and calculations, it was almost like I didn’t have a body anymore.” She looked up at Julian with her face flushed and her eyes big and bright. “Here I fee
l so alive. Not just my brain, but all of me. My hands.” She held her hands out, palms up, to show the calluses and splinters. “My arms. My legs. I can feel every muscle. I’d almost forgotten what my body was capable of,” she finished, with another laugh.
Julian had never wanted so much to grab her in a hug . . . and perhaps more. He had certainly not forgotten what her body was capable of, when he used to watch her back at the university. There had been a distance between them even when Yariko was at her friendliest, as if she didn’t entirely see him, or didn’t let go of her mental calculations while talking to him. Or perhaps she was always thinking of someone else.
Looking down at her happy, very alive face, and smelling his own sharp sweat mixed with a whiff of hers, Julian suddenly wanted to stay in the Cretaceous forever.
And the Cretaceous was becoming more wonderful to him every day. At dawn and at dusk, he became an explorer. He sometimes brought in small animals to eat; but more often he brought reports of footprints or other signs of animal life around their camp.
Once he saw the distinctive footprints of Troodon sunk into the mud near the stream, not far from the camp. He studied them for some time, trying to estimate the size of the animal, and whether it was one or several who had stood on the bank. He hesitated over informing his companions of the find; in the end he said nothing. After all, they would be moving on very soon.
People often thought of the Late Cretaceous as the glory days and the end of the Age of the Dinosaurs, as Julian knew; but it was equally the dawn of the massive radiation of mammals, from a few very similar types into the diversified groups that would spread over the earth. It was these small mammals scampering through the forest, Julian’s own ancestors, that interested him more than any other type of animal. Often he sat off to the side in the twilight hours, silently watching for the creatures.
The most common type was about the size of a kitten and gray all over. It would rummage through the dry leaves and then sit up and gnaw on a beetle, with an audible little crunching of the carapace between its teeth. But it was not until he found a dead animal, torn apart and surrounded by Hilda’s pad prints, that he was able to study its teeth and guess at the genus.
“Alphadon,” Julian said, poking at the remains with a stick. “A marsupial.”
Yariko squatted beside him, peering at the little bundle of fur and blood, holding her nose. “How do you know it’s a marsupial?”
“The pouch,” he said, prodding the belly.
“I know that,” she said. “But how could you know from a fossil. How did anyone know that ‘Alphadon’ had a pouch.”
Julian pried open the tiny mouth of his poor dead Alphadon and pointed out the unique marsupial dental formula: three premolars and four molars.
Alphadon was not the only mammal that Hilda obligingly killed. Each time she plodded into camp with a bit of gray fur dangling from her mouth, they would crowd around eagerly and Dr. Shanker would coax it away from her, much to her chagrin. Eventually she stopped bringing her kills to camp, and Julian would find them scattered around the forest, chewed almost beyond recognition.
They also found several larger animals killed, it seemed, by Troodon; these kills, with their distinctive disembowelment, were sometimes only a few hours old. Fortunately, none were found near their camp.
In addition to Alphadon, Julian saw a rat-sized, arboreal creature that might have been a species of Eodelphis. It had a ringed hairless tail and a hairless face; it looked rather like a small opossum, possibly being the direct ancestor of the modern animal. The opossum, he knew, was a wonderfully successful holdover from the age of dinosaurs, very little changed. Rodents he did not see; they would not evolve for another twenty million years.
Once he saw a Pteranodon, an immense, rust-colored creature, gliding with stately grace, a small airplane; vilified in the movies, but in actuality a toothless, harmless eater of fish. It gave out a shrill, lonely cry, caught an updraft, and disappeared to the north with a flap of its wings. He never saw another; they were already on the brink of extinction.
But the most wonderful animal of all was a tiny, unimpressive mammal.
It was sitting on a branch, nibbling at a beetle of some sort. It could almost have been a squirrel, minus the fluffy tail. Julian was alone, walking back to camp, not even looking for wildlife at the time; but as soon as he spotted the animal he froze and stared up at it, and it stared back.
It seemed to know that Julian could not climb. The animal continued eating, turning the dead insect in its forepaws, peering down, curious but unafraid. Julian could see the very beginnings of a separation between the tiny thumb and fingers; and on the foot, which was clamped to the branch, the great toe was separating from the other digits. The creature had large, dark eyes, and its skull was not so low or narrow as that of the other mammals.
Purgatorius.
