Mastodonia

by Clifford D. Simak

  “How do we get at them?” I asked.

  “We walk toward them,” said Ben. “Walking slow. Making no sudden motions and no sound. If some of them look up at us, we stop. When they look away again, we move. It will take a lot of patience. Rila in the middle, with one of us on either side. If they should take a notion to come at us, Rila drops back, the two of us stand firm.”

  We finished eating and left the plates and coffee pot there, not bothering to take them back to camp. Then we began our stalk, if it could be called a stalk.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I said, “standing up like this in plain sight.”

  Ben disagreed with me. “If we hunkered down and tried to sneak up on them, we’d panic them. This way they can look us over and probably we don’t look too dangerous.”

  It was a slow business. We moved only a few steps at a time, stopping whenever some of the brutes lifted their heads from grazing to have a look at us. But it seemed that Ben was right. They didn’t appear to be too concerned with us.

  We stopped a couple of times to let Rila expose some film, panning the camera up and down the valley. We got to within fifty yards or so of them before they took any serious notice of us. A couple of the big bulls stopped their grazing and swung around to face us, heads held high, their wicked horns aimed straight at us. They snapped their sharp, recurved beaks at us. We stopped. To my left, I could hear the camera running, but I kept my eyes on the bulls, rifle lifted to ready. One motion would put it on my shoulder. Funny thing about it—it had proved a heavy thing to pack, but now it seemed to have no weight at all.

  The cheeping stopped. All the cheeping stopped. Those farther back in the herd lifted their heads and stared at us. The entire herd, somehow, had been put on alert.

  Ben spoke softly. “Start backing off. Slow. One step at a time. Be sure of your footing. Don’t stumble.”

  We started backing off.

  One of the big bulls rushed forward a few steps. I brought my gun to my shoulder. But after those few quick steps, he stopped. He shook his head at us savagely. We kept on backing off.

  Another bull made a rush, stopped as had the other one.

  “It’s bluff,” said Ben. “But let’s not push them. Keep on backing off.”

  The camera kept on purring.

  The two bulls stayed watching us. When we were a hundred yards away, or maybe slightly more, they swung about and trotted back to the herd. The rest of the herd resumed its grazing.

  Ben let out his breath in relief. “That was close,” he said. “We walked a bit too close.”

  Rila lowered the camera. “But it made good film,” she said. “This is what we need.”

  “You got enough?” I asked.

  “I think I have,” she said.

  “Then let’s get back,” I said.

  “Keep on backing for a while,” said Ben. “Don’t turn your backs just yet.”

  We backed up for a while longer, then turned around and walked toward the camp.

  Behind us, the cheeping grew in volume as the herd settled down to grazing. All was well again. The pestiferous intruders had been driven off and the triceratops could get back to business.

  I said to Ben, “Just how did you know we could walk up to them that way? How could you know what dinosaurs would do?”

  “I didn’t,” he said. “I took a chance. I figured they wouldn’t be much different than the animals of our time.”

  “But in our time,” I said, “you don’t walk up to a moose or mountain goat.”

  “No, of course you don’t,” he said. “Maybe you never could walk up on a moose or mountain goat. Now the animals know what we are and won’t let us get too close. But in the old days, before they’d met many men, you could walk up to herd animals. In Africa, the early ivory hunters walked up on elephants. In the old American West, before the hide-hunting days, a man could walk up on a herd of buffalo. There was a sort of invisible line that you couldn’t cross. Most of the old hunters could calculate the location of the line.”

  “And we went beyond the line?”

  Ben shook his head. “I don’t think we did. We reached it and they let us know. If we’d stepped across it, they would have charged.”

  Rila made a warning sound. We stopped in our tracks.

  “The cheeping,” Rila said. “They have stopped the cheeping.”

  We swung around and saw what had stopped the cheeping.

  Coming down the slope, a quarter-mile or so from us, heading for the herd, was a monstrosity that made me catch my breath: no other than old rex himself. There was no mistaking him. He didn’t look exactly as our twentieth-century artists had depicted him, but he was close enough that there was no mistaking him.

  The pitifully shrunken, ridiculous little forelegs dangled on his chest. The huge, muscular hind legs, ending in wide clawed feet, moved with elaborate deliberation, eating up the ground, driving the ponderous, vicious creature forward with a grim sense of unstoppable power. It was the head, however, that provided the real horror. Close to twenty feet above the ground, it was mostly jaws, the six-inch fangs gleaming in the early sunlight. Below the lower jaw hung an elaborate dewlap that no artist could have been aware of—a dewlap that displayed an awful, iridescent beauty. It shone in the sunlight with colors that seemed to ripple across its surface—purple, yellow, blue, red and green—ever-changing colors that reminded me momentarily of the stained glass windows I had seen at one time in an ancient church, and, in that moment, I was annoyed that I could not remember where I’d seen the church.

  Rila’s camera was making its purring noise and I took a step or two forward so I’d be between her and this great monstrosity. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Ben also was walking forward.

  “A tyrannosaur,” Rila was saying to herself, speaking in a prayerful whisper. “A real honest-to-God old tyrannosaur.”

