Rivers of Time

VIII The Mislaid Mastodon

Eh, Mr. Schindler? What has given us the most trouble, not in prehistoric times, but right here in Present? Well, there was that lawsuit by the relatives of the Reverend Hubert after the silly galah got himself pecked to death by a Diatryma in the Eocene. Then there were those hearings before the Missouri Senate, where the fringe nuts argued that time safaris were a plot to discredit the Bible, or to change history and make us all go poof, or to violate the rights of animals.

The oddest objection, however, came from the hunting ranches. You know, those places where, for a few thousand, some urban bloke who has never taken ten steps off the footpath can shoot a tame lion as it comes up to lick his hand and then pose for photographs with a foot on the carcass. Then he hangs the picture on the wall of his apartment. When he's got a dollybird in, he can use the picture to show what a macho hero he is and soften her up for horizontal sports. If that's sport, I'm a bloody ballet dancer!

These game ranches did well for a while, with the disappearance of all the real wild lands except for parks and preserves, where the beasts are protected. The technique of breeding animals has got to the point where you need only a few of any species and you can keep your breeding group furnishing more specimens indefinitely.

Once Professor Prochaska got his transition chamber working, all the real hunting sahibs wanted to go back in time, shoot some local fauna—especially mammoth and dinosaur—and bring back heads and hides to prove it. So the game ranches had been going broke, and they hired a lobbyist to stop time safaris.

The lobbyist for the Game Ranch Association was a bloody shrewd lawyer named Jason Eckler. He made a pitch against importing fossil fauna to the Present.

The Raja and I had brought a couple of stenonychosaurs back from the late Cretaceous. These are man-sized theropods—flesh-eating dinosaurs. That Wildlife Park in San Diego reports that they have bred successfully. The Park people are all of a twitter over a half-dozen little stenos running around and snatching each other's meat rations.

Now there was talk of fetching something more ambitious. Each year the Raja and I find that fewer of our clients want to kill anything and more who prefer just to study, photograph, or watch the beasts, or wish to bring them back to Present alive, as we were trying to do.

This bloke Eckler spoke of the dangers of importing exotic fauna, of which a pair might get loose and fill the country with their descendants. He cited the starling, the walking catfish, the Mediterranean fruit fly, the kudzu vine, and so forth. He pictured America overrun with tyrannosaurs stalking and gobbling citizens.

In my turn, I pointed out that the same objection applied to bringing in any exotic species, as for zoos and circuses. In fact, some game ranches had imported Asian deer, which had got loose and out-competed the native deer. Australia well knows these dangers, as witness our troubles with imported rabbits and foxes.

Then another cove whom I knew took the stand. He was a big bloke with a ruddy complexion, conventionally dressed except for long black hair hanging down his back. He was Norman Blackelk, a Native American of the Crow or Absaroka tribe. He, a lawyer, headed the Redintegration Society, which was footing the bill for our mastodon hunt. On the stand, he explained that it was a matter of conscience with him to try to restore as much as possible of the North American Pleistocene climax fauna. The theory is that Blackelk's ancestors had come over from Siberia twenty or thirty thousand years ago. Finding the continent swarming with mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths, camels, horses, and other big, edible creatures that had never learned to cope with men, they killed and ate the lot. When the big mammals—the mega-fauna, my scientific friends call it—were nearly all gone, along with the lions and sabertooths that preyed on them, the invaders starved until they learned to grow maize and beans and to trap smaller beasts like marmots—woodchucks, I think you call them.

Another witness was Horace Dunbar, a lean, weather-beaten bloke with a potbelly overhanging his belt and a Texan accent. He owned a game ranch, and he told a pitiful tale of how he had worked long and hard to put his children through college, and now these foreign coves were going to bankrupt him with their devilish time-travel contraption. Had a couple in the audience shedding a tear.

