Rivers of Time

IV Miocene Romance

Have we ever acted as Cupid in connection with one of these time safaris, Ms. Pierce? Not really. You see, early in the history of Rivers and Aiyar, Time Safaris, we decided not to mix the sexes on our safaris. Come to think, there was one case that involved a romance of sorts, but it wasn't our doing. In fact, it was done in spite of us. The Raja—my partner, Chandra Aiyar—and I should have bloody well nipped it in the bud had we known what was brewing. And it didn't turn out as you might expect.

We had enrolled a pair of clients named Swayzey, father and son—James and Lawrence Swayzey. Jim Swayzey, the older of the two, who was paying for this safari, had a reputation as a hunter in Present. You understand, I'm sure, that there are bloody few places left on Earth where there are any really wild game animals, not half tamed from being penned up in parks and preserves and watched over by rangers. The older Swayzey paid extra for bringing his taxidermist along, to prepare animal heads and other trophies.

A couple of days after the Swayzeys signed up, a dollybird bounced into our office—excuse me, Ms. Pierce? Oh, "dollybird" is just our Aussie way of saying "sweet young thing." Anyhow, in came this gorgeous, auburn-haired young woman, in her early twenties, giving the name of Willow Lamar and saying she wanted a place on the Swayzey safari. I explained our policy of not mixing the sexes on these jaunts through time, having had unfortunate experiences with such mixed groups. At that she waxed wroth, as they used to say, accusing us of rampant sexism and threatening a class-action suit, one of those quaint Yank institutions that lets anybody sue anyone for anything, to the vast enrichment of the legal profession.

"Go ahead," I said. "Our insurance company assures us their lawyers can handle it."

"Oh, hell!" she said. "I might have known you'd have taken legal precautions."

"We got good advice when we started," I said. "Anyway, you look a bit small and delicate for hauling a big-game rifle around the trackless prehistoric landscape. It's a bloody rough country, with nothing resembling a road."

"Oh, I wasn't going to hunt anything."

"Eh? What then? Photography? We've had some nice—"

"No. I represent the S.T.L.O."

"What's that?"

"The letters stand for 'Suffer the Little Ones.' It's an animal-rights group, opposed to all hunting. To kill an animal that doesn't threaten you is the same as murder."

"Oh, come off it!" I said. "Murder is what the law says it is, and by that definition it doesn't include hunting."

"We obey a higher law," she snapped, with a fanatical gleam in her pretty eyes.

"I find it all I can do to obey the lower laws," I said. "Anyway, what did you propose to do for your cause on this safari? Preach to the Swayzeys? Pa Swayzey gives the impression of being one bloody tough egg. He says hunting is the only proper sport for a he-man with his pants on."

"That wouldn't stop me," she said. "One method we've found effective is, when we see a hunter about to shoot some poor beast, we wave a flag and blow a whistle. Then almost any animal will run away."

"All the more reason for not taking you along," I said. Then, trying to talk her into a more reasonable frame of mind, I added: "You know, Miss Lamar, believe it or not, I'm a wild-life conservationist, too. I spend my own hard-earned money on organizations that try to protect endangered species, of which the Earth has lost hundreds in the last century. But the beasts my clients hunt on these time safaris are all long extinct anyway. Ending the safaris wouldn't bring any dinosaurs or mastodons back to life.

"In fact, some safaris have captured young extinct animals and brought them back to Present alive, so now they actually exist once again in Present."

My argument missed fire entirely. She said: "But you still foster hunting! It's not whether a species is threatened but the wrong in killing an individual animal that concerns us. Abuse is abuse regardless of the species!"

"Nowadays hunting is almost impossible anyway," I said. "That's why we go back in time."

"But it's still catering to sadistic instincts, left over from primitive times!" She practically spat the words at me. "Killing for fun is a crime against the universe!"

"Now, now, my dear young lady—"

"I'm not your dear young lady!"

"All right then, my good female, remember that hunting was the normal life of our ancestors, along with picking berries and nuts, for millions of years before the discovery of agriculture and the domestication of edible animals. Are you a vegetarian, by the way?"

"Of course!" she snapped.

"Well, you're at least consistent. But the species probably wouldn't have survived, and we shouldn't be ere arguing, without the occasional high-protein food our hunting-gathering ancestors brought in. That means meat. So—"

"Whether or not our ancestors hunted, there's no excuse for it now, when there's plenty of plant food to go round—"

"I don't know about that. Heard about the latest famine in Africa?"

"Oh, you're impossible!" and she flounced out of the office.

One condition in our contract with the Swayzeys was that both the Raja and I should go along on Jim Swayzeys safari. We had by that time begun alternating, one to man the office while the other led the hunting party. But we had no strong objections to our both going.

Jim Swayzey, I found, had a tendency towards imperial ideas, expecting to be attended at all times by flunkeys, the way your American Presidents move surrounded by a swarm of menials and assistants. The older Swayzey had become rich in the petroleum business and retired to devote his life to hunting. Since hunting was practically finished in Present, he gravitated to the time safaris of Rivers and Aiyar and a couple of other hunting-guide groups.

