Mastodonia

SIXTEEN

Hiram was in charge and being important about it.

“You see those stakes,” he said, pointing to three red-painted stakes standing in a row, one behind the other. “Those stakes mark the time hole. You just follow them and you’ll walk into it.”

He handed me a bundle of similarly painted stakes.

“When you get there,” he said, “don’t go running off without looking. Plant these stakes in front of the other end of the hole the way I lined up these three here.

That way you will know where the hole is when it’s time to come back.”

“But you have only three stakes here,” I said.

“I gave you more,” said Hiram, “because you may want to mark it better. Back there where you are going, things might be running over the stakes, but there’s no chance of that happening here. I made the stakes longer, too, and heavier, so you can pound them in real good.”

“Hiram,” Rila asked, “did you think this up all by yourself?”

“Sure I did. There was nothing to it. And don’t you worry none. If you’re not back in a few days, I’ll send Bowser in to find you. He can lead you home. You remember, Mr. Steele, the time he led you home.”

“Indeed I do,” 1 said. “And, Hiram, thank you very much.”

”You be sure you stay right here,” Ben said to him.

“Don’t go wandering off. Keep an eye on this place.

Asa left enough food in the refrigerator so you won’t have to leave to eat.”

“Could I maybe leave long enough to go to the bathroom?”

“Yes, of course,” said Ben, “but be quick about it.

And don’t tell anyone what is going on. Not even if they come asking. Herb might come. He smells that something’s going on and he could get itchy. If anyone comes by and asks what those stakes are, say that you don’t know.”

“Once we’re gone,” said Rila, “he could even pull up the stakes.”

“No I can’t,” said Hiram. “What if I have to go through the hole to rescue you?”

“We won’t need any rescuing,” said Ben. “Even if we’re a little late, don’t worry. Don’t send Bowser in.

Don’t come in yourself.”

“If I have to come,” said Hiram importantly, “I’ll get together a posse.”

“Damn it, no!” yelled Ben. “Don’t do anything at all. You just stay here.”

“All right, Mr. Page,” said Hiram.

I looked at the other two and there seemed no reason that we shouldn’t start. Rila was loaded down with her camera equipment, and both Ben and I were carrying backpacks as well as the big rifles. In addition, Ben had a.30–06 slung over his shoulder. He was taking it because he said we would need a meat gun.

“I never go on a hunting trip,” he’d said, “that Idon’t shoot some meat. Living outdoors, we’ll need fresh meat.”

“But there are only lizards,” I’d said. “Dinosaurs and lizards and other things like that.”

“Who says lizards can’t be eaten?” he’d demanded, “Or even dinosaur. There are a lot of people who eat lizards. I read about it somewhere. Said they taste like chicken.”

So there we were, standing in a row, with me in the lead and Rila in the middle, Ben bringing up the rear.

“So let’s go,” I said. “One thing to remember. We may come out of the other end at night. Through millions of years, the length of the day would vary. And anyhow, Catface can’t be all that accurate. At the distance back in time we’re traveling, there’ll be some error. He’s aiming at seventy million years, but there might be an error of several years plus or minus, so you can understand …”

“Asa,” said Ben, “cut out the lecture. Let’s go.”

I stepped out, and although I didn’t look behind me, I knew the other two were following. 1 went down the line of bright red stakes, and when I passed the last one it seemed that something tripped me, but in one stride I caught my balance and was in a different place.

“Stay right where you are,” I told the other two.

“Keep facing in the same direction. We have to set these stakes out and there can’t be any slip-up.”

It wasn’t until I’d said all this that I gave myself the time to see where we were. That was something I should have reminded them about before we’d left, and I was in something of a panic that somehow we’d fouled up our direction and our placement. I was remembering the terror I had felt when I had had no idea how to get out of the Pleistocene.

It wasn’t night, as I had told them it might be.

Rather it was broad daylight, and even if I hadn’t known where we were going, I think I would have recognized the late Cretaceous.