After the hearing, the Raja and I—that dark chap you met when you came in was my partner, Chandra Aiyar. I call him "Raja" because by descent he actually is one, if anybody paid attention to that sort of thing nowadays. We went down with Blackelk to unwind, taking a table for four. Presently Eckler, finding all the stools along the bar taken, asked if he might sit at our table. I said certainly.

"No hard feelings?" he said. "I'm just an advocate, doing what the Game Ranch Association pays me to do."

"I understand," I said. We talked of lightweight matters while our drinks were coming. Then the Raja, who is a near-teetotaler, excused himself and went away to meet his wife. Eckler said:

"May I offer a small piece of advice, Mr. Rivers?"

"Sure, if you like," I said. I looked sharply at him, wondering if the next remark would lead up to a threat or a bribe offer. "Is your meter turned off?"

He laughed. "Oh, I'm not charging for this. I was going to say, next time you're on the witness stand, speak a little more slowly and distinctly than normal. As it is, that Australian accent causes some Americans to miss an occasional word."

"Thanks; I'll try," I said.

Then Eckler, looking round, spotted Dunbar, searching for a place to sit. He called: "Hey, Horace!"

Soon Dunbar, after apologies, occupied our fourth chair. After a bit of persiflage, Dunbar looked at me through narrowed eyes.

"Mr. Rivers," he said, "do I understand rightly that your next Safari won't be for hunting, but to bring back one of them mammoths or mastodons to the present world?"

"That's right," I said. "Mr. Blackelk hopes to get enough of these Pleistocene animals to establish breeding herds."

"We aim," said the Native American, "to start with Mastodon americanus, a once very common, successful species. It will have to be young, because the transition chamber isn't large enough for a full-grown specimen; likewise with the three species of mammoth of the North American Pleistocene."

Dunbar gulped his third drink—he was a two-fisted drinker—and said: "I've got a client who'll pay a hefty five-figure sum to shoot one of them mastodons."

"Well then, send him to Rivers and Aiyar, Tame Safaris," I said.

"No, that won't work. This guy's got a phobia, I guess you'd call it, about your time machine. He's mortal afraid it'll get him back to some ancient time and then break down, leaving him stranded millions of years back. He's had a couple of experiences with machines that make him leery—an airplane forced to land in a cow pasture, or a train that ran off the rails, or a ship that went aground. And he figures time travel's the trickiest of all."

"It's always worked for us," I said. "We've made dozens of time trips in it, and it's never failed to fetch us home to Present."

"That don't make no difference. This client's got his mind set and wouldn't listen to you. How about if you was to bring your mastodon back to now and then sell him to us?"

"Hey!" said Blackelk. "You mean so you can stake it out for your client to walk up and shoot?"

"Sure. This guy's crazy mad to kill an elephant, irregardless of how he does it. Only nowadays there ain't no elephants for shooting. The few that still live are all numbered and watched over like so many prize chickens, both the African and the Asiatic kinds. There's no place you're allowed to shoot one. One of my customers tried poaching, and the rangers shot him dead. Well, Mr. Rivers, how about it?"

"I'm not interested in that kind of 'sport,' " I said. "Anyway, the animal will be the property of Mr. Blackelk and his Redintegration Society."

"And you can be damn sure we wouldn't consider any such deal," said Blackelk. "We're trying to restore the species, not exterminate it a second time over."

Dunbar by now had had four or five drinks. He growled: "All right, you snotty sons of bitches! I'll show you! Gonna put me out of business, eh? After I've spent half my life trying to build up an honest sporting establishment—"

Eckler grabbed Dunbar's arm and squeezed hard, saying: "Shut up, Horace! This is your lawyer speaking!"

Dunbar subsided, belched, and mumbled: "Sorry, guys. Guess I let my feelings run away with me. Anyways, I gotta go. Put my drinks on your bill, Jason. See y'all." He rose and staggered off.

The first job in our mastodon hunt was to adapt Prochaska's transition chamber. A full-grown American mastodon would stand about two and a quarter meters high at the shoulder and be perhaps five and three-quarters long. That's not so tall as a big modern bull elephant, but it is longer in the body and about as heavy.