The day before departure, the Raja and I were in the building housing Professor Prochaska's time chamber and its vast mass of supporting equipment. Prochaska, a chunky little man with gray beard and mustache and a Middle-European accent, said:

"Mr. Rivers, do you know a young woman named Willow Lamar?"

"Slightly. Why?"

"She has been hanging around the building asking questions of me and the other chamber personnel. I like to show visitors the transition chamber, but this has become a nuisance."

"Well," I said, "at least this dollybird is easy on the eyes."

Prochaska snorted. "You may not be too old for such considerations, Mr. Rivers, but I most definitely am! Here comes the taxidermist of Mr. Swayzey, senior."

This fellow, a skinny young bloke named Fuller— Plautus Fuller—came in with a whole lorryload of equipment: cans of chemicals, worktables, instruments, and so on, mostly wrapped in black tarpaulins. I could see that this man and his apparatus would require at least one extra trip by the chamber to get him and his equipment back to the upper Miocene, the era we had targeted for the Swayzey safari.

I had little to do with this part of the operation. Beauregard Black, our longtime camp boss, got all this mass of stuff lined up so that it could be efficiently stowed in the chamber when the time came.

The next day, we joined the Swayzeys and Plautus Fuller in Prochaska's building for takeoff. Jim Swayzey was a big bloke, with a leathery skin, bristly gray hair, a Texan accent, and a pair of ice-cold gray eyes that didn't miss much. Larry Swayzey was about half his sire's age, of more average size, shape, and coloring, but handsome in a movie-actor sort of way.

Each brought a couple of big-game rifles—not dinosaur-killers like the Raja's and my double 600s, but there was no need for such heavy artillery in the period we were going to. No dinosaur, although some Creationist preachers insist there must have been dinosaur at that time and we just haven't looked hard enough for them. Since the transition chamber has to stay at the same latitude and longitude, regardless of how far it goes back in time, there's no way we can roam round the world to confirm or disprove their claims.

Anyhow, we trooped into the chamber with our packs and guns. Bruce Cohen shut the doors, twirled his dials, and pushed his buttons. Off we went, with all the usual nausea, vertigo, and general discomfort.

We were aimed for the upper Miocene, 13,500,000 years ago—about the time of the Hemphill and Blanco formations in Texas. At the stop, Cohen turned his handwheel, looking at his radar screen, and shouted to me over the roar of the machinery:

"Hey, Reggie! I think I got you a nice, easy landing this time! No seas or swamps or cliffs!"

One of our problems is that the surface of the ground changes over the eras. Since the chamber can't move horizontally, you have to take what you can get. If there's open water beneath the chamber, or a bottomless bog, or a slope too steep to set the thing down on, you just have to go on to another time until you find a site where you can ground the chamber safely.

As usual, the Raja and I hopped out first, guns ready. But no animals were in sight. The chamber alighted on the crest of a rise in slightly rolling country with an open forest—almost a savannah, like those that covered much of East Africa before it was taken over for farming. The vegetation was enough like that of modern Missouri and Illinois so you'd have to be a paleobotanist to tell the difference. It was mostly cedars, oaks, elms, walnuts, maples, ash, and other common deciduous trees. The rainfall here was not quite enough yearly to support a dense, continuous forest; but if we trekked east a few score kilometers, we should probably find ourselves in such a woodland.

Such a site would be less suitable for our purposes than this more open land. Some people think of a dense forest or jungle as swarming with animals. But it's not so; at least, as regards big game. The reason is that, if the rainfall is heavy enough to support such a flora, then most of the vegetable food is in the form of leaves up in the trees. So the plant eaters have to be able to climb up for their tucker.

The place you find the big herds of plant eaters, or did before people killed them off, are open, grassy plains, where there's plenty of green stuff on the ground where grazers can get at it. For the best game-rich conditions, you want a rainfall roughly between fifty and a hundred centimeters per year. If you have more, you get forest; if less, you get poor steppe or desert, neither of which supports the kind of fauna that hunters go balmy over.

The chamber disappeared with a whoosh as it went back to Present. An hour later it was back with Beauregard, his helpers Pancho and Bruno, and a train of a dozen asses—burros, you'd call 'em. It had to go back for Ming the cook and the camp equipment; and once more for Plautus Fuller and his taxidermic materials.

While Fuller and the crew were hauling Fuller's bundles out of the chamber and setting them up in the part of the campsite we had dedicated to taxidermy, Pancho suddenly shouted:

"Hey! ¡Estd viviente! This one is alive!"

We all stopped to stare at the bundle he had carried out of the chamber and dropped. The tarpaulin opened, and out stepped Miss Willow Lamar, in a new khaki safari suit and carrying an umbrella.

"Well," said Larry Swayzey, "dip me in guano!"

"Stone the crows!" I said.

"Jai Ram!" said the Raja.

' Dog my cats!" said Beauregard Black.

"Good God!" roared Jim Swayzey, in the kind of voice God might have used on Sodom and Gomorrah. "It's that little bitch from the S.T.L.O.! Think you're gonna spoil our fun, do you? I'll show you! I'll hog-tie you so you can't move!"

Jim started for Willow with his hands out to grab, ignoring a cry from young Larry: "Hey, Dad, you can't ..."

Willow ran away from Jim Swayzey, chortling: "You can't catch me, gramps!"