It didn’t look much different than the Willow Bend we’d left. There were more trees, of course, but they were familiar trees: maples, birches and oaks, with a scattering of evergreens. But directly in front of us grew what appeared to be a huge pineapple with a multitude of fern-like branches sprouting out of it. A cycad, and a more primitive one than I would have expected to find, but the fact remained that only in the Cretaceous, in this latitude, would one find a cycad growing among the familiar trees of home.

“All right,” said Ben. “.Let’s start pounding in the stakes.”

I half turned and handed one back to him, then unshipped my belt axe and pounded in one myself.

Then I walked out a ways and pounded in another.

By the time we finished, we had six stakes pounded in a line. Ben walked along the row, pounding each succeeding stake a little deeper than the preceding one.

“There,” he said, “we’ll know what direction to go.

The taller stakes are nearer home.”

“A cycad,” Rila said to me. “They’ve always fascinated me. I bought a bunch of fossil ones several years ago.”

“A what?” asked Ben.

“A cycad. That crazy pineapple with a topknot.”

“A pineapple. Yeah, I see it. Is it really a pineapple?”

“No, it’s not,” said Rila.

Ben and I shucked out of our packs and eased them to the ground. Rila hung onto her camera junk.

“Now, look here,” said Ben. “You been fooling me.

Where are all them dinosaurs?”

“They’re around,” said Rila. “For instance, look over there on that ridge. There’s a herd of them.”

Ben squinted at the ridge. “But those are small,” he said. “No bigger than sheep.”

“Dinosaurs come in all sizes,” said Rila. “From chicken size on up. Those are herbivores. Too far away to identify.”

She and Ben must have sharper eyes than I do. I could just barely make them out. If some of them had not moved now and then in their grazing, I’d not have seen them at all.

The sun stood straight overhead. The air was warm, but not too warm, and a little breeze was blowing from the west. It reminded me of a day in early June before the summer heat clamped down.

First I had seen the home like trees, then the cycad.

Now I began to notice other things as well. The ground was covered, although not entirely, by dwarf laurel, sassafras and other little shrubs. Grass was growing in scattered patches — rough; tough grass and not too much of it — nothing like the grass of the Pleistocene that tried to cover every square inch of soil. I was surprised at the grass. There shouldn’t have been any. According to the textbooks, grass hadn’t shown up until much later, several millions of years later.

But here it was to show us how wrong we could be.

Here and there, at a distance, between the groves of home like trees, grew small patches of palmetto. W’e. stood, I knew, at the transition point between the early development of the deciduous trees and the dying out of the older, more primitive flora; the two here intermingled. Because the ground cover was not as extensive as it would be some millions of years into the future, when true grasses had developed and taken over, the ground was rough, pocked and runneled by small channels where the soil had washed away in sudden summer showers — if, in fact, this world had anything but summer. It was the kind of ground that could not be trusted. Every minute of the time that we were here, we’d have to watch our step. The shrubs would impede walking, and the channeled ground would offer unsure footing.

Ben bent and hoisted his packsack to his shoulder.

“We’d better look around for a place to camp,” he said. “Near water, if we can. Somewhere around here we should find a spring. Back home, there used to be a lot of springs. Remember, Asa, when we were boys.

But now, with the trees cut down and a lot of the land turned to pasture, most of them have dried up.”

I nodded. “We should find one without too much trouble. I’m trying to get the geography straightened out. The river is still over there, to the west and south, but its course has changed. Look, it runs straight now and hasn’t got a bend. It runs straight through the place where Willow Bend will stand.”

“I see,” said Ben. “Everything looks a little fuzzy, but I guess the hills and swales seem pretty much the same. We’ll get it straightened out.”

“This is ancient land,” said Rila. “There has been nothing to change it much between now and Willow Bend. No epicontinental seas. No glacial action. The Kansas Sea lies a good many miles to the west of us.

Except for possible lakes, we have no big bodies of water in the area. For that reason, we probably won’t find sauropods.”

I hoisted my pack and shrugged into it. Rila shifted her camera equipment to a more comfortable position.

With Ben in the lead and myself taking up the rear, We moved out. In a patch of shrubbery over to our right, something squeaked and ran, rustling through the underbrush. Perhaps, I thought, a small mammal.