  Down in the valley, the triceratops had stopped their feeding. Ringed in the forefront of the herd was a line of big bulls, almost shoulder to shoulder, facing the oncoming carnivore, forming a fence of flaring bony frills and outthrust horns.

  The tyrannosaur was angling toward us and by this time was considerably less than the quarter of a mile away he had been when we first had sighted him. He halted and stood for a moment, hesitant. It must be apparent to him, I thought, that he’d find no easy picking in this herd of triceratops. While the big bulls stood considerably less than half his height, their horns would reach well up into his gut. While he just possibly might be able to mangle one or two of them with his powerful jaws, they’d have him disemboweled before he could reach any of the others.

  He stood poised on those powerful hind legs, the massive tail sticking out behind him, barely clearing the ground, swinging his heavy head from side to side, as if he might be seeking a safer angle of attack.

  Then he must have caught sight of us, for suddenly he pivoted around on one of his legs, thrusting himself around to face us with a powerful stroke of the second leg. He started for us even as he pivoted, and with every step he made, he was twelve feet closer. I had the gun on my shoulder and was surprised to find that there wasn’t even a quiver in the barrels. When you have to get a job done, you often do it better than you think you can. I had it sighted just about the place where those tiny forelegs sprouted from the body, and I dropped the gun a little so it was aimed about the point where I thought the heart should be. The gun hammered at my shoulder, but I didn’t really hear it go off, and my finger slipped off the first trigger and found the second one. But there was no need to fire again. Out in front of me, the tyrannosaur was rearing back and falling over. At the edge of my vision, I caught sight of Ben and saw that a small trickle of smoke was issuing from one of the barrels of his gun. The two of us, I knew, had fired almost simultaneously, and two of those big bullets were more than the huge dinosaur could take.

  “Look out!” yelled Rila, and even as she yelled, I heard a crashing to my left.

  I swung in that direct
ion and saw another tyrannosaur bearing down upon us. He was far too close for comfort and was coming fast. Ben’s gun roared and, for a moment, the beast was thrown off its stride, sliding down the slope, but it recovered and came on. And now something inside of me said, it is up to you. Ben’s gun was empty and I had just the one cartridge left. The tyrannosaur’s head was coming down and the jaws began to open wide and there was no chance at a decent body shot. I don’t know how I did it. There was no time to think. What I did, I’m sure, was simple reflex, a natural and instinctive protective action. I aimed the gun right in the middle of that gaping mouth and pulled the trigger and out in front of and above me, the dinosaur’s head exploded and his body went tumbling to one side. I distinctly heard the thump and felt the vibrations in my feet when eight tons of flesh hit the ground not more than thirty feet away.

  Ben, who had thrown himself aside to escape the charge, was scrambling to his feet, clicking cartridges into the barrels. Behind me, the camera was running.

  “Well,” said Ben, “we know something now. The damn things hunt in pairs.”

  The second dinosaur was dead, its head torn from its body. It still twitched and kicked, striking out viciously with one clawed hind leg. The first one was trying to get to its feet, but tipping over and falling back each time it did. Ben walked down the slope toward it, fired another bullet into its chest, and it slumped into a mound of flesh.

  Rila walked slowly down the hill taking close-ups of the two dead beasts from several angles, then shut off the camera and lowered it. I opened my gun and reloaded, then tucked it under my arm.

  Ben came up the hill toward me. “I don’t mind telling you,” he said, “that I’m a bit shook up. That second one damn near ran me down. You got him in the head. You blew his fool head off.”

  “It was the only thing I could do,” I said. I didn’t mean to sound smug about it, but I couldn’t explain to him that some primitive sense of self-preservation had taken over for me—that it was not I who had blown off the dinosaur’s head, but some instinct that took over. I couldn’t explain it even to myself.

  “The other one, however, still has a head,” said Ben. “We ought to chop it off and haul it back. Just as proof.”

  “We have the proof,” I said. “Rila has the proof.”

  “I suppose so,” said Ben, “but it’s a shame. If you ever wanted to part with it, that head, mounted, would bring a lot of money.”

  “It probably weighs several hundred pounds,” I pointed out.

  “The two of us …”

  “No,” I said. “We have a couple of miles or more to go to find the stakes. We’d better start getting out of here.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  I gestured at the two dead dinosaurs. “Fifteen tons of meat,” I said. “All the scavengers will start flocking in. Every stinking meat-eater from miles around. By nightfall, their skeletons will be picked clean. I want to be out of here before they start arriving.”

  “It would give us some good film.”

  I said to Rila, “You have enough film? You are satisfied?”

  She nodded. “I never missed a lick—the killing of those two beasts. If that doesn’t convince Safari, Inc., nothing ever will.”

  “All right,” I said, in a tone of voice that told them I meant it, “we’re heading out for home.”

  “You’re chicken,” Ben told me.

  “So, I’m chicken. We have what we came for. We’re leaving while we can.”

  “I really think,” said Rila, “we should leave. I’m scared down to my toenails.”