"We'll see!" yelled Swayzey, running for all he was worth. Both disappeared among the scattered trees, although we caught glimpses of them, getting smaller and smaller. Then they were entirely out of sight. Larry Swayzey said:

"Mr. Rivers, what's the meaning of this? Did you arrange for this wench to stow away in the time chamber?"

"Absolutely not!" I retorted. "I was as bloody surprised as you. It's the first time anyone has stowed away in Prochaska's chamber; have to see that a special guard is posted henceforth."

The building already had a night watchman. I suspect, though without any sort of proof, that Willow seduced this bloke with her alabaster body to sneak her in.

After some speculative chatter among young Swayzey, the Raja, Fuller the taxidermist, and me, I said: "Anyway, we'd better get the camp set up."

By the time this operation was finished, Jim Swayzey appeared, red in the face and walking slowly, as if his run had bloody nearly done him in.

"She got away," he mumbled.

I said: "Now look here, Mr. Swayzey, you signed an agreement to obey your guide's orders. That means not dashing off into the woods, unarmed, because of some bloody personal difference. You might have run into a bear-dog, which would have made short work of you."

"Personal differences!" he howled. "Here I been looking forward to this trip for years, and this crazy bitch comes along to ruin it, and you call it just a 'personal difference'!" (Excuse the expression, Ms. Pierce; I'm just giving a literal account.)

"Calm down, Dad," said Larry. "I'm sure Mr. Rivers would have stopped this if he'd known about it. What worries me is, what will she do for food and shelter?"

"Serves her right if she starves to death, or gets et by one of them bear-dogs," snarled Jim.

The Raja spoke up: "Mr. Swayzey, we really cannot let that sort of thing happen if we can stop it. It's just not done, you know."

"Maybe not by your fancy-pants kind," barked Jim, "but that wouldn't stop a real man!" (He did not add "like me," but I'm sure he thought it.)

I said: "What I'm thinking is, who's going to pay for her passage in the chamber?"

"Make her pay in trade," snarled Jim Swayzey. "You know, so much a screw."

"Sorry, sport," I said. "That won't work. I'm a married man and want to stay that way."

Larry said: "My guess is that hunger will bring her round. Since she's unarmed and doesn't believe in killing wild things, she can't live off the country."

"If she comes back," growled Jim, "it'll be on my goddam terms."

Altogether, the atmosphere at dinner that night was as miserable as a bastard on Father's Day. It wasn't lightened up by the distant flashes of lightning and growls of thunder. Sure enough, the rain began towards midnight and drummed on the canvas all night.

Next morning it was still pouring, with no sign of Willow Lamar. The schedule called for us to make a one-day trek after fresh meat and then pack up and head westward, where the Geological Survey maps for this period showed a big river flowing south, possibly the great-grandfather of the Mississippi.

You can't really identify any river you come across in periods earlier than the Pleistocene with any stream in Present, because the rivers shift their beds about the continent and even change their direction of flow from eon to eon. Often they just disappear.

Jim Swayzey wanted to set out on the meat hunt, downpour or not. He was in a fever of impatience to kill something, but I told him we would do no such fool thing. It would be as silly as a gum tree full of galahs. In this weather, it would be easy to get lost and not be able to find the camp again. Whether he liked it or not, we should bloody well wait out the rain and then do some careful exploring round about the local outback.

The rain went on and on, cascading down from an endless procession of blue-black, swag-bellied clouds. On the third day it was still coming down. When along towards midday it let up, a small voice called:

"Please, may I come in?"

I looked out the Raja's and my tent. Sure enough, there was little Willow Lamar, looking like a drowned rat. I said:

"G'day, Miss Lamar! What brings you back?"

"I found I couldn't live off this country. No nuts or fruits in season. So it was either come back here or starve to death."

"Yes," I said. "Too bad we humans don't have those multiple stomachs like cows and goats, so we could digest leaves and grass. But that's typical of the temperate-zone forest most of the year.'

"And then I got lost," she went on, "and thought I'd never find this place again. Just luck that I stumbled on—"

"Well, well!" growled Jim Swayzey, appearing from his tent. "I heard voices ... Willow, what the hell d'you think you're gonna do? We're going hunting as soon as the rain quits for good. After that, we got some strenuous hikes ahead of us. When we're hunting, you can stay in the camp if you like; but we won't put up with none of your animal-rights lunacy. I'd sooner shoot you myself."

"I—I thought," said she, "I'd like to go along on one of your hunts, just to watch. If I'm to work against that sort of thing, I ought to know what it is I'm opposing, oughtn't I?"

"Reckon you ought," said Larry Swayzey, appearing behind his father.

"But without any of your nutty stunts to scare the game!" roared Jim Swayzey. "The first one of those you pull I'll hog-tie you myself!"

"I—I promise," she said, looking tearful.

"Okay then," growled the older Swayzey. "By the way, if you're gonna stay with us, where you gonna spend the nights? All our tents are full up."

After some round-and-round discussion, Plautus Fuller said: "There's room in my tent for Miss Lamar." I thought I saw a lecherous gleam in his eye.

"Fine," I said. "But then you'll have to squash in with the crew."

"Oh," said he in a disappointed tone.

