Cretaceous Dawn

by Lisa M. Graziano

  All around the huge trunks of sequoia rose like pillars. When Julian stood still for a moment and gazed up, the trunks seemed to converge at the top because of their enormous height. Shafts of sunlight fell through, touching the pillars and bringing out the red tint of their bark, or by luck piercing all the way down to the floor of the forest and lighting up a patch of ferns. At the base, the trees were so large around that one could have hollowed them out and made a house inside.

  They were not modern redwoods; Julian knew this because they had begun to drop their leaves for the winter and the ground was cluttered with wide brown needles rustling underfoot. True redwoods are evergreen trees. These were evidently Dawn Redwoods, Metasequoia, wonderful trees known from the fossil record. They were famous because scientists had assumed they were extinct until an isolated grove of them was found in central China in the 1940s. Saplings were dug up and transplanted all over the world, and they soon became common ornamental trees. However, he had never before seen an entire forest of them. It seemed almost a sacrilege to mark them with the axe, as he did nearly every tree.

  One intriguing speculation about why trees evolved such great height was that it protected their leaves from herbivorous dinosaurs. Certainly, Julian thought, the Dawn Redwoods would have been beyond the reach even of the great sauropods such as Apatosaurus and Diplodocus. However, those giant herbivores no longer existed in the north. Somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere the titanisaurids may still have lifted their unbelievable necks to reach the tops of trees; there had even been a Late Cretaceous migration to as far north as Texas, bringing sauropods to North America once again. But in the northern regions the sauropods had long ago disappeared, leaving behind a permanent mark on the floral morphology.

  Julian was jolted out of his fear-tinged awe at the forest by the unmistakable sound of barking. It was faint but clear: the kind of bark a dog makes when it has treed something, a sharp, short, endlessly repeated bark.

  “That way!” Dr. Shanker said, pointing a little to the left. He began to jog, calling “Hilda! Here girl!” every few steps. Yariko kept just behind him, and Julian brought up the rear with some vague chivalrous notion that a surprise attack from behind would kill him and not her.

  Then the barking stopped. The forest was eerily silent.

  Julian was still unsure of this venture away from the river, and how far it might take them. Even putting a dent in every tree they passed, which greatly slowed down their progress, didn’t ensure against losing their direction. And surely Hilda had heard them by now—they’d been able to hear her, after all. She would follow if they headed back.

  “What if we stopped and let her come to us?” he suggested. “I don’t think we should go any farther from the river. I’m sure she’ll find us when she’s ready.”

  But Dr. Shanker strode on. “Just a little bit further,” he said. “We’ve hardly gone two hundred yards; the river’s only just back there.” Suddenly he stopped and pointed. “We’ve walked up on something,” he said, casually.

  Yariko whispered, “Is it a rock, or an animal? Julian—take a look.”

  About a hundred feet away in the trees, up a rising slope in the forest floor, lay a gigantic gray object that certainly resembled the huge rocks left behind by glaciers. But the region had been free of glaciers for at least a hundred million years; so far they’d seen no such rocks. They watched it in silence for a minute, but it did not move.

  Dr. Shanker thought that Hilda might have trotted up to sniff it. They all had the same unpleasant thought: that she had been killed, and the enormous creature was resting after its meal. Flitting from one tree to the next, they climbed the needle-strewn slope, until they were thirty feet away and too nervous to peer around the giant bole of the tree to see what it was.

  “Stay here,” Dr. Shanker mouthed; he was afraid even to whisper. He darted from behind the tree to another one nearby, gripping his spear so hard the muscles stood out on his arm and shoulder.

  Suddenly he laughed and strode into the open. “Here’s a fierce creature!” he said. “Come look!”

  It had been dead a long time, and little was left except a mummified skin pulled tight across the bones. When they walked around to the other side they saw that the skeleton had begun to separate, and the vertebrae of the tail were scattered about on the ground. The feet were still enclosed in leathery skin; the leg bones had fallen under their own weight and lay partly sunk into the soil. It must have lain down on its side to die, and now the ribs arched up above their heads, gray and weathered, black in parts where they had begun to rot.

