He was bursting with curiosity as well as apprehension. It was clearly not T. rex, and didn’t sound like any other dangerous predator; but a herbivore did not mean there was no danger: Hilda was proof of that. After all, many modern man-killing creatures were strict vegetarians: bulls, rhinoceroses, hippos. However, if his companions continued motionless and nonthreatening, they would probably be safer than suddenly jumping up and running off, or doing anything else that would startle the creatures.
Finally the animal came into view: not one, but a small herd, eleven of them, ambling one by one from behind the tree. They were bipeds, small ones only about the size of a human, or of a large deer, and Julian supposed they served very much the same function that deer might: nibbling on bark, bending down to tear up ferns and herbs, eating the leafy vines that clung to the tree trunks. They were comical animals, stocky, bull necked, and stout bodied, with heavy tails that jutted out stiffly behind and allowed them to balance on their two legs.
One peculiarity was so distinct that he knew the type of dinosaur instantly. The tops of their heads were expanded into large rounded domes, mostly bone, giving them the look of sage old men who had gone bald. Pachycephalosaurs.
They wandered into view peacefully, chewing bits of fern that dangled from their mouths. One of them pulled up the low herbs with its hands and then transferred them to its mouth.
It was Yariko who scared them away. She woke up with a start and said, “Good lord! What are they?”
They froze, staring at the humans like dinosaur gnomes caught in the middle of some piece of mischief. Then they vanished into the forest, thudding over the dry ground.
Yariko stretched, and gave a little laugh. “I’m glad we looked for Hilda,” she said, her voice soft but startlingly close. “Now we’re all together again we can find the river, and go on. You know, I think I’m getting used to this life. I can hardly remember living any other way. It seems so . . . normal.”
Before Julian could answer, she had snuggled up against him with her head on his shoulder. Soon she was asleep, breathing softly.
Later in the night Julian heard the same thumping of feet. Another group of pachycephalosaurs must have passed close by, but he could not see them in the absolute blackness under the trees, and in any case he was more interested in what was sleeping in his arms.
When Julian woke next there was a dim light around him. Yariko’s head was still on his shoulder, and his arm was around her; her knees had tilted over onto his lap. He hated to disturb her; but after a while a cramp in his leg demanded that he move. Yariko woke with a start, drawing quickly away from him. Then she smiled and leaned against him again.
“I forgot we weren’t on a loft,” she said.
Julian longed to kiss her on each of her puffy eyes, and on her very chapped lips; he wondered if she was wondering why he never initiated anything. He had always been so shy with her, but they needed each other now. Everything had changed between them. But even as he had the thought Dr. Shanker sat up beside them and stretched.
Seeing her master move Hilda lifted her head and wagged her tail. They were ecstatic. They crowded around, petting her and talking to her, and she seemed to like the attention. But when she tried to stand up she wobbled and then sat down suddenly and whined.
There was no water for Hilda, and no breakfast. They set off as quickly as they could toward the river, Dr. Shanker carrying her again. Her head lolled against his shoulder, and her wide brown eyes gazed back at Julian, sad and confused.
An hour later they still hadn’t come to the river, or seen any of their notched trees. Julian silently cursed himself for losing them. It had seemed such an obvious marker at the time, but had turned out to be too subtle to keep track of easily.
Hilda began to struggle and complain about being carried, and when Dr. Shanker set her on the ground she puttered along at a maddeningly slow pace. The forest began to seem like an evil force keeping them from knowing their direction. Although nobody said anything, they were all thinking of the few weeks remaining before the close of the time window.
Again, it was Yariko who stopped first. “Now we really need food,” she said in a faint voice.
Julian chose an arrow. “Let’s get what we can,” he said.
They moved more slowly, trying to be quiet.
The first thing they brought down was nothing more glorious than a toad. Dr. Shanker got it with his spear. He fed it to Hilda and looked the other way as she devoured it raw. A little food in the stomach seemed to perk her up, and she was better able to trot along after that. But she seemed chastened, a little frightened by the forest, and showed no interest at all in wandering off.