"You needn't make Mr. Fuller move," said Willow. "I don't mind sharing a tent with him."

"Maybe you don't," I said, "but I do." I thought this safari had enough complications without having to meld in the sex factor.

"It is against the Rivers and Aiyar policy," said the Raja firmly and primly. He is actually more of a puritan in such matters than I am. So Plautus Fuller had to move his stuff in with Beauregard, Pancho, and Bruno.

"And please," said Willow, "may I have something to eat? Otherwise I'll pass out from starvation."

"Serve you right!" growled Jim Swayzey. But he made no objection when the Raja got Ming to whip up some extra tiffin.

Although the skies cleared that afternoon, by the time we had finished all the yabber and the shifting of accommodations, it was too late to start on a hunt. I gave Willow a clean toothbrush that I had packed as a spare, but otherwise she made do with just the clothes she wore. In my experience, women are much more bothered by lack of changes of clothes and other items of personal baggage than most men; but Willow took these minor hardships very well indeed.

Next morning we set off on our deferred meat hunt. Besides the Raja and me and the Swayzeys, Plautus Fuller elected to come, too; although his only arm was a one-shot small-gage shotgun, meant for birds and small mammals. Then Willow showed up with her umbrella. Larry Swayzey asked:

"What do you want to lug that along for, Willow? It's a fine day."

"It came in mighty handy when I was out in the bush in the downpour," she said. "So I'll keep it, thank you."

We hiked in leisurely fashion off to westward, getting occasional glimpses of wild animals of the smaller kinds, such as squirrels and gophers, and vast numbers of birds. The sky was a brilliant blue in that clear, pre-gasoline air, in which puffy little cumulus clouds of blazing white began to form as the day wore on. Wildflowers bloomed here and there in scarlets and golds and blues. I find I miss them in the Mesozoic and earlier periods.

We hadn't seen any impressive animals until we topped a rise and found ourselves overlooking a streamlet flowing through the dingle on the far side. Trees—willows and cottonwoods—grew along the stream, so we did not get much of a look at it, merely a patch of silvery reflection here and there. Jim Swayzey said in a hushed voice:

"Hey, something's moving on the far side of the creek! Let's stalk 'em!"

He started off, slinking as close to the ground as such a big bloke could get, with a predatory gleam in his eyes. The rest of us followed in single file.

When we reached the little gallery forest along the creek, Jim Swayzey glided through those trees like a bloody ghost. He was a man who had really studied and practiced hunting. When we got to a clearer view of the stream, I saw that a small herd, perhaps eight or ten, of small equids—early horses—were drinking on the far side of the stream. They were slender little creatures standing about waist-high, with stripes like a zebra's on their forequarters. While some had their heads down guzzling, others would have theirs up, looking around for danger. Then the drinkers and the lookers would exchange roles.

"Hey, Reggie!" whispered Jim Swayzey. "Are those the three-toed kind?"

I took a good look through my glasses. "I think so,"

I said. "I think the side toes don't come all the way to the ground, unless the animal walks over soft soil, so the main hoof sinks in. In this period the only equids with three toes were some browsers, who were dying out. For those ancestral to the modern horse, you'd have to go farther west, to the prairies, and hunt up the one-toed grazers."

"I want one of them three-toes," he whispered back. "I'll have Plautus mount the whole animal ..."

I heard the tiny click as he thumbed the safety catch on his rifle. Before he could shoot, however, Willow pushed past him. He muttered:

"Hey! What the hell—"

Then Willow was through the trees on this side, between us and the equids. She snapped open her umbrella, dug a whistle out of her jacket, and started blowing with all her might.

You can be bloody sure the equids weren't slow in reacting. In a second, the whole herd was racing away. They vanished over the nearest ridge.

Jim Swayzey gave a hoarse shout, between a roar and a scream. "You little son of a bitch!" he yelled, getting his genders mixed in his passion. "You promised you wouldn't spoil our hunts, or I wouldn't have let you come along!" He actually had tears in his eyes.

Willow had turned back towards us and was furling her umbrella. As she turned, I saw that on its convex surface, the umbrella bore a fierce painted animal face, with scowling eyes and a mouthful of fangs. She had a triumphant expression, which she tried with little success to modify to look apologetic. She said:

"I'm sorry, Mr. Swayzey. I had to obey a higher law."

He swung up his rifle and pointed it at her. "I'll higher-law you, God damn it! If I loll you here and now, nobody can do a goddam thing to me for it! By God, I think I will...."

He brought the rifle to his shoulder. Then several things happened at once. Plautus Fuller yelped: "Hey! Mr. Swayzey!"

The Raja said: "You can't! No gentleman—"

"Hell!" shouted Swayzey. "I ain't no fucking gentleman! I'm just a lucky oil-field roughneck...."

Larry Swayzey, who had walked past us towards Willow, sprang in front of her, holding his arms out as if he were practicing up for a crucifixion.

I put the muzzle of my own rifle against Jim Swayzey's back at about kidney level and said: "If you shoot, Jim, I'll shoot you! Put that rifle on safety and drop it!"

After a couple of seconds' hesitation, he dropped the gun, which the Raja pounced upon and snatched up. Larry Swayzey had meanwhile turned to face Willow. He wrenched away her umbrella.