Prochaska was dubious about our taking liberties with his precious transition chamber; but he became enthusiastic at the prospect of hauling an endless series of extinct organisms beck to Present. That is how it has worked out. He hovered over us while our workmen took out the chairs that the passengers normally sat in during the transition. Then we put a row of stout steel bars round the chamber wallah's corner, so that none of our animal cargo could lay a claw or a fang on Bruce Cohen while he handled his controls.

As usual, these modifications took twice as long and cost twice as much as estimated. For one thing, we needed a pen to hold the animal back in Present until the Redintegration people could come and take it away. Since the local zoo didn't have any vacant pens we could borrow or rent, I rounded up some carpenters and bought some lumber: good, stout ten-by-ten centimeter timbers. The carpenters assembled these on the university grounds and bolted them together, with the sides cross-braced in case the animal tried to push one of his walls over.

As an example of the unforeseen delays that bedevil such a project, we were talking with Joseph Hockersmith, a specialist in catching wild animals uninjured for zoos and scientific institutions. When he saw Cohen's cage being assembled, he cried: "Hey! You've got to put padding on those bars!"

"Eh?" said I. "What for?"

"You want to catch a member of the elephant tribe, don't you?"

"Yes," I said, "though there's a question about calling a mastodon a member of the elephant tribe, since elephants are descended from mastodons."

"But he'll have tusks, won't he?"

"If he's a two-thirds grown one, he will."

"And you'd like to deliver him with tusks undamaged, wouldn't you?"

"Righto!"

"Well, if you put the beast in a cage with iron bars before he's had a chance to get used to you, he'll be so angry and frightened that he'll bang his tusks against the bars hard enough to break them. He'll arrive in the present with only the stumps. I've handled elephants."

So we had to hold up proceedings to pad the bars and also to hang sheets of that quilting that moving men use in their vans to keep the furniture from damage.

At last we assembled in the chamber building: the Raja and I, Norman Blackelk, the cook Ming, and our crew. These were Beauregard Black, the crew boss, and his helpers Pancho, Bruno, and Rodrigo. Then there were Hockersmith and his three assistants, and one more man: A young cove, Wilmer Delarue, whom the University of Minnesota had sent us. A graduate student and assistant instructor, Delarue was bucking for his doctorate in paleontology. We were always glad to have a real scientist on these safaris, because it gives certain tax advantages.

There had been a number of such young blokes on our safariin, some easy to get along with and some not. Delarue seemed a harmless chap except for a know-it-all tendency to set everybody right on details, such as the pronunciation of words like Apatosaurus. When Norman Blackelk pronounced it with the accent on "pat," Delarue picked him up and said the word should be stressed on the "ap."

"Wilmer," said Blackelk, "the most successful lawyer I've known, when a client came in to hire him, if the client mispronounced a word, this lawyer in later conversation used the same mispronunciation, even though he knew better."

"That's why the language goes all to hell," said Delarue.

We hoped to scare up mastodons near enough to the chamber site so as not to need to shift camp. Therefore we did not bring a train of asses to haul our stuff around the outback. We thought that, if we had to move camp, we could send the chamber back to Present with Black and his crew to fetch them.

As a last-minute addition, Hockersmith's boys brought a barrel of apples, which they manhandled into the chamber. Hockersmith explained:

"This is my bait. Don't let any of your people swipe them. With elephant, I never found anything that brings 'em round so fast as ripe yellow apples. They love 'em. The only thing that would fetch them quicker would be the fruit of the umganu tree of Southern Africa. It ferments as it ripens, and the elephants there got drunk on 'em. I didn't have any umganu fruit, and perhaps it's just as well. A sober elephant is problem enough to handle, so you can imagine what it would be like with a drunken one!"

"Bloody good idea," I said. We filed into the chamber, and off we went.