“What’s that?” Yariko said suddenly, stopping and putting her hand on Julian’s arm. “Over there—something moving. Maybe several things.”
She and Julian crept closer, trying to stay down, while Dr. Shanker waited beside Hilda.
It was a group of pachycephalosaurs; perhaps even the same herd they’d met during the night. One of the animals stood off on its own, separated from the others by a few yards, its head down, grazing on a patch of leafy trailers. Julian didn’t dare whisper, but with signs pointed it out to Yariko. They split up, Yariko moving to the left, Julian to the right.
The pachys had chosen a patch of forest that was grown up with leafy, evergreen bushes, which fortunately gave cover for stalking them. Julian was able to get within about twenty feet of the lone animal without detection; there was no breeze in the still forest, and the animal was clearly not expecting an attack. He extracted an arrow from the bundle, silently, and fitted it to the bow. Then he peered out between the leaves.
The animal was turned away from him, and he waited for it to expose more flank, having no illusions about his marksmanship. The pachy took a step and bent down again to tear up a mouthful of leaves. But it must have heard something; suddenly it paused and stared over its shoulder directly at the spot where Yariko was hiding.
Instantly she released her arrow; Julian let his go almost at the same time. It sank into the animal’s side just above the hip, while Yariko’s went into the lower chest.
The creature screamed, a horrible sound, while chewed leaves tumbled from its open mouth. The whole group of pachys turned and ran, the injured one at the back and lagging.
Julian crashed out of the bushes to follow but they disappeared as if they had never been there at all. “I know we hurt it,” he said, after a moment. “We should be able to track it.”
Dr. Shanker joined them. “We’ll have to trail it until it dies. Hilda can find it for us, I’m sure.”
But Hilda wasn’t much help when they brought her to the spot. When Dr. Shanker put her nose to a spatter of blood on the ground she licked at it and then glanced up with a wag of her tail, as if waiting for more.
In the end they simply followed the drops of blood. In one spot the needles and ferns were smeared with blood, as if the animal had stumbled and gotten up again. The fall may have driven the arrow deeper, since they found the pachy about twenty yards farther, dead.
Dr. Shanker gutted and cleaned the carcass.
Hungry as he was, Julian was sickened by the process. Their diet for weeks had been small mammals, fish, and roots; they had not eaten dinosaur flesh since the very beginning. As Julian received the thick, bloody chunks that Dr. Shanker carved from the thigh, the smell and consistency revolted him. The meat was a dark, almost purple red, with an unexpected yielding quality, as if it would squash to gel in his hands. The thick nobbled skin, mottled green and brown with yellow streaks here and there, reminded him of poisonous lizards he’d seen in zoos. Just under the skin was a whitish membrane layer that slipped and glistened and proved difficult to slice. The meat looked, felt, and smelled utterly foreign.
However, there was nothing to do but eat it. Yariko was working on a fire a short distance away, her back carefully turned to the dead animal.
Julian handed her a drooping, heavy mass impaled on an arrow.
“Your dinner, my dear,” he said, making an effort.
“Why thank you,” Yariko said. “It looks wonderful. Did you make it yourself?”
They bantered as they toasted bits of meat, and Julian felt better when his chunk began to look more like food as it cooked.
“What do you think?” he asked Yariko, as he studied his portion, turning it this way and that to see if it was really cooked.
But Yariko was looking over his shoulder with a strange expression on her face. “I’m going to be sick,” she said.
Julian turned in time to see Dr. Shanker pop a tiny, dripping piece of raw flesh in his mouth.
“More moisture,” Dr. Shanker said, realizing he was being stared at. “You’re making a mistake, cooking all the liquid out of it. We have no water without the river.”
Julian and Yariko turned their backs to Shanker and Hilda, and tried to enjoy their own meal.
As they finished it began to rain heavily, as if to purposefully contradict Dr. Shanker. Long strings of water cascaded from the treetops and drummed on the ground, washing away the needles, churning the forest floor into mud. They tilted back their heads and drank, and cupped their hands for Hilda to drink. The fire was flattened into soggy charcoal and the blood washed from the carcass.