"We can't have this kind of thing," he said. "The next such stunt you pull, we'll tie you up and leave you in camp while we hunt!"

It was a bloody sober, silent party that hiked back to our first camp. We had one piece of luck. Plautus Fuller, of all people, fired a load of buckshot from his little .410 into an ancestral peccary that wandered into our path. So we did have fresh meat after all, at least for one meal. The peccary, no larger than the modern kind, was pretty well demolished by the ten meat-eating human beings in the camp that night; Willow passed up her share because of her vegetarian principles.

I can't say I looked forward to the rest of this safari; but what were the choices? We couldn't simply cancel out and go back to Present until the chamber came to fetch us. Meanwhile we could either go through with our trek as planned, in which case Willow Lamar would have to come with us on her own feet; or cancel it and stay where we were. In the latter ease we could tie up Willow and leave her bound in the camp while we went out hunting. If we did that, I wouldn't put it past her to persuade one of the crew to turn her loose in our absence, as I suspect she did in getting Prochaska's night watchman to let her hide herself in the chamber. Then Aljira only knew what might happen.

The Raja and I talked the matter over that night in our tent and decided to go through as planned, hoping the threat of being bound and gagged if she misbehaved would keep Willow in order.

Breakfast next morning was as uncomfortable as the previous dinner had been. Jim Swayzey and Willow Lamar had developed a full-fledged mutual hatred that you could bloody well feel whenever one of them looked at the other. They refused to speak to each other; thus Jim Swayzey would say to me:

"Reggie, ask Miss Lamar to pass the jam, wouldja?"

While we ate, the crew were striking the tents and packing up the gear to load on the asses. By mid-morning we were on our way.

We headed west towards the big river shown on the Geological Survey maps for this period. The Survey people had made their own time safaris, shooting their little rocket-powered camera up half a kilometer, where it opened a parachute and snapped pictures on the way down. The big river—you might call it the pseudo-Mississippi—was a few kilometers west of our site.

We came across a sizable stream flowing westward, not shown on the Survey map. I guessed that the creek where we had seen the equids was a tributary of this stream, which in turn flowed into the pseudo-Mississippi.

Since this tributary flowed the way we were going anyway, we followed it downstream for a couple of kilometers. From time to time we glimpsed a few animals, but all were too far off to tempt our hunters. There were, for example, a herd of what could be called either humpless camels or giant llamas, on a distant rise. Then we startled what I took to be an ancestral tapir in the woods along the tributary. It took one look at us and bolted into thicker brush.

At one point, the stream opened out into the good-sized pool or lake. When we found a place free enough of trees to give us a view, Jim Swayzey pointed and said:

"Hey! What's that in the water?"

Through my glasses I picked out a dark blob. I saw a pair of ears, a pair of eyes, and a snout with a small horn on it, just clearing the surface.

"Looks like a hippo," said Swayzey, peering through his own glasses. "Seen em in Africa."

"Close," I said. "I'm pretty sure it's a kind of rhino, called Teleoceras. It's built like a hippo, with the same short legs; but it has a little rhinoceros horn on its nose."

"I want its head," growled Swayzey. "How can we get it to come ashore so I can shoot it?"

"We should have to camp here overnight," I said. "If its habits are like those of the hippopotamus, it comes ashore at night to feed and then goes back in the water to float around all day digesting its meal. But we're not going to stop here. That would cost us an extra day, and we may need the time to get back for the chamber to pick us up."

Jim grumped a bit but didn't argue the toss, and we continued downstream. I noticed that Larry Swayzey was walking beside Willow Lamar, and those two were having a livery conversation in low tones. I once saw Jim Swayzey, up front, turn round to send them a glare that would have melted a hole in a plate-glass window if a plate-glass window had been between him and them. Then he faced forward and continued to march, always peering this way and that for game.

As we approached the pseudo-Mississippi, the country flattened out and became swampy. We had to detour farther south to avoid getting stuck in the mud. Here the vegetation grew more thickly, with lots of swamp cypress. The day was nearing its end, so we were happy to stop on a little knoll, from which we could see the pseudo-Mississippi through the trees in the middle distance, and pitch our camp.

The knoll was at least drier than the ground on all sides about us. It was not, however, above mosquitoes' cruising altitude. The little buggers were all over us, and there was a run on mosquito-repellant. Some bugs seemed so determined that they bit us through the smears of repellant. When Willow swatted one on her arm, I clucked:

"Tsk, tsk! I thought abuse was abuse regardless of the species!"

"We allow reasonable self-defense, you idiot!" she said.

They tell me the Native Americans, in the days when they went around naked in hot weather, used to smear themselves all over with animal fat to ward off the mosquitoes. Of course it made them stink, and I didn't think such a plan was practical for us. For these safaris you need lots of pockets, as in those vests we wear; so complete nudism isn't very practical.

While the crew were pitching the camp, Larry Swayzey came up to me. "Reggie," he said, "the big river's only a five-minute walk from here. Willow and I would like to go for a swim. Is there anything dangerous in the river?"

