Day of the Predator

CHAPTER 52

Clay tablets, five of them, buried deep in mud and sand, silently count the passing of years. Above, as they slumber in their own dark tombs, tides rise and fall, and individual layers of mud dotted with the decaying bones of generations of creatures accumulate like the rings of a growing tree.

Two hundred and seventy-six thousand, nine hundred and two years after a group of Homo sapiens placed them in the ground, the planet Earth shudders under the impact of a rock the size of Manhattan travelling at forty thousand miles an hour. A wave of incinerating energy spirals hundreds of miles out and tidal waves engulf millions of miles of lowlands across the world. The sky turns dark for the best part of a decade. A ten-year night in which almost all of life on land vanishes, except hardy small rodents from which those very same Homo sapiens will one day descend.

The giants of the plains die off quickly, first the plant-eaters, then the predators. A holocaust followed by a nuclear winter. Massive extinction on an unimaginable scale.

Yet through this five tablets lie still, and dark and oblivious.

In the aftermath of the asteroid impact, the Palaeogene period begins: a vast stretch of time, forty million years in which mountain ranges are born, live and die. A period in which a vast inland sea riding up a backbone of hills that will one day be called the Rockies recedes, surrendering ground that has only ever known the darkness of a seabed, ground that will one day have names like Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico.

The dinosaurs are long gone, now nothing more than fossils waiting silently, like the tablets, for the constant attrition of erosion, the movements of ground, to finally push them near the surface and sunlight, again.

Above, in the world of daylight, a brand-new ecosystem exists, a world utterly rewritten. It is a cooler one than the tropical world of the dinosaurs, and the small hardy rodents have grown, evolved, diversified and cover the land with a million different mammal species, many of which a traveller from the present might even begin to recognize.

Near the end of this era, one of the five tablets, now no more than an impression on the surface of a stratum of sandstone, is lost forever when a minor earthquake fractures and grinds the strata to loose gravel. The subtle etchings of words and numbers imprinted from the long-gone clay tablet, erased.

Four companions, however, live on, still separated after so many millions of years by the same distance that existed between them the day they were buried, mere hundreds of yards apart.

Around twenty million years pass and the Palaeogene period becomes the Neogene. The world grows cooler, and for the first time, for a long time, ice-caps begin to form at the polar north and south. Species of grass colonize the land in a way that prehistoric ferns could only dream of, and small four-legged mammals that will one day look very different and be known as ‘buffaloes’ graze blissfully upon it.

Around seven million years ago, the hard-rimmed hoof of one of these small grazing creatures catches the tip of a broken slab of sandstone, and pulls it out of the ground. It lies there in the darkness of night, moonlight picking out strange and subtle patterns of raised markings on one side. But the roaring of a night predator spooks the herd. As one, they surge away from the sound, and the night is filled with the rumble of thousands of hooves on hard-baked soil.

By dawn the curious slab of sedimentary rock is no more than dust and fragments, destroyed by thousands of trampling beasts.

Three silent witnesses remain as endless aeons pass in darkness, like the soft ticking of an impatient clock. Above ground, one species of rodent that took to the trees during the early Palaeogene, has finally ventured down to the ground once more to forage for food as the Neogene era begins. It is larger, with a more muscular frame and a head larger in proportion to its tree-climbing ancestors. It’s a species that will one day, in another more million years, be known as ‘ape’.

In 11,000 BC, early one morning as warm sun spills across a plain, a young Indian brave carefully scouting the grazing buffalo ahead runs his hand over the coarse grass and dislodges the sharp corner of a stone. A chunk of flint emerges from the orange soil, a flint, he notices, with curious markings on it.

For a moment the markings incite his curiosity. They look deliberate. But then his mind moves on to the size of the flint itself. He can see how three separate tamahaken blades could be struck from it, and he thanks Great Father Sun for the find.

Now only two silent messengers remain.

In 1865, a young Confederate lieutenant on the run from Union forces, leading a ragtag band of soldiers unwilling to accept that the civil war is over, rests his aching back against a rock. With tired eyes, too old for such a young face, he watches the languid river in front of him as his fingers twist through coarse grass. And, yes, they find the sharp edge of a stone. Before the war he was a student of history, and the faint lines of writing on the stone fascinate him. He puts the curious piece of rock in his saddle-bag and resolves to take it to a professor of natural history he once knew in Charleston when he eventually can. But later that same day the Union cavalry regiment finally catches up with the lieutenant and his men. And before the sun has set they — soldiers and officer — lie in a shared unmarked grave not far away from the Paluxy River.

And so just one last tablet remains.