By then, departure was pretty much routine. The dizziness of transition through time caused one of Hockersmith's men to lose his breakfast. He managed to keep it in until the Raja passed an airsickness bag back to him. Cohen had taped envelopes of these bags to the backs of the seats; but then the chairs were taken out, and nobody gave the bags a thought. Bruce Cohen's as fussy about keeping his chamber clean and shipshape as anybody's maiden aunt, so he had laid in his own supply.

I had told Cohen to set his dials for one million years before Present. That was the closest Prochaska's scientists would let users of the chamber come to Present. They didn't want to have time travelers meet Blackelk's ancestors coming over from Siberia. Such a meeting would affect later history and cause a paradox. To prevent that, we should all be thrown back to Present, boom!, and killed in the process.

Actually, I am sure that a setting of half a million b.p. would not impose any risk, since all the evidence is that the first Red Indians arrived in North America well after 100,000 b.p. But Prochaska's committee of experts insisted on an extra-wide safety factor.

Cohen found us a nice, soft landing place. He can't move the chamber horizontally, but by hunting back and forth in time he can find a period when the site is flat and hard enough to provide a safe alighting. The landscape of 1,000,000 b.p. looks hardly different from today in those national forests, all named after Mark Twain, across southern Missouri. This state is pretty bloody flat, with a little roll but nothing an American from a western state would call a mountain. The highest place is a hill in Iron County called Taum Sauk Mountain, less than 500 meters. In Colorado they wouldn't bother to name it.

For millions of years, this area has been part of the big temperate-zone forest, which covered the eastern third of the continent until the white men moved in and cut down most of the trees for farmland. It's pretty well out towards the western edge of this forest, and the edge moves back and forth with the weather. In a series of dry centuries, the forest retreats eastward, leaving most of Missouri as grassland; then a sequence of wet centuries brings the forest back again.

We had evidently hit one of the drier periods. There was still plenty of timber around us, mostiy maple, hickory, and several kinds of oaks; but it was broken into clumps and copses. In our business, we prefer this to a solid, dense forest. Not only are the animals thicker, since the grass provides them with food down where they can reach it, but also we can better see them. In a real jungle you're bloody lucky to see fifty meters. You never know how many beasts of the kinds you're looking for are just outside that limited radius of vision.

In any case, there were no animals but a couple of squirrels in sight when the Raja and I hopped out with guns ready. After a trip by the chamber back to Present to fetch our equipment, setting up the camp kept us all busy for the first couple of hours.

One of our preparations was to spread a big sheet of canvas away from the camp. This sheet was attached by a steel cable to a power winch, and the winch in turn was belayed to the bars of the chamber and plugged in to the chamber's power point. If we could get our mastodon to stand on the sheet, we could tranquilize it and use the winch to haul it into the chamber. I had the boys build a little earthen ramp from the ground of our landing place to the sill of the chamber door. But the canvas could be carried only as far from the chamber as the length of the cable allowed.

I was about to call time for tucker when we heard crashing from a clump of trees south of us.

"Hey!" said Hockersmith. "Maybe that's our mastodon, right to hand! Fred, get out the apples!"

Hockersmith's boys rolled out the barrel, while the Raja and I cautiously approached the grove. As we slunk around the clump of trees, the cause of the disturbance came in sight. It was a big ground sloth, which had hooked its claws under the roots of a young maple and pulled it out of the ground. Now it was sitting up on its hindlegs and tail, holding the uprooted sapling in its forepaws and eating its way down the tree. It had already eaten all the leaves and twigs, branch by branch, most of the distance from top to base.

Imagine an animal like an oversized bear with a big, bushy tail, or better yet a wolverine scaled up to the bulk of a small elephant. The hind feet had heels that stuck out to the rear almost as far as the rest of the foot did forwards, which certainly gave the animal a solid stance.

The ground sloth looked at us in a vague sort of way and went back to its feeding. Hockersmith asked:

"What d'you call that critter, Reggie?"