It was a shame to leave the rest of the animal when they’d hardly taken any meat off, but not even Dr. Shanker was willing to carry raw flesh through the forest. They each saved a well-cooked piece that they wrapped in a leaf and carried on a stick. Dr. Shanker picked through the small mound of viscera he’d thrown to the side and cut the bladder free. He washed it out in the rain, filled it with water, and tied off the top. Julian grinned, watching him: little did Shanker know it was of immense scientific interest that a pachycephalosaur even had a bladder.
The rain slowed and then stopped altogether by midday.
The afternoon was sunnier, and Julian was able to figure out the points of the compass. However, although they walked roughly northwest, the river obstinately refused to appear. It must have taken a meander, looping farther north. There was nothing to do but keep going, and hope.
Finally they struck a dry streambed worn into the soil, snaking between the trees. That caused excitement; surely it would lead to the main river eventually. Julian could not resist picking up stones and splitting open the shelves of sedimentary rock, looking for fossils. Stream beds were excellent places to look for fossils, with the types found dependant on the layers of rock exposed.
In the twentieth century, the geographic region of the Hell Creek Formation was particularly rich in Late Cretaceous fossils; but now in the Late Cretaceous itself, the stream bed was filled with fossils from a much earlier date. Julian found impressions of half-inch shells, sometimes mingled and crammed together in tessellated patterns as if hundreds of the mollusks had died and settled on top of each other.
These fossils dated from the Cambrian, several hundred million years earlier, living and dying in such a distant past that by comparison dinosaurs were modern animals, indistinguishable from humans. If he and the others had been thrown back to that era in time, the earth would have been utterly alien, unrecognizable, although probably much safer.
The terrain began to change again. The giant Metasequoia thinned and the gaps were filled more and more with smaller conifers. The undergrowth became tangled again and difficult to walk through, and the ground was softer. They were nearing the river at last.
Hilda had completely recovered her good humor and the swelling around her eye had gone down. At the same time she regained her enthusiasm for chasing after animals, and several times came near to being kicked again by frightened pachys. Julian wondered how many trials it would take before she learned, and if she would survive until she did.
Once, she dashed off through the bushes, snarling, stopping not far away to bark at some unfortunate animal that she must have cornered. They crashed through the bushes after her, partly to rescue her if she needed it, and partly to see the animal. Dr. Shanker was hoping it would make a good meal, if Hilda brought it down.
They struggled out of the bushes, scratched and itching, beating aside the bracken with their spears, and stepped into the clearing. Julian was scanning the nearest tree, looking for a small mammal, treed and hissing down at Hilda from a branch. But as soon as Yariko struggled free of the bushes she grabbed his arm to stop him and pointed across the clearing.
Julian was so startled that he felt goose bumps pricking on his arms and chest.
Hilda was tormenting a monster.
She was barking in a frenzy from just beyond its reach. Its bulk was partly screened by leaves and by the bare twigs of deciduous bushes. But from the back end of its shell to the front of its snout it must have been nearly thirty feet long, another example of the gigantish trend of the Late Cretaceous.
It had a blunt, triangular head, wide and flat, knobbled and plated on top, small in comparison to the body. It held its head near the ground as if in a defensive posture, or in threat, its beaked mouth gaping and showing a single row of small, foliated, plant-grinding teeth far back in the jaw. The body rose up behind the head, armored with rounded plates of bone, like a monstrous turtle. A few small birds fluttered above it. Its rump was raised but it had not yet turned around to present its club-tipped tail. In fact the creature did not seem very alarmed about the puny, noisy mammal that had disturbed it, and after silently threatening, it turned back to feed.
Julian stood amazed, watching. An enormous, bluish tongue reached out of the mouth and curled around a twig, pulling the leafy end into the animal’s beak. Such an organ had been suspected by paleontologists, because the skulls of ankylosauria had well-developed hyoid and entoglossal processes to anchor the tongue muscles. Another guess was that most of the digestion would have taken place inside an extensive gut, since the teeth were too small and weak to process the food effectively.