There would be a lot of them here, mouse to rabbit size. There probably were rabbits, certainly opossum.

Maybe even squirrels. Hiding out against the more vicious beasts that roamed, watching to satisfy an ever-present hunger, these little scurriers would emerge from hiding ten million years or so from now to take over a world left empty by the massive extinction of the reptiles.

Ben led us toward the river, circling to the west-The walking was hard. You had to feel your way.

There was a tendency to watch underfoot, to see where you were walking. But if you did that, you couldn’t keep close watch, and here was a place where you knew instinctively you had to keep close watch of everything around you.

The gun was growing heavier and more awkward by the minute. I couldn’t find a comfortable way to carry it, and I wondered what the hell I’d do if some slavering carnivore should hove in sight and come thundering toward us. The pack was bad enough, but the gun was worse.

A turtle — a huge turtle — poked a head as big as a barrel out of a small grove of birches a few hundred feet away. The turtle poked its head out, paused, blinking at us, then kept coming. At the sight of it emerging from the birches, we froze. Ben brought up his gun halfway to the shoulder.

It looked like a turtle, faintly, but it was not a turtle, It didn’t have a shell; it had armor plate. And it kept on coming, blinking at us all the time, a nictitating. membrane flickering over and off its eyes. It waddled when it walked, and its short legs held it only a short distance off the ground.

To my right I could hear Rila’s camera whirring, but I didn’t look at her. I kept looking at the beast.

“It’s all right,” I said, hoping I was right. “It’s an ankylosaur. It’s not a predator.”

By now it was free of the birches — all fifteen feet of it. Its dragging tail had a massive bony club at the end of it.

The camera kept on with its whirring and now old armor-plate had stopped. It grunted at us and lifted that great club of a tail and beat it on the ground.

“I’ll be damned,” said Ben. “It’s warning us off.”

“It’s not scared,” I said. “Not of anything at all. Let one of the carnosaurs have a go at it, and it would give the carnosaur that tail right in the teeth.”

Deliberately the ankylosaur swung about, away from us, and sedately trundled off. Rila lowered her camera. “Let’s find that camping site,” said Ben.

A half-hour later we found it, a spring gushing out of a hillside, hidden by a patch of oaks and maples, mighty trees that made me think of an artist’s conception of the ancient English forests drawn to illustrate an old edition of Tennyson.

“It’s perfect,” said Ben. “We have protection. None of the big stuff can get at us easily, here among the trees.”

“Maybe we’re overestimating the ferocity of the carnosaurs,” I told him. “Maybe they don’t go for you on sight. We’ll seem strange to them, not like their usual prey. They might shy off from us. And another thing — there may not be many of them about.”

“Even so,” insisted Ben, “we won’t take any chances. We all stick together. No one goes wandering off. And we don’t take a thing for granted. When we get the camp set up, we’ll test-fire the guns.”

We quickly got the camp set up (a simple camp, with two small tents pitched underneath the trees), a fire pit dug, dead wood chopped, brought in and stacked, and our kits unpacked.

“You and I will take turns standing guard tonight,” Ben said to me. “We don’t want something blundering in on us.”

With the camp all tidy, Ben and I test-fired the guns.

“The thing to do,” said Ben, “is to hang in there easy. Don’t get tense, don’t stiffen up. Hold the butt to your shoulder, but don’t hug it too tight. There has to be a little play, but you have to have control of it so the butt doesn’t bounce off your shoulder and clip you on the chin. And lean into it. Not too far, but lean into it.”

Ben had no trouble. He’d fired big-caliber before, but none as big as the ones we carried. With me, it was a bit different. I’d never fired anything bigger than a .22, but I remembered what Ben had told me, and it didn’t go too badly. The first shot almost took my shoulder off and drove me back a step or two, but it didn’t knock me over. The second shot was better.

The third seemed quite natural. The fourth and last shot, I didn’t even notice the recoil. The big lone birch tree we had used as a target was chewed up by the impact of the bullets.

