Mastodonia

by Clifford D. Simak

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  Mastodonia

  Clifford D. Simak

  ONE

  A dog’s high kiyoodling brought me up in bed, still half asleep, barely functional. The first light of dawn lay within the room, showing in its ghostliness the worn carpeting, the battered highboy, the open closet door with its array of hanging clothes.

  “What is it, Asa?”

  I turned my head and saw Rila sitting there beside me and I asked myself, for the love of Christ, how come—that after all these years Rila should be here. Then I remembered, in a sort of blur, how come she was here.

  The dog cried out again, closer this time, a cry of anguish and of fright.

  I began scrambling out of bed, grabbing for a pair of trousers, feet scuffing to find the slippers on the floor. “It’s Bowser,” I told Rila. “The damn fool never came home last night. I thought he had a woodchuck.”

  Bowser was hell on woodchucks. Once he started on one, he never would give up. He’d dig halfway to China to get one out. Ordinarily, to put an end to all his foolishness, I’d go out to get him. But last night, when Rila had shown up, I’d not gone hunting Bowser.

  When I reached the kitchen, I could hear Bowser whining on the stoop. I opened the door and there he stood, with a wooden shaft dragging behind him. I stooped and put my arm around him and hauled him to one side so I could see what was going on. Once I’d done that, I saw that the shaft of wood was a lance and that the stone blade attached to it was embedded in Bowser’s back leg, high up. Bowser whined piteously at me.

  “What’s the matter, Asa?” Rila asked, standing in the door.

  “Someone speared him,” I said. “He’s got a spear in him.”

  She came swiftly out on the stoop, moving around the two of us, and went down the steps to the sidewalk.

  “The blade is only halfway in,” she said. “It’s only hanging there.”

  Her hand reached out and grasped the shaft, then gave a twitch and pulled it free.

  Bowser yipped, then whined. He was shivering. I picked him up and carried him into the kitchen.

  “There’s a blanket on the davenport in the living room,” I told Rila. “If you would get it, please, we can make a bed for him over in the corner.”

  Then I turned to Bowser. “It’s all right. You’re home now and it’s all right. We’ll take care of you.”

  “Asa!”

  “Yes, what is it, Rila?”

  “This is a Folsom point.” She held up the spear so that I could see. “Who would use a Folsom point to spear a dog?”

  “Some kid,” I said. “They are little monsters.”

  She shook her head. “No kid would know how to mount the point on the shaft—not the way this one is mounted.”

  “The blanket, please,” I said.

  She laid the lance on the table and went into the living room to get the blanket. Back with it, she folded it and knelt to put it in one corner of the kitchen.

  I lowered Bowser onto it. “Take it easy, boy, we’ll fix you up. I don’t think the cut’s too deep.”

  “But, Asa, you don’t understand. Or didn’t hear what I said.”

  “I heard,” I said. “A Folsom point. Ten thousand years ago. Used by paleo-Indians. Found associated with the bones of prehistoric bison.”

  “Not only that,” she went on, “but mounted on a shaft shaped by scraping—that’s the earmark of prehistoric technology.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said. “I hadn’t meant to tell you right away, but I might as well. Bowser, it seems, is a time-traveling dog. Once he brought home some dinosaur bones …”

  “Why should a dog want dinosaur bones?”

  “You miss the point. Not old bones. Not fossilized. Not weathered. Green bones, with shreds of flesh still hanging onto them. Not the bones of a big dinosaur. Small one. From an animal the size of a dog or maybe just a little larger.”

  Rila did not seem curious. “You get scissors and trim off the hair around that wound. I’ll get some warm water to wash it out. And where’s the medicine cabinet?”

  “In the bathroom. To the right of the mirror.” As she turned to leave, I called, “Rila.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” I said.

  TWO

  She had come out of the past—at least twenty years out of the past—only the evening before.

  I had been sitting in front of the house, in a lawn chair under the big maple tree, when the car turned off the highway and came up the access road. It was a big, black car, and I wondered, just a little idly, who it might be. To tell the truth, I wasn’t particularly happy at the prospect of seeing anyone at all, for, in the last few months, I had gotten to the point where I appreciated being left alone and felt some mild resentment at any intrusion.

  The car drew up to the gate and stopped, and she got out of it. I rose from my chair and started walking across the yard. She came through the gate and walked toward me. She was well up the path before I recognized her, saw in this svelte, well-dressed woman the girl of twenty years before. Even then, I could not be sure that it was she; the long years of remembering might have made me susceptible to seeing in any beautiful woman that girl of twenty years before.

  I stopped when she was still some distance off. “Rila?” I called, making it a question. “Are you Rila Elliot?”

  She stopped as well and looked at me across the dozen feet that separated us, as if she, as well, could not be absolutely sure that I was Asa Steele.

  “Asa,” she finally said, “it is really you. I can see it’s really you. I’d heard that you were here. I was talking with a friend just the other day and he told me you were here. I had thought you were still at that funny little college somewhere in the West. I had thought so often of you …”

  She kept up her talk so that she would not have to do anything else, letting the talk cover whatever uncertainty she might still feel.