  The size was impossible. To Julian, that was the best word: impossible. People of the twentieth century are used to regarding the elephant as the largest of land creatures, but an elephant could have bivouacked inside the arch of this immense rib cage. The skull was nine feet long, resting on the ground, its vast eye sockets gazing into the forest. It had a narrow, pointed face tipped with a horny beak.

  Farther back in the jaw, exposed in death, was a battery of flat teeth like a grinding mill. A bony frill jutted back from the skull and yard-long horns curved out from above the eye sockets. It had a third horn, a smaller one, above the narrow nostrils. It was of course Triceratops horridus. It came over Julian finally how tiny a creature he was. The trees and the dried-up corpse seemed from another world, of vast dimensions perfectly proportioned for each other, and his own presence was ludicrous. He was a product of the diminutive world of the Quaternary, scampering through the haunts of these creatures of more perfect size. He expected to see a moth the size of a crow, or a cockroach as big as a dog, or some other proof that he’d been dropped into a world with a different scale of measurement altogether.

  “What now?” Yariko’s voice was low, almost a whisper, and Julian knew that she too had been struck with the feeling of insignificance.

  It was time to get back to the river, and they all knew it. They hadn’t heard Hilda’s barking for some time, and without it there was no point in searching for her. If she was alive, she’d have to find her own way back to them. Still, they sat down beneath a great trunk and waited in silence for what seemed a long time, listening.

  Dr. Shanker rose and turned back first, to Julian’s surprise. He and Yariko followed, watching Shanker’s slumped shoulders, and tried to cheer him up. Hilda must have come this way, Yariko said; she could never have passed a dead animal without sniffing it and this ultimate of dead animals must surely have attracted her like a magnet; and they all laughed at the thought of her innocent and funny curiosity. But inside they all knew that either she would come back to the river by herself, or they would never see her again.

  Late afternoon crept in; Julian began to feel thirsty, and became careless in looking out for the notched trees.

  Now and then they passed a clump of low bushes, bracken, and undergrowth living in the glow of indirect sunlight that filtered down between the giant trees. It was by the merest chance that Julian looked back over his shoulder for a second glance at one of these thickets, and saw a little patch of black fur.

  The remains of a small mammal, he thought; somebody’s meal. Maybe even Hilda’s recent kill.

  He snuck toward the bush, hoping nothing dangerous was about to come crashing out; but it did not move at all, and he decided it was dead. He pushed aside the twigs and peered down at Hilda, covered with blood and absolutely still.

  TWELVE

  The ceratopsia, the parrot-beaked dinosaurs, diversified in the Cretaceous. The coincidence of their rise with the rise of flowering plants suggests that they evolved specifically as the dominant eaters of angiosperms. However, by the end of the Maastrichtian, all except a very few species had died out. The massive Triceratops, for example, was a late survivor, probably traveling in large migratory herds.

  —Julian Whitney, Lectures on Cretaceous Ecology

  1 September

  7:48 PM Local Time

  In the physics lab, Earles stared at the two scientists. Physicist
s taking observations of beetles and twigs, beetles disappearing, physicists and dogs disappearing; she would have laughed if there wasn’t a dead body to show it was quite serious.

  “Come again?” she said.

  “They disappeared,” Ridzgy repeated. “The beetles did. Just like your missing people.”

  Hann snorted, but Earles jumped on the emphatic statement. “What do you mean, ‘just like’ our missing people?” she asked sharply.

  Bowman made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “She was being dramatic. Of course we don’t know where your people went.”

  Earles wasn’t ready to let it go, however. “You said before there was a decrease in pressure inside the vault. What if some of the contents of the vault disappeared? Wouldn’t that cause the vacuum?”

  “It could have. If it was enough.”

  “Maybe as much as four-and-a-half people and a German shepherd?” Earles folded her arms and looked at Bowman.