“That’s good,” said Ben approvingly. “You can’t let it hurt you too much. If you let it wallop you too hard, if you don’t stand up to it, you become afraid of it and you flinch each time you fire it. When that happens, you might just as well throw it at whatever’s coming at you. Flinching, you can’t hit the broad side of a barn at thirty paces.”

“Asa,” Rila said softly, off to one side.

I turned and saw that she was sitting cross-legged on the ground, her elbows resting on her knees to hold the binoculars steady. “Come take a look,” she said.

“There’s a lot of stuff out there. Small groups and loners, but they blend into the background and are hard to see. Look over there, just to the left of the little group of four trees on the ridge running back from the river.”

She handed me the binoculars, but they were so heavy that standing, I couldn’t hold them steady. I had to sit down and use my knees to support my elbows, as she had been doing.

It took a while to pinpoint what she wanted me to see, but finally I caught the thing in the field and fiddled with the adjustment wheels to bring it more sharply into focus. It was in a squatting position, resting, reared back with its knees flexed so that its great tail gave it support. The huge body was almost upright and the ugly head kept swinging from side to side as if keeping watch of the countryside.

“What do you think?” asked Rila. “A tyrannosaur?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t be sure.”

The trouble, of course, was that no one could be sure. All we had ever seen of any of the dinosaurs were their bones, plus, in a few instances, fossil mum-mies with part of the skin intact. Our visual impressions of them came from artists’ conceptions, which were fine, so far as they went, but couldn’t even pretend to be sure of many details.

“Not rex,” I said. “The forelegs are too big. Maybe a trionychid. Maybe another kind of tyrannosaur we’ve never found a fossil of; we can’t be sure we’ve found the fossils of all the different kinds of tyrannosaurs. But whatever he is, he’s a big brute. Sitting up there resting, taking it easy, looking around for something that’s worth his while to gobble up.”

I kept on watching the brute. Except for his swinging head, he did not stir.

“The forelegs are too well developed,” said Rila.

“That’s what puzzled me. If we were a few million years farther back, I’d be tempted to say it’s an allosaur. But up here there aren’t supposed to be any allosaurs. They died out long ago.”

“Maybe not,” I told her. “We’re acting as if we knew the entire history of the dinosaurs from the fossils we have found. If we find one dinosaur in an old stratum and find him in none after that, we’re inclined to say he became extinct. What could happen is that we simply failed to look in the right place to find him in the younger strata. Allosaurs could have existed up to the very end.”

I handed the glasses to Ben, pointing out the clump of trees, “Over to the left of them,” I said.

“Asa,” said Rila, “I want some film of him. He’s the first big thing I’ve seen.”

“Use the telephoto lens,” I said. “That will catch him.”

“I have,” she answered, “but it comes up awfully fuzzy. At least, what I can see does. I suppose on the film as well. To convince the safari people, to get them all fired up, I have to have something sharp and close.”

“We can try to get closer,” I said. “He’s a long way from here, but we can have a try.”

“The beggar’s moving off,” said Ben. “Going up the ridge. He is moving fast. Maybe he spotted something he’s after.”

“Damn it,” said Rila bitterly. “It was you guys and your test-firing. It made him uneasy.”

“He didn’t look uneasy to me,” I said. “He was just sitting there. From this distance, the firing would not have been very loud.”

“But I’ve got to get some big stuff,” said Rila.

“We’ll find it,” I said, trying to comfort her.

“There is a lot of little stuff out there,” she said.

“Ostrich dinosaurs and small herds of little fellows, turkey size or so. A few ankylosaurs. A few small horned varieties. All sorts of lizards. Some big turtles down by the river, but who cares for big turtles? Some flying reptiles. Pterosaurs, I suppose. Some birds. But nothing spectacular.”

“It would be senseless to go chasing after that big fellow,” Ben said. “He was traveling fast. Like he knew where he was going. By the time we get out there, he’ll be clear out of the country, the rate that he was going. We can take a small stroll, if that is what you want. Maybe we can stir up something. But we shouldn’t go too far. It’s getting well into the afternoon and we should be back here well before night sets in.”

“We’ll likely be safer after dark than at any other time,” I told him. “I doubt that any of the reptiles would move around too much once the sun has set.