"Not knowing, can't say," I told him. "Maybe alligators ranged this far north at this period, the climate being a degree or two warmer than it would be in Present. Without anyone to hunt them, alligators can grow up to four or five meters long. I doubt if there are any, but it's a possibility."

"Well, in any case we need someone to sit ashore with a gun to watch over us. Will you do it?"

"I promised your old man a lesson in Miocene paleontology," I said. "But I'll ask the Raja." I have since thought that this was a bad judgment call on my part, and mat we were luckier than we deserved to be.

Presently Larry, Willow, and the Raja with his gun set off westward towards that gleam of muddy water. A big red sun was descending but wouldn't set for another hour. The elder Swayzey and young Fuller and I broke out our ration of whiskey and sat round the fire, while I tried to pass on what I thought I knew about the evolution of North American life during the Miocene. I'm sure any professor of the subject could have done it better.

I couldn't get much information across anyway, because Jim Swayzey was not the sort of bloke to sit quietly while someone else lectured him. He soon kidnapped the conversation and dragged it off to his own favorite subjects, guns and hunting. I understood him to own a fabulous gun collection.

Jim also told dull stories of his pursuit of the American whitetail deer, the main quarry of North American hunters, and a species whose numbers are carefully controlled to give the hunters a beast to shoot indefinitely.

Then he went off on guns, about details of calibers, muzzle energy, magazine capacity, and so on. Of course this was all old hat to me. Finally he got on the villainy of those who tried to limit gun ownership, roaring that any real man had a God-given right, sanctified by the Constitution, to buy and use any God-damned kind of gun he liked, and anyone who disagreed was an agent of some sinister foreign power seeking to disarm the American people in preparation for either invasion or revolution.

He went on and on, until I could think of no way to turn him off short of hitting him with a stick of firewood. The sun was just setting when the missing trio returned. Larry Swayzey and Willow were laughing and chattering, a sight that cut short Jim's harangue on the virtues of the new Mannlicher-Schönauer seven-point-five millimeter and brought a ferocious scowl to his face.

I saw that my partner has a glum, discomfortable expression, as if he had sat down on something wet. When I had poured him his tot of whiskey—practically the Raja's only concession to the pleasures of sin—he said:

"Reggie, step aside for a minute, will you old chap?"

"Yes?" I said. "What went wrong?"

"That depends on how one looks at it," he said. "When you suggested this little jaunt, I didn't stop to think about the lack of suitable garb. When we got to the shore, where there's a nice little stretch of beach, those two simply peeled off every last stitch and walked into the water. I was jolly well embarrassed, I can tell you."

I couldn't help laughing. "D'you mean they lay down on the sand for a quick screw?" Excuse the expression, Ms. Pierce.

"Good lord, no! Though I shan't say the idea might not have crossed their minds but for the mosquitoes. Anyway, I saw no sign of alligators.

"But when they came out of the water, they danced around trying to get dry. Then they came up to me and stood no further than I am from you, with drops still dripping off their bare hides and everything showing, and asked me about our safari experiences. I didn't know where to look!"

I laughed some more. "That's just your Hindu puritanism, old sport! They tell me that sort of thing is now common in America. Then what?"

"The mosquitoes descended upon them in bally clouds, so they dressed in a hurry."

"Did you see any animals that might interest our clients?"

"Yes, matter of fact I did," he said. "I meant to tell you the first thing, but this—ah—experience left me a bit shaken and rather blasted it out of my mind. A little way north, at the edges of that big swamp where the tributary meets this river, there's a herd of shovel-tuskers feeding."

"Ah!" said I. "I shall ask Jim Swayzey if he wants a head. It's bloody big, but I think we could haul at least the skin and skull back to base."

Jim Swayzey was enthusiastic about hunting shovel-tuskers. They are a kind of mastodon common in this period, where swamplands furnished a lot of soft plants for food. They were smaller than a modern elephant, less than two meters high at the shoulder. In the upper jaw they carried a pair of tusks, in most species rather small ones. Then in the lower jaw they had another pair of tusks, expanded into a huge scoop, over which their short, thick trunks fitted. They were animated excavating dredges, which could make short work of a bed of reeds, cattails, or any other swamp plant.

Because of this elongation, the heads are a couple of meters long and a bit of a problem to collect. It's like the heads of Cretaceous ceratopsians, such as Triceratops. If you're going to mount such a head in your house, be sure you have a good, big room to hang it in, or it won't leave room for anyone else.

Next morning, Jim Swayzey and I set out, leaving the crew to clean up the camp. Larry, Willow, and the Raja begged off, saying they wanted to make a cast south or downstream to see what there was there. After a couple of hours of squilching through mud and muck, we reached the borders of the swamp.

There in plain sight were half a dozen mastodon, busily scooping up the muck in which the swamp plants grew with their shovel-tusks and shoving it back with their stubby trunks to where they could swallow it.

The elder Swayzey grinned at me. "Bet I could get one from here; but maybe I oughta go a little closer, to be sure."

So he and I moved up towards the shovel-tuskers until we found a big swamp cypress that gave us cover. Jim peered around it at the mastodon, which simply went on eating like so many inanimate dredging machines.

Up came Jim's gun, and bang! down went one shovel-tusker with a splash.