  I crossed the space between us and we stood close together.

  “Asa,” she said, “it’s been so goddamn long.”

  Then she was in my arms and it seemed strange that she should be there: this woman who had stepped out of a long, black car in this Wisconsin evening across two decades of time. How hard it was to equate her with the gaily laughing girl of that Mideastern dig, where we had slaved together to uncover the secrets of an ancient tumulus that, finally, turned out to be of slight importance—I digging and sifting and uncovering, while she labeled and tried to somehow identify the shards and other prehistoric junk laid out on long tables. That hot and dusty season had been far too short. Laboring together during the day, we slept together on those nights when we could elude the notice of the others, although, toward the end, I remembered, we had ceased being careful of the others, who had not really seemed to care or to take notice of us.

  “I had given up ever seeing you again,” I said. “Oh, I thought of it, of course, but I couldn’t bring myself to break in on you. I told myself you had forgotten. I told myself you wouldn’t care to see me. You’d be polite, of course, and we’d exchange some silly, stilted talk, and then it would be the end, and I didn’t want to end it that way. I wanted the memories to stay, you see. I had heard ten years or so ago that you’d gone into some sort of import-export business, then I lost all track of you.…”

  She tightened her arms around me and lifted her face to be kissed, and I kissed her, perhaps not with the excitement I might once have felt, but with deep thankfulness that we were together once again.

  “I am still in business,” she said. “Import-export business, if you want to call it that; but shortly, I think, I will
be getting out of it.”

  “It’s a little silly, standing here,” I said. “Let’s sit down underneath the tree. It’s a pleasant place. I spend a lot of evenings here. If you’d like, I could rustle up some drinks.”

  “Later on,” she said. “It’s so peaceful here.”

  “Quiet,” I said. “Restful. The campus, I suppose, could be called peaceful, too, but this is a different kind of peace. I’ve had almost a year of it.”

  “You resigned your university post?”

  “No, I’m on sabbatical. I’m supposed to be writing a book. I’ve not written a line, never intended to. Once the sabbatical is over, it’s possible I’ll resign.”

  “This place? Is this Willow Bend?”

  “Willow Bend is the little town just up the road, the one you drove through getting here. I lived there once. My father ran a farm-implement business at the edge of town. This farm, this forty acres, was once owned by a family named Streeter. When I was a boy, I roamed the woods, hunting, fishing, exploring. This farm was one place that I roamed, usually with friends of mine. Streeter never minded. He had a son about my age—Hugh, I think his name was—and he was one of the gang.”

  “Your parents?”

  “My father retired a number of years ago. Moved out to California. My father had a brother out there and my mother a couple of sisters up the coast. Five years or so ago, I came back and bought this farm. I’m not returning, as you may think, to my roots, although this place, Willow Bend and the country hereabout, has some happy associations.”

  “But if you’re not returning to your roots, why Willow Bend and why this farm?”

  “There was something here I had to come back and find. I’ll tell you about it later, if you’re interested. But about yourself—in business, you say.”

  “You’ll be amused,” she told me. “I went into the artifact and fossil business. Started small and grew. Mostly artifacts and fossils, although there was some gem material and some other stuff. If I couldn’t be an archaeologist or a paleontologist, at least I could turn my training to some use. The items that sold best were small dinosaur skulls, good trilobites and slabs of rock with fish imprints. You’d be surprised what you can get for really good material—and even some that is not so good. Couple of years ago, a breakfast cereal company came up with the idea that it would be good promotion to enclose little cubes of dinosaur bone in their packages as premiums. They came to me about it. Do you know how we got the dinosaur bone? There was a bed out in Arizona and we mined it with bulldozers and front-end loaders. Hundreds of tons of bones to be sawed up into little cubes. I don’t mind telling you I’m a bit ashamed of that. Not that it wasn’t legal. It was. We owned the land and we broke no laws, but no one can ever guess how many priceless fossils we may have ruined in the process.”

  “That may be true,” I said, “but I gather you have little use for archaeologists or paleontologists.”

  “On the contrary,” she said, “I have high regard for them. I would like to be one of them, but I never had a chance. I could have gone on for years, the way you and I went out into that godforsaken dig in Turkey. I could have spent all summer digging and classifying and cataloging, and when the dig closed down, I could have spent more months in classifying and cataloging. And in between times, I could have taught moronic sophomores. But did I ever get my name on a paper? You bet your life I didn’t. To amount to anything in that racket, you had to be at Yale or Harvard or Chicago or some such place as that and even then, you could spend years before anyone took any notice of you. There’s no room at the top, no matter how hard you work, or how you scratch and fight. A few fat cats and glory-grabbers have it all nailed down and they hang on forever.”

  “It worked out pretty much that way for me as well,” I told her. “Teaching in a small university. Never a chance to do any research. No funds for even small-time digs. Now and then, a chance to get in on a big one if you applied early and were willing to do the donkey work of digging. Although I’m not really complaining. For a time, I didn’t really care too much. The campus was safe and comfortable and I felt secure. After Alice left me—you knew about Alice?”