  SEVENTEEN

  We had returned from the Cretaceous early Monday morning. It was Friday. A great deal had been going on in those four days. A start had been made on building the fence around the forty—high steel posts set in concrete, heavy wire fencing installed upon them and welded into place. Trenches were being dug along the interior perimeter of the fence to lay electric cable for the floodlights. Foundations had been poured for the administration building and lumber was being delivered. Ben’s motel was going up. Rila had left the day before for New York with the film that she had taken. Courtney McCallahan, the Washington attorney, was flying into New York to sit in with Safari, Inc., on the showing of the films. The films were to be developed in Safari’s laboratory, making it unnecessary to take them outside the organization.

  I had worked my tail off to get things going, with a lot of help from Ben. He had made a lot of the necessary contacts, had twisted arms and pleaded, had scrounged up gangs of workmen to turn loose on the projects. A lot of the men were no more than common laborers—farm boys, mostly—but Ben had found some competent foremen to place in charge as well, and things seemed to be going well.

  “The idea,” he had said, “is to get started and get the fence and administration building finished as soon as possible, before too many people begin asking questions. Once we get the fence up, they can ask all the questions that they want and, behind the fence, we can thumb our noses at them.”

  “But, Ben,” I had protested, “you have things to do yourself. You have your motel to be built and the bank to run. You have no direct interest in this deal.”

  “You’re borrowing a lot of money from me and the bank is earning interest,” he’d said. “You gave me an edge on starting the motel and I’ve been doing a lot of other things besides. I’ve bought up every acre around here that is loose. I picked up that farm to the east of you just the other day. Old Jake Kolb stuck me for more than he thought that it was worth, figured I was a sucker, buying it. What he doesn’t know is that it’ll be worth ten times more than I paid for it once your business here gets started. And you took me on that hunting trip after dinosaurs. I wouldn’t have missed that for the world. I would have paid you to take me on it. And I figure that before I’m through with it, you’ll let me in for a small percentage of this deal of yours.”

  “Let us get the business started first,” I’d said. “The whole thing may fall into a heap.”

  “Hell,” he’d said, “I don’t see how it can. This is the biggest thing that ever happened. Everyone, the whole world, will go mad over it. You’ll have more business than you can handle. You just hang loose. You keep an eye on things. If you need help, reach for the phone. I tell you, boy, the two of us have it made.”

  I was sitting in the kitchen talking with Hiram. The two of us were having a beer. It was the first sitting time I’d had since it all had started. I sat there, drinking my beer, feeling guilty at not doing anything, racking my brain to figure out if there was something that I should be doing.

  “Catface,” said Hiram, “is excited about what is going on. He asked about the fence and I tried to explain it to him. I told him once it was finished, he could make a lot of time holes and he was pleased at that. He is anxious to get started.”

  “But he could make time holes anytime he wanted. He could have been doing it all along. There was not a thing to stop him.”

  “It seems, Mr. Steele, that he can’t make time holes for just the fun of it. They have to be used or they aren’t any good. He made a few for Bowser, but there wasn’t much satisfaction in that.”

  “No, I don’t suppose there would be. Although Bowser had a lot of fun with them. He used one of them to bring home the dinosaur bones.”

  I went to the refrigerator to get another beer.

  “You want one?” I asked Hiram.

  “No, thank you, Mr. Steele. I don’t really like the stuff. I just drink it to be sociable.”

  “I asked you to talk with Catface about how big the time holes can be made. The Safari people will probably want to take in some trucks.”

  “He says it ain’t no problem. He says the holes are big enough to take anything at all.”

  “Did he close the one we used? I’d hate to have some of those dinosaurs stumbling through.”

  “He closed it,” Hiram said, “right after you got back. It’s been closed since then.”

  “Well, that is f
ine,” I said and I went on drinking beer. It was good just to be sitting there.

  Footsteps sounded on the steps outside and there was a knocking at the door.

  “Come on in,” I yelled.

  It was Herb Livingston.

  “Grab a chair,” I said. “I’ll get a beer for you.”

  Hiram got up. “Me and Bowser will go and look around outside.”

  “That’s all right,” I said, “but don’t move off the place. I may need you later on.”

  Bowser got up from his corner and followed Hiram out. Herb pulled the tab on the beer can and tossed it in the wastebasket.

  “Asa,” he said, “you’re holding out on me.”

  “Not you alone,” I said. “I’m holding out on everyone.”

  “Something’s going on,” Herb said. “And I want to know about it. The Willow Bend Record may not be the world’s greatest newspaper, but it’s the only one we have here, and for fifteen years, I have told the people what is happening.”

  “Now hold up, Herb,” I said. “I’m not going to tell you and you can yell at me and pound the table and I still won’t tell you.”

  “Why not?” he demanded. “We were boys together. We’ve known one another for years. You and me and Ben and Larry and the rest of them. Ben knows. You have told Ben something.”

  “Ask Ben, then.”

  “He won’t tell me anything, either. He says any information has to come from you. He gave out to start with, about this business of the fence, that he was putting it up for someone who was going into mink farming. But I know you aren’t going into mink farming. So the reason is something else. Someone else had the idea you found a crashed spaceship in that old sinkhole. One that crashed a thousand years ago. Is that what this is all about?”