They get lethargic then, or are supposed to. They’re cold-blooded. Their temperature tolerance is narrow.

They take shelter at noon when the sun gets hot, and don’t move around much when the temperature falls at night.”

“You are probably right,” said Ben. “Undoubtedly, you are. You know about such things. But me, I’ll feel more comfortable at night in camp with a good fire going.”

“We can’t be absolutely sure about dinosaurs not moving around at night,” said Rila. “For one thing, we can’t be sure that even with the sun gone the temperature will fall a great deal. And another thing, there is some evidence that dinosaurs may not be cold-blooded. There is a fairly persuasive opinion among some paleontologists that they were, in fact, warm-blooded.”

She was right, of course — there was some evidence of warm bloodedness. I had read some of the argument and had not been impressed with it. I didn’t say so, though. Apparently Rila did accept it and this was no place to get into an academic argument.

Somewhere to the north, something began to bellow.

We stood and listened to it. It didn’t get any nearer, nor did it recede; the bellowing just kept on. Everything else fell silent, and in between the bellows, there was nothing to be heard. We had not been aware of the background noise before, but now we noticed the absence of other sounds, of the grunting, feeble honking, the multitude of different squeaks.

“Wonder if that’s our pal from over on the ridge?”

asked Ben.

“It could be,” said Rila, “It could be something else.”

“I didn’t know dinosaurs made sounds.”

“No one knew. The general belief, I think, has been that they were silent creatures. Now we know they’re noisy.”

“If we climb the hill,” said Ben, “once we get to the top, we may be able to spot this bellower.”

We climbed the hill, but we didn’t find the bellower.

The bellowing quit before we reached the hilltop. A search with the glasses failed to pick up anything big enough to have been making all that noise.

We didn’t find the bellower, but we stirred up a lot of life. Small bands of ostrich dinosaurs that looked for all the world like six-foot naked birds went racing away from us. A grunting bunch of little horned monsters, two feet at the shoulder, waddled away from a patch of ground they had torn up with their horns in search of roots and bulbs. Snakes slithered out from beneath our feet. We raised a flock of grotesque, awkward birds, the size of grouse or maybe a little bigger, that fluttered protestingly. They were funny-looking things. Their feathers seemed to be put on wrong, and they were not good at flying. A little distance off, we saw a few iguanodons standing six feet high or so.

They should have been much bigger; more than likely, according to the fossil record, they shouldn’t have been there at all. They were flabby, evil-looking beasts, and when they opened their mouths, they showed fine sets of teeth. There was no question they were meat-eaters. Those teeth were never made to deal with vegetation. We edged up close to them, Ben and I on the alert, rifles ready. I was braced for a charge, but they weren’t sore at anyone. They regarded us sleepily and suspiciously for a time, then they wheeled about and went lumbering off.

During the afternoon, Rila’s camera kept up an almost ceaseless whirring. She used up a lot of film, having to stop every now and then to reload. But except for iguanodons, she wasn’t getting anything big.

As we turned to go home, Ben pointed at the sky.

“Look there,” he said.

He was pointing at a flock of birds far off. There must have been a hundred of them, looking like black gnats in the sky, flying east.

I focused the glasses on them and, although they remained fairly small, there was no mistaking them.

“Pterosaurs,” I said. “There must be big water out there somewhere.”

The sun was only an hour or so above the horizon when we turned back for camp. Halfway there, we ran head-on into a group of six ostrich dinosaurs. They hesitated at the sight of us, began to turn away. Ben thrust his elephant gun at me. “Hang onto this for a minute,” he said.

He lifted the shoulder strap of the.30–06, and as he swung around, the ostriches were off, running fast with their powerful, swinging stride. Ben’s rifle came up and he swung it, following them. It coughed with a flat vicious sound, and one of the fleeing dinosaurs spun head over heels. It landed on its back and its slender legs stuck up in the air, kicking.

“Supper,” Ben said, grinning. He slung the strap of the smaller rifle over his shoulder and reached out for the one I was holding for him.

“Did you get it?” he asked Rila.

“I got it,” she said grimly. “It’s on film. The first dinosaur kill.”

