Mastodonia

TWENTY-EIGHT

Ben had more to worry about than the overdue safari. He told me about it as we got ready for the trip.

They don’t know if we’re part of the USA or not.”

“We can make as good an argument against being part of the country,” I said, “as anyone can claiming we are.”

“I know,” said Ben, but if that gets to be a part of general argument it is going to strike pretty close to home. I don’t like it, Asa. I don’t like any of it.”

I didn’t like it either, but right at the time, I wasn’t as upset about it as he was.

Rila was determined to go into the Cretaceous with us, and it took us quite a while to convince her she’d better stay behind. She was all burned up at not being allowed to go along. She was outraged; she said she had the right to go.

“Not a chance,” I told her. “You risked your neck once and that’s enough. That time we had to go for broke, but this time, it’s different. We’ll be back in a little while.”

It developed that during all the ruckus, Hiram had sneaked off to go hunting Stiffy. Rila wanted me to go after him, but I said to hell with him; I said that if, right at that moment, I did go after him, I’d most likely shoot him and have it over with.

So Ben and I started out in something of a foul mood. When we hit the Cretaceous, the local weather didn’t help us any. It was hot and stormy and the landscape steamed. A high, hot wind was blowing; the touch of it almost burned you. Great cloud masses, torn apart, raced across the sky, and every once in a while one of the clouds would pull itself together and deliver a five-minute downpour of rain so warm that it seemed to be scalding. Underfoot, the ground was greasy from being soaked by the intermittent downpours, but Ben’s four-wheel drive was a good mudder and we didn’t have too much trouble with it.

The vile weather apparently had tamed down the fauna. Most of them, perhaps, were hiding out in groves of trees. Those that we did disturb went racing away from us, including one small tyrannosaur. We had to drive around a herd of triceratops, who stood with their heads drooping, not bothering to graze, just waiting for the weather to get decent.

The track made by the safari was fairly easy to follow, the wheels of the heavy trucks leaving deep depressions in the soil. In a few places, recent rains had either filled the tracks or washed them out, but where they were missing, it was no great problem to pick them up again.

We found the first campsite about five miles down the river valley. It seemed the safari had stayed there for several days. The campfire locations were thick with ash and there had been a lot of traffic out and back. After some looking, we found the trail the outfit had made in moving out: west over the ridge across the river, then across a prairie for twenty miles or so.

At the end of that twenty miles, the country broke suddenly, plunging down into the valley of the Raccoon River. The trail that we were following snaked crookedly down the hills. As we rounded the sharp angle of a ridge, we came upon the camp. Ben braked the car to a halt and for a moment we sat there, saying nothing. Tents, many of them down, fluttered in the wind. One truck was tipped over on its side. The other was in a ditch, one of those deep gullies so characteristic of the Cretaceous, its nose buried against one wall of the gully, its back canted up at a steep angle.

Nothing moved except the fluttering fabric of the tents. There was no smoke; the campfires had burned out. Here and there were clutters of scattered whiteness lying on the ground.

“For the love of mercy!” said Ben.

Slowly, he took his foot off the brake and let the car ease forward. We crept down the slope and into the camp. The place was littered with debris. Cooking utensils were scattered about the dead fires. Torn clothing was tramped into the ground. Dropped rifles lay here and there. The scattered whitenesses were bones — human bones polished clean by scavengers.

Ben braked the car to a halt and I got out, cradling the heavy rifle in the crook of my arm. For a long time I stood there, looking around, trying to absorb the enormity of what 1 saw, my mind stubbornly refusing to accept the full impact of the evidence. I heard Ben get out on the other side of the car. His feet crunched as he walked around the vehicle to stand beside me.

He spoke harshly, as if he were fighting to keep his voice level. “It must have happened a week or more ago. Probably only a day or so after their arrival here.

Look at those bones. Stripped clean. It took a while to do that.”

I tried to answer, but I couldn’t. I found that I had my teeth clenched hard to keep them from chattering.

“None got away,” said Ben. “How come none got away?”

I forced myself to speak. “Maybe some of them did. Out in the hills.”

Ben shook his head. “If they had been able, they would have tried to follow the trail back home. We would have found them coming in. A man alone, or an injured man, would have no chance. If something didn’t snap him up on the first day, they would have on the next, certainly the next after that.”

Ben left me and walked out into the campsite. After a minute or so, I trailed after him.

“Asa,” Ben said. He had stopped and was staring at something on the ground. “Look at that. Look at that track.”

It had been blurred by rain. Little pools of water stood in the deep imprints left by the claws. It was huge. The blurring might have enlarged it or given the impression that it was larger than it actually was, but the print appeared to measure two feet or more across at its breadth. Beyond it and slightly to the left was another similar footprint.

“Not rex,” said Ben. “Bigger than rex. Bigger than anything we know. And look over there. There are more tracks.”

Now that Ben had found the first track, we could see that the area was covered with them.

“Three-toed,” said Ben. “Reptilian. Two-legged, I’d guess.”

“From the looks of the evidence,” I said, “a pack of them. One, or even two, couldn’t make that many tracks. Remember our pair of tyrannosaurs? We thought they hunted in pairs. Before that, the impression was they hunted alone. Maybe they hunt in packs. Sweeping across the country like a pack of wolves, grabbing everything they can find. A pack would pick up more prey than a lone hunter or even a pair of them.”

“If that is the case,” said Ben, “if they hunt in packs, Aspinwall and the others didn’t have a prayer.”

We walked across the campsite, trying hard not to look too closely at some of the things we saw. The four-wheel drives, curiously, stood where they had been parked. Only one of them had been knocked over.

Cartridge cases gleamed dully in the half-light of the cloudy day. Rifles lay here and there. And everywhere, the marks of those huge, three-clawed footprints.

The wind whined and moaned in the hollows and across the ridges that ran down to the river valley.

The sky of torn and racing clouds boiled like a cauldron. From far off came the rumble of thunder.

Leering out of a small thicket at me was a skull, tattered bits of hairy scalp still clinging to it, a patch of beard adhering to the jawbone. Gagging, I turned back to the car. I’d had enough.

Ben’s bellow stopped me. When I looked back, I saw him standing at the edge of a deep gully that ran down the southern edge of the campsite.

“Asa, over here!” he yelled.

I staggered back to where he stood. In the gully lay a pile of massive bones. Bits of scaly hide fluttered from some of them. A rib cage lay gaping, a clawed foot thrust upward, a skull with the jawbone still attached had the look of being interrupted in executing a mangling snap.

“That foot,” said Ben. “The one sticking up. That’s a forefoot. Well developed, strong, not like the forelimb of a rex.”

“An allosaur,” I told him. “It has to be an allosaur.

One grown to gigantic size, its fossilized bones never found by anyone.”

“Well, at least we know our people got one of them.”

“They may have gotten others. If we looked around …”

“No,” said Ben. “I’ve seen enough. Let’s get out of here.”