The other animals raised their heads and looked round in all directions; but they did not flee. This reaction is common among prehistoric fauna. Never having been shot at, they may be startled by the report of a gun but don't connect it with danger and death. I suppose to them it's merely a kind of thunderclap.

"That was the biggest," I said. "It should give you your trophy, when we get Fuller on the job."

"Look!" said Swayzey. "They realize something's wrong with the big bull, and they're trying to get him up."

In fact, three of the herd had clustered round the fallen one. With those monstrous muzzles they were trying to heave him back on his feet; but that mastodon was dead. Jim Swayzey was too skilled a hunter to waste shots.

Then he raised his rifle and fired again. Down went one of the bull's would-be helpers. About this time, the rest of the herd began to suspect that something very wrong was happening. When Swayzey fired a third shot and killed a half-grown calf, they were sure of it and began to trail off. But Swayzey wasn't yet satisfied; he fired twice more, killing a mastodon with each shot. That left only one of the herd still on its feet. Swayzey then had to reload, and by the time he got all five cartridges into the butt of his rifle the lone survivor was out of range.

"I got em!" he roared, waving a big fist. "I got 'em!" He didn't actually pound his chest, but he looked as if he would have liked to.

"What are you going to do with all those carcasses?" I asked. "We can't possibly haul five mastodon heads back to base."

"One, the big one, will suit me," he said. "For the others, y'all can feast on mastodon steaks as long as we're here. They say an elephant's trunk is the best-eating part of him, and maybe it's the same with these critters."

"But why wipe out the whole herd?" I asked. "Not sporting."

"Hell, man, that's hunting! That's what a real man does! There ain't no thrill to compare with hearing your gun go bang and seeing a big brute like that keel over! That's livin'! I only wish it was one of them dinosaurs or mammoths. I'd be hunting them things now, only Larry thought we oughta start easier, in a less dangerous period." Swayzey shook his head. "Sometimes I think that boy ain't got no real killer instinc', like I have." He looked sharply at me. "I hope you ain't gettin' no shitty ideas from the Lamar bitch!"

"I try to avoid extremes," I said. "We'd better put Plautus to work." Inside, I began to have a certain sympathy for Willow Lamar, for all her goofiness. But it wouldn't have been good business to say so.

It took Plautus Fuller all next day to collect and prepare the head of the biggest mastodon. We didn't see anything else of interest, save little things like rabbits.

The day after, we started down the pseudo-Mississippi to our third camp. During the day we were there, Jim Swayzey shot a giraffe-camel, an animal the size and shape of a giraffe, but with what looks like the head of a camel or llama on that fantastic neck. They tell me it's an offshoot of the camel family, which went extinct without descendants.

No, Jim Swayzey didn't want the head or any other part of the animal. All he wanted was the fun of killing it, photographing it, and entering in his hunting diary. He explained:

"They used to have these here safari clubs, where hunters would get together and tell of the animals they'd killed all over the world. If you killed at least one each of, say, a hundred different kinds, they gave you a medal and called you a senior hunter or something. But there ain't no more of 'em; they gave out when the wild game did.

"Now we got time travel, some friends of mine and I are talking about starting a new safari club. So to get a head start, I want to kill as many different kinds as I can."

Next day we packed up again and started back for base camp. The Raja and I had been keeping close track of where we'd gone and how far. With modern navigating instruments, we'd become pretty bloody adept and have never been unable to find our way back to base. Some time safaris have got lost and never seen again.

I was glad to see the end of this journey approaching. Besides the hostilities among the clients, the crew were getting itchy at the way Jim Swayzey ordered them about, and particularly at his open contempt for persons of the racial backgrounds of Beauregard, Pancho, and Bruno. He didn't actually call Beauregard a "nigger," but he made it bloody plain that his mind ran along those lines.

On this trek, Jim Swayzey strode along up front. He shot a small hornless rhinoceros, genus Aphelops, an animal more like a modern tapir than what you would think of as a rhino. Again, he did not collect any part of the animal; merely took a photo and made a note on his diary pad.

When we stopped for tiffin, the sky began to cloud over. Willow said: "Boys, I've got to make a comfort stop. Where's my umbrella?"

"Huh?" said Larry Swayzey. "What do you need that for?"

She pointed up at the cloud, and just then came a rumble of thunder. So the younger Swayzey went to Beauregard, who was busy staking out the asses to graze. Soon Larry presented Willow with her umbrella.

She was gone for some time. Then, from the other side of a clump of trees, came a feminine yell of "Help!"

Larry Swayzey jumped up and grabbed his gun. The Raja and I were only seconds behind him, as were Jim Swayzey and Plautus Fuller.

Round the clump, we came on a strange sight. There were three mammals: Willow Lamar, flapping her umbrella; a small sabertooth of the period; and confronting Willow, the biggest of the bear-dogs, Dinocyon.

The sabertooth was not a sabertooth "tiger," as the big ones of the Pleistocene are often called. It was only half the size of these and were better called a sabertooth puma or leopard. It was a tawny cat with faint brown spots, like those of a leopard or jaguar but not so conspicuous. It was slinking away, turning its head to snarl at the bear-dog.

This animal was about the size of the biggest bears, say a polar or a Kodiak brown, with a head like that of a canid but twice as big. It's more lightly built than those bears, but stouter than a dog or wolf.