Ben grinned even more broadly. “What do you know about that.‘“he said.

We walked to the kill. Ben leaned the big gun against it and took a knife out of the belt sheath.

“You grab hold of the leg,” he told me, “and pull.”

Still hanging onto my gun with one hand, I grasped the leg with the other and pulled. Ben’s knife made quick, expert slices, cutting around the ham.

“All right,” he said. He grasped the leg with both hands and twisted savagely. It came free, but some muscles still held. He slashed twice more and the quarter was severed from the body.

“I’ll carry it,” I said. “You have the extra gun.”

He grunted. “We could take the other leg, but this should be enough. No use trying to get meat ahead.

It will only spoil,”

“How do you know this will be good to eat?” I asked.

“It won’t poison us,” he said. “If we don’t like it, we can throw it out and fry up some bacon.”

“We won’t have to throw it out,” said Rila. “It will make good eating.”

“How can you be so sure of that?” I asked.

“We eat chicken, don’t we?”

“I may be stupid,” said Ben, “but what have chickens got to do with it?”

“Chickens are close to dinosaurs. The closest thing we have today. Direct descendants, if you stretch a point or two.”

Stretch a point or two, indeed, I told myself, but I kept my mouth shut. She was not, of course, entirely wrong. I had kept quiet about the warm-bloodedness, I told myself, and for the sake of harmony, I might as well keep quiet about this one, too.

We didn’t throw it out. It tasted good. It faintly resembled veal, but it wasn’t veal, either. It had a sweet, succulent taste all its own. We ate a lot of it.

We built up the fire after the cooking was done and sat beside it. Ben broke out a bottle of whiskey and poured into our coffee cups. “A small drink,” he said.

“A hunter’s drink. Just enough for us to feel a little warm and happy. Something to warm the gut.”

He handed us the cups and put the bottle away.

We sat there sipping at it, and the world was good.

We were snug beside the fire and we had film and everything was all right. We didn’t do much talking.

With the tramping we had done, we were too tired to talk.

In the underbrush around us, we heard rustlings and squeakings.

“It’s the mammals,” said Rila. “Poor little scurriers, they hide out all day.”

“Don’t feel pity for them,” said Ben. “They’ll make out all right. They’ll still be here when the dinosaurs and all the rest of them are gone.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” she said.

“We ought to be getting some sleep. I’ll take the first watch,” he said to me. “I’ll wake you at…” He looked at his watch. “Hell, it says four o’clock. It would. Our time is no good here. Anyhow, I’ll wake you in four hours or so.”

“There are three of us,” said Rila.

“You get your sleep,” he said. “Asa and I can take care of it.”

We had set up the tents, but it was good weather and we didn’t use them. We spread out our bedrolls and lay down. It took me a long time to go to sleep, although I tried to. We had a hard day coming up.

Ben sat by the fire for a while, then picked up the heavy gun and walked toward the edge of the grove.

All around us in the grove, the little rustlings and squeakings continued. There must be, I thought, a lot more little skittering mammals in this world than anyone had suspected.

“Asa,” Rila said, “are you asleep?”

“You go to sleep,” I said. “It will be a rough day tomorrow.”

She didn’t say any more and I lay there, drifting, encouraging myself to drift, and, finally, I must have gone to sleep, because the next I knew Ben was shaking me by the shoulder. I threw back the blanket and got up.

“Everything all right?” I asked.

“Nothing’s happening,” he said. “It’ll be dawn before too long.”

“You stood more than your share of the watch.”

“I couldn’t sleep, anyway,” he said. “Too excited.

But I’m tired. Maybe I can now. If you don’t mind, I’ll use your bedroll. No sense in unrolling mine.”

He kicked off his boots and got into the bedroll, pulled the blanket over him. I walked over to the fire, which was burning briskly. Ben apparently had put a few sticks of wood on it just before he’d wakened me.

Some of the squeaking and rustling had died down and everything was quiet. It was still dark, but the feel of the air said that dawn was coming. Off somewhere out beyond the grove something began cheeping. I figured it was a bird — or birds, rather, for there seemed to be a lot of cheeping, more than one thing cheeping.