  “Yes,” she said, “I knew.”

  “I don’t think I even minded that much,” I said. “Her leaving me, I mean. But my pride was hurt and, for a time, I felt I had to hide away. Not here, I don’t mean that, and now I’m over it.”

  “You had a son.”

  “Yes, Robert. With his mother in Vienna, I believe. At least, somewhere in Europe. The man she left me for is a diplomat—a professional diplomat, not a political appointee.”

  “But the boy, Robert.”

  “At first, he was with me. Then he wanted to be with his mother, so I let him go.”

  “I never married,” she said. “At first, I was too busy, then, later, it didn’t seem important.”

  We sat silently for a moment as the dusk crept across the land. There was the scent of lilacs from the misshapen, twisted clump of trees that sprawled in one corner of the yard. A self-important robin hopped sedately about, stopping every now and then to regard us fixedly with one beady eye.

  I don’t know why I said it. I hadn’t meant to say it. It just came out of me.

  “Rila,” I said, “we were a pair of fools. We had something long ago and we didn’t know we had it.”

  “That is why I’m here,” she said.

  “You’ll stay a while? We have a lot to talk about. I can phone the motel. It’s not a very good one, but …”

  “No,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I’m staying here with you.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I can sleep on the davenport.”

  “Asa,” she said, “quit being a gentleman. I don’t want you to be a gentleman. I said stay with you, remember.”

  THREE

  Bowser lay quietly in his corner, regarding us with accusing, doleful eyes as we sat at the breakfast table.

  “He seems to have recovered,” said Rila.

  “Oh, he’ll be all right,” I told her. “He’ll heal up fast.”

  “How long have you had him?”

  “Bowser has been with me for years. A sedate city dog to start with, very correct and pontifical. Chased a bird sedately every now and then when we went out for a walk. But once we came here, he changed. He became a roustabout and developed a mania for woodchucks. Tries to dig them out. Almost every evening, I have to go hunting him and haul him out of the hole he’s dug, with the woodchuck chittering and daring him from deep inside his burrow. That’s what I thought Bowser was doing last night.”

  “And see what happened when you didn’t go to find him.”

  “Well, I had more important things to do, and I thought it might do him good to leave him out all night.”

  “But, Asa, it was a Folsom point. I can’t be mistaken. I’ve seen too many of them and they are distinctive. You said some kid might have got hold of it, but I know no kid could mount it on the shaft the way that it is mounted. And you said something about dinosaur bones.”

  “I told you he was a time-traveling dog,” I said. “Impossible as that sounds.”

  “Asa Steele, you know that’s impossible. No one can travel in time, least of all a dog.”

  “All right. Explain fresh dinosaur bones.”

  “Maybe they weren’t dinosaur bones.”

  “Lady, I know dinosaur bones. I taught paleontology at the college and dinosaurs became a sort of hobby for me. I read all the papers I could lay my hands on and one year we picked up some dino bones for the museum. I mounted the damn things. I spent one entire winter stringing all those bones together and making artificial skeletal details that were lacking, coloring them white so no one could accuse us of faking anything.”

  “But, fresh!”

  “Shreds of flesh still clinging to them. Some gristle and tendons. The meat was getting high. So was Bowser. Apparently, he had found a decaying carcass and had rolled in it, picking up all that lovely scent. It took thre
e days of scrubbing him to get the stench out of him. He was so high there was no living with him.”

  “All right, then, if you say so. How do you explain it?”

  “I don’t. I’ve gotten so I don’t even try. For a time, just to show you, I toyed with the idea that maybe a few smallish dinosaurs had survived into modern times and that Bowser had somehow found one that had died. But that doesn’t make any more sense than a time-traveling dog.”

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Who is there?” I yelled.

  “It’s Hiram, Mr. Steele. I came to see Bowser.”

  “Come on in, Hiram,” I said. “Bowser’s in here. He had an accident.”

  Hiram stepped inside, but when he saw Rila at the table, he started to back out. “I can come back later, Mr. Steele,” he said. “It was just that I didn’t see Bowser outside.”

  “It’s all right, Hiram,” I told him. “The lady is Miss Elliot, a friend of mine I haven’t seen for a long time.”

  He shuffled in, snatching off his cap, clutching it with both hands to his chest.

  “Pleased to meet you, miss,” he said. “Is that your car outside?”

  “Yes, it is,” said Rila.

  “It’s big,” said Hiram. “I never saw as big a car. And you can see your face in it, it shines so nice.”

  He caught sight of Bowser in the corner and hurried around the table to kneel beside him.

  “What’s the matter with him?” he asked. “He’s got all the hair off one of his hams.”

  “I cut it off,” I told him. “I had to. Someone shot him with an arrow.”

  The explanation wasn’t exactly correct, but it was simple enough for Hiram to understand and not start asking questions. Arrows he knew about. A lot of kids in town still had bows and arrows.

  “Is he bad hurt?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Hiram bent and wrapped an arm around Bowser’s shoulders. “That ain’t right,” he said. “Going around and shooting dogs. There ain’t no one should shoot a dog.”