As we rounded the trees, the bear-dog roared like a Hon and sprang forward with its big paws up. It came down on Willow and knocked her flat. Before those huge, slavering jaws could close on some part of her, Larry Swayzey got his rifle up and cracked off a shot. It took the bear-dog amidships and knocked it sideways, so that it didn't fall on top of Willow. She made a quick roll away from it and scrambled up.

The bear-dog had a piece of her umbrella in its jaws and champed on it. Then the Raja and I both fired. The bear-dog arched its body, shuddered, and went still. Meanwhile the sabertooth had run off and disappeared.

Next, Willow and Larry Swayzey threw themselves into each other's arms. I heard a growl like one the bear-dog might have uttered, but it was only Jim Swayzey. The Raja, who had stepped close to the bear-dog, picked up the mangled remains of Willow's umbrella, saying:

"I am sorry, Miss Lamar, but I fear ..." He stopped when it was plain that there were not listening.

Back at the tiffin site, Willow explained: "I was on my way back here when out of the trees came this cat. It snarled but didn't attack me. Guess it thought I was too different from its usual prey. I opened the umbrella, and it backed off, snarling and yowling. Then out of nowhere came the bear-dog. It roared at the cat as if to say: 'Get out, you; this is my piece of meat!'

"I flapped my umbrella and blew my whistle, but the bear-dog didn't get the message that it was supposed to go away. In fact, my demonstration only seemed to infuriate it. The cat was just leaving and the bear-dog was crouching to spring when you people appeared."

Jim Swayzey said: "Suppose we could track that sabertooth? I'd sure like it for my hunting record."

"Not bloody likely," I said. "But you can have the bear-dog's remains."

"Nope," he said. "You-all shot it and I didn't, so it wouldn't be ethical."

"Why didn't you shoot, Dad?" asked Larry with an edge to his voice. "Were you hoping the bear-dog would eat Willow?"

"No. I was behind the rest of you, and by the time I got out to the side where I'd have a clear shot, y'all had finished it off. No use spoiling the hide with more bullet holes."

"Well," I said, "if you, Larry, want a fine bear-dog rug, you could ask Plautus to skin it."

"Thanks; think I will," said Larry. Then the rain started. So we passed a couple of hours huddling in our slickers while the poor taxidermist did his work in the rain.

There's not much more to tell about the rest of that leg of the safari, save that Jim Swayzey shot a couple more animals: a Synthetoceras, an antelope with a forked horn on its nose; and a hyena-dog about the size of an Alsatian but with thick, bone-crushing jaws. As the name implies, it's mainly a carrion eater, though I shouldn't care to be cornered by a pack of them.

Relations remained strained all the way. Besides the mutual hostility between Jim Swayzey and Willow Lamar, which had not abated in the least, things weren't cozy between Jim and his son Larry, either.

The growing friendship between Larry and Willow stuck in Jim's craw; I heard furious arguments between them in their tent at night.

The transition chamber showed up on time, and back we went to Present. Our basafiri scattered to their homes, and I heard no more about them until about a year later, when I ran into Larry Swayzey at a meeting of one of the societies I belong to. I asked how life was with him. Before he could answer, my wife put in her piece by saying:

"How did things work out between you and Miss Lamar, Larry? Reg told me that you two seemed pretty thick when you came back to Present."

I should never have had the gall to ask such a personal question; but women don't seem to have that kind of inhibition. Larry said:

"We were engaged to be married. It caused all sorts of row with my old man. He was so outraged that he disinherited me, kicked me out of his house, and got me fired from my job with his oil company. He's supposed to have retired, but he still swings a lot of weight with the company he founded."

"How dreadful!" said my wife.

"Oh, I survived. Got another job, with a rival oil company. But poor little Willow's dead."

"Oh!" said I. "Sorry to hear that, even if she was a bit of a problem. What happened?"

He took a deep breath. "We figured out we'd both have to change some attitudes if we were ever to get along as a married couple. So I promised to give up hunting, which I was never so fanatical about as my old man anyway; and she would give up crusading for the S.T.L.O. So things looked hunky-dory.

"But Willow's fanatical streak found another outlet. While she gave up trying to stop hunting, she became instead a fanatical anti-tobacconist. Must be a fanaticism gene, like the one my father has about guns and hunting.

"Of course not many smoke nowadays; neither my old man nor I have ever done it. But there's still an industry of raising tobacco in the Carolinas, and politicians from those parts have enough clout to cause the government to subsidize that crop.

"The anti-tobacco group she joined decided on direct action. That meant going to the Carolinas, hunting down tobacco plantations, spraying the plants with kerosene, and burning them. Willow was in one of these arson parties when the tobacco farmer shot her."

"How about you?" my wife asked.

"Oh, I got over it. Now I have my own house and another girl."

"Reg's told me about trouble between you and your father. Are you and he reconciled?"

"Not yet, though he began to soften a little after he heard of Willow's death. But beware the fanaticism gene, Reggie!"

"I try to," I said. "But how do you tell, just by looking at a bloke, whether he's got it?"

"Wish I knew." Larry Swayzey spread his hands, shrugged, and wandered off.