  “That’s certainly one hypothesis,” Ridzgy said.

  Hann gave a bark of laughter. “What is this, Star Trek? People don’t just ‘vanish’ into thin air.”

  “No,” Earles said, before the physicists could answer. “But a few hours ago we thought they’d been burned to nothing; cremated. That would be a large amount of mass disappearing. What if they disappeared some other way?”

  Hann stopped chuckling and looked impressed.

  But Ridzgy shook her head. “Sorry, that doesn’t work. Cremation, as you put it, isn’t a negating of mass; it’s a change in state. The water and carbon in the body simply become gas: carbon dioxide, hydrogen. The mass is still there. Furthermore, according to the notes and programs, these people were pulling small things into the vault from elsewhere . . . and then watching them disappear later, outside the vault.”

  “We’re not here to solve the mystery for you,” Bowman added, seeing the doubtful look on Earles’ face. “We’re physicists—we can try to re-create their experimental run, but there’s no information here on people chopped in half or gone missing.”

  But Earles was not convinced. She was staring at the vault, seeing in her mind’s eye the human body sliced through the middle; not burned, but sliced . . . cleanly, and the rest gone as if never present, blood and all.

  Hilda lay partly on her chest, her head stretched out on the ground and one front paw curled under her body. Her lips were drawn back as if they had stiffened in a snarl, or perhaps a yelp. By now Julian had seen many dead animals, limp furry bodies with the warmth gone from them; but this death wasn’t the same kind. There was a stillness about it that struck him like a blow in the stomach. This animal, their companion, so full of life and health and intelligence, this personality he’d lived with for so long on a tiny raft, this ever-curious and alert being who put the humans’ adaptive abilities to shame; the physical proof that this spirit was suddenly gone, leaving only the final stillness of any empty body, a meaningless shell, made Julian lose all hope of his own survival. First Frank, now Hilda: the two who were best equipped to survive had been killed first.

  He felt his companions approach and stand behind him.

  Dr. Shanker dropped to his knees with an involuntary groan. He reached out a hand toward Hilda’s head and made a gesture of stroking it; but he didn’t touch her.

  She must have been badly injured, and crawled into the bush to die. As they stared at her it came over Julian that this was the natural end of every wild animal, including themselves. They were looking at their own future, probably not too distant, and the vision they had of reaching their vague goal was mere idealistic prattle.

  Dr. Shanker pushed Julian aside. Then he gently disentangled Hilda’s body and laid her in the open, as if, even in death, she might be more happy in a comfortable position. He squatted and palpated her body to see how she had been injured. The blood came from her mouth, and was coagulated in the fur of her muzzle and on her chest. It looked as if she’d been struck hard on the head or across the jaw. One side of her face was badly swollen and the flesh around the eye had puffed up and forced the lid closed.

  Dr. Shanker felt gently near her collar bone, his stubby fingers now stained with blood. After a moment he looked up and said, “Her heart is beating.”

  Julian’s new sense of doom vanished. He knelt down beside Shanker. “Are you sure? It’s easy to feel your own pulse in your thumb.”

  “No,” he said. “Try it.”

  Julian worked his fingers into the fur and immediately realized that she was warm and her body was not stiff. He could feel a faint pulse, and when he stared hard at her abdomen he saw a flutter, a hint of a breath, irregular and infrequent. She was just barely alive. “Yes,” he whispered. “I feel it.”

  “If we let her lie still—” Dr. Shanker began.

  “We should get back to the boat,” Yariko said. “Before nightfall. It isn’t safe here, for her or for us. And she’ll need water.”

  “Not to mention us,” Julian said. “I could do with some water myself.” It was amazing how life suddenly mattered again, and thirst could drive him to action. “There’s more likely to be food near the water too.”

  Dr. Shanker handed his spear and bow to Yariko and then gently gathered Hilda in his arms and lifted her. They walked back toward the river, single file again, slowly so as not to jostle her over the uneven ground. But after only a few minutes he stopped and said in a low voice, “There’s something ahead.” He lowered Hilda to the ground, and Yariko handed him his spear. “Do you see it?” he asked.