The meeting was so ludicrous and awesome at the same time that Julian felt dizzy. This creature might truly have been his direct ancestor, his grandparent removed by three million generations. He wondered what was passing through its tiny, slightly expanded brain; he could not quite read the expression in its eyes. Finally he asked it out loud, “Well, are you proud of me? I’m your own child.”
At the sound of his voice the animal dropped the beetle, screamed at him, and then clambered away and disappeared into the forest canopy.
Dr. Shanker was also too restless to sit still. He busied himself transferring large rocks from scattered piles to the campsite. He built a more substantial wall on one side of their shelter and they felt a bit safer sleeping next to it. Once he came back from an exploration and claimed, jokingly, that he’d found a cairn.
“Looked just like one,” he said. “Gave me quite a turn, when I first spotted it. Just the size to cover a human. Of course, it was covered with creepers, which is probably what held the rocks together. I didn’t see any carvings though.” He winked at Julian. “This invisible rescue party is impressing me less and less all the time. First they leave a message in unintelligible symbols, and then one of them is killed and buried. Besides, it’s not like the ground here is too hard to dig a real grave.”
Julian had long since gotten over his embarrassment at trying to see letters on a rock; he chuckled along with Yariko, although they kept the ongoing joke from Frank.
When moving rocks was no longer useful, Dr. Shanker took to exploring the island with Hilda, the two of them crashing through the bushes like a herd of edmontosaurs. Indeed, Julian grumbled, they made rather more noise than the wary herbivores. Chasing all the interesting mammals away, he complained; to which Dr. Shanker countered that mammals were clearly dangerous beasts who would attack at will: witness Frank’s still swollen shoulder bite.
Julian found it vaguely annoying that Dr. Shanker spent so much of the day alone with Hilda, away from the camp and essential chores; although, to be fair, Shanker was quickly gathering long, straight branches for building a raft. At the same time, and quite irrationally, Julian felt a twinge of annoyance whenever he came back to camp and found Yariko and Frank so busy and amicable together.
It felt as if they’d been on the island for a lifetime, even though it was less than seven days; Julian wanted to be moving, fighting his way west, not waiting for his companions to play at making tools.
The second evening he came back to find Yariko fitting a short stick against a crude-looking bow. “Watch out,” she said as he approached. “I might shoot you. I haven’t figured out how to make it go straight yet.”
With that she pulled back on the braided vine string and let it go with a snap. The stick went remarkably far, Julian thought; almost thirty feet. It also went sideways, and tumbled in the air as it flew.
“Well, it might land on an animal’s head,” he said, helpfully.
“Yeah, and anger it,” Yariko said, with a sigh. “It’s not just the lousy arrows. It’s the string too. Those vines are no good.” She turned back toward the shelter, and Frank.
&nb
sp; “Yariko,” Julian said, and she stopped. “Why do you sit in camp all day?”
She gave him a puzzled look. “Why do you wander around all day? Frank can’t move far and somebody has to stay with him. We’ve been making things, useful things. He’s working on a better axe and spears with stone heads.” When there was no answer she added, “We need these things, Julian. We need to get going on that raft, too. There’s nearly enough wood gathered.”
“Then let’s start it,” Julian said, still feeling annoyed. “Let’s get down to the water and start putting those sticks together. Surely you must have calculated it all out by now.” He stopped, surprised at the acrimony in his voice. He hadn’t meant to be angry.
Yariko looked at him for a long moment before speaking. “It’s true I’m trained as a physicist,” she said at last. “And that was useful when we first got here. But now. . . .” Her expression as she looked at Julian was almost an appeal. “Now, I’m not a physicist any more. I’ve had to redefine who I am, my essential self. You wouldn’t know. You’re as much a paleontologist here as back at the university. You can just be yourself. Sometimes,” she went on, sounding sad now, “I’m not sure who I am now. And this thousand-mile journey just seems insane. What does it matter? We can’t possibly make it.”
Julian had to suppress a new feeling of panic. Yariko, uncertain? Yariko not willing to try? And if she gave up, before they’d even really started, what would happen to him? It was her strength he needed to keep his own hope alive.
“You’re Yariko, and you’re my friend, and Dr. Shanker’s, and—Frank’s, too,” he said, feeling generous. “And if you give up, I’ll give up and we’ll just live on this island forever. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad life.” Seeing an ironical smile on her face he went on in a lighter tone, “And if I’m still a paleontologist, then you’re still a physicist. Physics still existed back in the Cretaceous, you know, just like paleontology.”
Cretaceous Dawn Page 9