I tucked the rifle under my arm and walked out to the edge of the grove. The surrounding countryside was half lighted by a pale sickle Moon.

Nothing seemed to be moving and then, down in the narrow flatness of the river valley, something did move. I couldn’t make out what it was. The movement had stopped, but suddenly it moved again. In a moment, I told myself, when my eyes became adapted to the darkness, I would make out what it was.

Ten minutes or so later, it seemed to me that I could make out a number of dark lumps in the valley. I tried to concentrate to make out what they were. They remained dark lumps, but now there seemed to be fleeting reflections as well, the momentary reflection of the thin moonlight off something that was moving. All this time, the cheeping kept on, and it seemed to me that it came from the valley, that there was more and more of it, and that it was getting louder. It was a tricky sort of sound and hard to place. But I could almost have sworn that it was the lumps that were cheeping.

I squatted down and watched, but I couldn’t see much — just those lumps that seemed at times to be moving, although if they were moving, they weren’t getting anywhere.

I don’t know how long I squatted there, but it was a long time. Something held me there, watching whatever was moving in the valley. The eastern sky began to lighten, and behind me, in the grove, a bird twittered sleepily. I turned my head to look at the grove, and when I looked back at the valley again, it seemed to me that I could see those black lumps more distinctly than I had before. They were bigger than I had thought they were at first, and they were just ambling about, not all of them at once, but one or two of them moving and stopping, then another one or two moving.

They looked to me like cattle grazing, and thinking this, I knew that whatever might be down there were doing exactly that — grazing. A herd of grazing dinosaurs.

Whether it was thinking in this direction or because the light of the still hidden sun had imperceptibly intensified, I was able quite suddenly to make out what they were: triceratops, a herd of triceratops.

Now that I knew what they were, I could make out the flaring frills and the whiteness of the two horns that sprouted and thrust forward just above the eyes.

I rose slowly and cautiously — perhaps more cautiously than was necessary, for at my distance, there was little chance of spooking them — and went back to camp.

I knelt and shook Rila’s shoulder and she murmured sleepily, “What now?”

“Wake up,” I said. “Easy. No noise. We’ve a herd of triceratops.”

She came up out of the blanket, still only half awake.

“Triceratops,” she said. “Horns and everything?”

“A herd of them. Down in the valley. Like a herd of buffalo. I don’t know how many.”

Ben rose up, sitting on his bedroll, scrubbing at his eyes with doubled fists. “What the hell is going on?”

he asked.

“Triceratops,” said Rila. “Asa spotted them.”

“Those are the ones with the horns growing out of their face?”

“That is right,” I said.

“Big brutes,” said Ben. “They have a skeleton of one in the Science Museum at St. Paul. I saw it several years ago.”

He stumbled to his feet and picked up the gun.

“Well, let’s go get them,” he said.

“It’s too dark yet,” I said. “We have to wait for light. Let us have some breakfast first.”

“I don’t know,” said Rila. “I don’t want to miss them. A herd of them? You said a herd of them, didn’t you? Regular triceratops, not some of those little horned fellows we found yesterday?”

“Big,” I said. “I couldn’t make out how big, but they are good-sized. If you two want to go out and keep an eye on them, I’ll cook some eggs and bacon.

When it’s done, I’ll bring it out to you.”

“Be careful,” warned Rila. “Don’t make any noise.

Don’t go banging pots.”

The two of them left and I dug out the eggs and bacon, got the coffee started and settled down to cooking. When I took their plates and the coffee pot out to them, it was beginning to get light. The triceratops were still there, down in the river valley.

“Did you ever in your life,” asked Rila, “see anything so beautiful?”

For a fact, the herd was quite a sight. For a couple of miles up and down the river, the valley was simply covered by them. They were busy cropping at the grass and low-growing ground cover. There were some young ones, not much bigger than hogs, and others slightly larger that I took to be yearlings, but there were a lot of big ones. From where we sat, the big ones appeared to be five feet tall or more, and including their tails, perhaps twenty feet in length. The massive frills made their heads appear enormous. They kept up their contented cheeping.

“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 direction 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.”