  Julian looked hard, trying to estimate distances. Something gray showed far away between the tree trunks. It must have been huge, although his eyes were constantly tricked about depth and size in the gargantuan forest.

  “Maybe it’s a live one this time,” he whispered. “Triceratops.”

  “We could make a wide circle,” Yariko said, “but we’d lose our marked trees. And it’d probably hear us anyhow.”

  Julian gave her an apologetic look. “We’ve lost them already.” He gripped his spear. “I’ll go closer and take a look.”

  “I’d go with you,” Dr. Shanker said, “but I want to stay with Hilda. If it’s anything dangerous, she won’t be able to defend herself, or even run away.”

  “All right, then,” Yariko said, getting her bow ready. She pointed to a tree halfway there and said, “Not beyond that point. I won’t let you. Frankly, this whole forest scares me. We don’t belong here—and every animal will know that.”

  As they approached, they made out a gigantic gray object lying at the top of a gentle slope. They were within fifty feet of it and were crouching behind the tree, when Yariko suddenly said, in a disgusted voice, “Julian, it’s the same one!”

  It was.

  They stood and looked at the massive skeleton of Triceratops horridus.

  “It’s not possible,” Dr. Shanker said as he joined them, gently laying Hilda on the ground again. “How did we lose ourselves? We walked straight north toward the river, didn’t we?”

  Yariko shrugged. “Clearly not. It isn’t easy to tell the direction of the sun, in a forest.”

  Julian looked wildly around at the woods, trying to see his crude axe marks on the trees, or some indication of the river’s direction. Massive trunks rose everywhere, and deceptive lanes between the trees seemed to open up and then fade out farther along. Every direction looked the same.

  “It can’t be far from here to the river,” he said, finally. “If we head northwest, we should hit it pretty soon.”

  They set out again, but more than an hour later still had not come to the river. The sky was hazy and it was impossible to tell where the sun lay. A diffuse greenish light filtered down through the treetops.

  Yariko stopped first. “We need food,” she said. “And water. Hilda must be very dehydrated. And we’re not far from being in her state.”

  Julian knew they’d never reach the river before sundown, and it would be foolish to continue at night, in the pitchy blackness of the
forest. They settled down at the base of one of the enormous Metasequoia. There was no possibility of climbing the tree, and no undergrowth to hide in; they would have to spend the night exposed on the forest floor.

  They laid Hilda gently on a bed of needles. Her breathing had become more regular, and her foot twitched once in her sleep, a sign that the blow to her head had not paralyzed her.

  Setting aside their spears, bows, and bundles of arrows, they settled back against the trunk of the tree, shivering in the slight chill of the evening.

  “I wonder what it was that got her,” Yariko said. She sat close to Julian, not quite touching, with her arms around her drawn-up knees.

  Julian had been pondering that. “My guess is she was chasing a group of herbivores, perhaps hadrosaurs,” he said. “Like a dog chasing cows, or sheep: she was probably nipping at their heels and one of them kicked back. If she doesn’t wake in the next twelve hours. . . .”

  “She’s strong,” Dr. Shanker said. “She’ll make it.” But his voice didn’t sound quite as assured as usual.

  As the darkness closed in they fell silent. Julian began to doze, now and then waking up with a start to the same quiet forest, now invisible. Tiny sounds became more apparent, as did the scents: pungent needles of trees, resin, dry leaves, decay. Once he thought he heard a footstep, and he started awake and listened intently. He had just decided it was part of a dream when it repeated itself: a tiny thump. Both Yariko and Dr. Shanker remained asleep, their heads lolling back against the shaggy bark.

  Again, the thump. It did not sound like a very large animal. Julian was reminded of a deer stepping slowly through the forest, barely audible, browsing on patches of ground cover. There was a long silence, several minutes, and then the sound again, much closer, directly behind the tree. He thought he heard the soft tearing of plants being pulled up from the forest floor.