One symptom not much discussed in the journals was that the fermentation of leaves in the gut produced an incredible smell whenever the animal dropped feces, which it did at that moment, in huge wet quantities.
That was enough to make them all back away. Hilda, however, continued to pester it, darting dangerously close and snarling, but the animal snapped back in a halfhearted way, glancing at her without much concern.
Dr. Shanker strode forward. “Hilda! Get away from that! Come back here!”
He made a grab at the scruff of her neck and caught her after several tries. He slipped a rope over her head and began to haul her away while she strained against it, still barking and snapping fiercely, as though convinced she was larger than the monster.
But the animal seemed to think that Dr. Shanker was joining the attack. It began to turn away from him, lumbering on its ungainly, trunk-like legs, the back ones longer than the front. As it turned, snapping and bending the branches around it, Julian saw clearly the ring of spikes curving out from the edges of its armor. Any carnivore foolish enough to attack this animal or try to turn it over would have a bloody mouth for the trouble, and very possibly a fatal gash.
He thought it was maneuvering to lumber away into the woods; but as soon as its back was turned the tail lashed out with astonishing energy considering how sluggishly the animal had been moving. The tip of the tail was weighted with lumps of bone in the shape of a medieval mace. If Dr. Shanker hadn’t ducked in time his skull would have been smashed. He hurried back to Julian and Yariko.
The ankylosaur began to back toward them. Even Hilda decided it was not worth antagonizing further. They quickly scrambled away through the brush, Hilda in front dragging Dr. Shanker by the homemade leash. Fortunately the ankylosaur did not follow them very far; when Julian glanced back he saw it settling down to feed again.
Later the same day they reached Hell Creek. It could be heard plainly from a distance, crashing and rumbling, and when they finally emerged from the forest they stood on a rocky cliff, thirty feet high, looking down at a shallow, fast-flowing stream. The raft woul
d never have made it through this stretch, had they continued on the river; clearly luck was with them still. A mist of droplets hung in the air, and the spray flew up into their faces. It was difficult to talk over the roaring water.
The opposite bank of the river was lower. Open lands stretched out beyond for miles, speckled with scrub and here and there a coniferous tree. The sun had almost set, spreading a dull red light over the sky and the plains. Jutting up against this redness, in silhouette along the western horizon, stood the first low slopes of the infant Rocky Mountains. They were nothing like the lofty peaks Julian had visited in his own time.
He followed their probable path with his eyes: it lay toward the very first of the slopes. But he could not help thinking the chances were still slim. The river now bent south so it would be no more use as a guide. Miles of broken, rocky ground lay before them. It was all too exposed; there were few trees to climb, and even less underbrush. The hills were likely cooler at night, and there’d be a scarcity of food and water. It all seemed impossible, especially within the remaining few weeks. Impossible—but they would keep trying. Julian was not discouraged. Instead, he felt strangely excited. Their goal was suddenly a reality. Finally, it was in sight.
Yariko touched his arm and pointed. One great swath of the plains, beginning near the river but stretching away at least a mile, looked darker than the rest. Julian thought it looked like turned-up earth, lumpy with mounds and boulders, as if some giant had begun to till the field and then found it too rocky to cultivate; but the distance was so great that the boulders must have been enormous up close.
Suddenly he realized that they were not rocks or clumps of earth at all, but animals, bulky Triceratops. Like the bison or the wildebeest they were gathered together in uncountable thousands, stretching beyond all imagination, sending up a haze of dust that caught the red light of the sunset.
They watched for a long time. Dr. Shanker put three fingers to his forehead and mimed a lumbering, rhinoceros kind of animal, and Julian nodded vigorously. Dr. Shanker grinned, his whole leathery face bunching up with pleasure. Yariko also grinned; she took Julian’s hand and held it tightly, hurting his fingers, but he did not complain. He squeezed back.
Cretaceous Dawn Page 16