"Ground sloth," I said. "First discovered by your President Jefferson, who got hold of a fossil claw and named the animal Megalonyx. He thought it some sort of Hon."

"Excuse me, Reggie," said young Delarue. "I'm sure that one belongs to the genus Mylodon, not Megalonyx."

"Okay, call it what you like."

"Are we going to do anything about it?" asked Delarue.

"I see no reason to. Some clients would shoot it just to hear the gun bang and see the animal drop dead. But we shan't have room in the chamber for it and our mastodon, too, assuming we catch one. So I would leave it be."

"It doesn't seem afraid of us," said Hockersmith.

"Has never seen creatures like us," I said. "If the books are right, the only predator it seriously had to fear was the sabertooth. The ground sloth has an armor of little round bones embedded in its skin, and it would take those saber-fangs to reach a vital organ. We don't look or smell like sabertooths. Even the American Hon might have found it too tough to handle, since a swipe with those big claws could take your head off."

We watched; but all the ground sloth did was just eat, eat, eat. From what I've seen of large plant eaters, especially those who live on leaves or grass, that is what they mostly do. They have to spend their time eating, because grass and leaves have a bloody low nutritional value.

Soon the Mylodon had cleaned that sapling of every last leaf. It dropped the trunk, came down on all fours, and ambled into the grove, looking for another sapling. It walked on the knuckles of its forefeet, somewhat as a gorilla does, and paid us no more heed.

In looking for animals to shoot, photograph, or just gawk at, one must be prepared for the unpredictability of their appearance. During the following days we saw other Pleistocene mammals—deer, bear, ground sloth, horse, a bear-sized beaver, and a glimpse of a Hon at long distance—but no mastodon. Hockersmith explained:

"It's the same with elephants. They are always migratory, because they have such enormous appetites that a herd soon strips all the greenery from any place they inhabit, even the bark of the trees. So they have to move on, leaving the area they have devastated to recover. That may take years, and this fact complicates trying to preserve them."

More time passed without sight of mastodons. One of Hockersmith's men shot a deer, so the camp had fresh meat for a while. One day Hockersmith and the Raja came in from a hike in considerable excitement.

"There's something of the elephant kind near here!" said Hockersmith. "We passed a fine pile of elephant turds; no mistake!"

We got up a safari to look into the matter. After some hours of tracking, we heard a rumble ahead.

"We're getting close!" said Delarue. "That's the proboscidean borborygmus."

"The what?" said Blackelk, turning his coppery face to me. "What does he mean?"

I said: "That's technical for the rumble that gases make in an elephant's guts."

We went ahead cautiously until we could hear the sound of breaking branches. At last we sighted our quarry, about seventy meters off and pulling the branches from a basswood tree to eat the twigs and leaves.

It proved a big mammoth, a good four meters at the shoulder. It was rather short in the body but longlegged, covered with reddish-brown fur, nowhere near so long as that of the smaller true or woolly mammoth further north. It also bore a fine pair of long, spirally curved tusks, crossing at the tips, which would have driven any of my trophy-hunting sahibs into ecstasies. There was once a lot of argument over what use such crossed tusks could be, since the points could not be applied to anything. Then it was figured out that the bulls used them as snow shovels to get at food in winter, the cows and young following behind. Time travel has confirmed the theory.

"Columbian mammoth," I said. "Paraloxodon jeffersoni, if I remember the textbooks."

"Oh, that terminology's obsolete," said young Delarue in his irritating way. "Nowadays most specialists lump it in with the woolly mammoth as Mammuthus. Some even want to cram them all back in Linnaeus's Elephas, but I wouldn't go that far."

We watched the mammoth; but just looking at an animal eat, eat, eat gets pretty bloody boring after a while. Hockersmith asked:

"Shall we try to capture it, Reggie?"

I shook my head. "He's too tall to fit into the chamber, unless we could get him to go down on knees and elbows and crawl in. I don't see much prospect of that."

"You could shoot him with a tranquilizer charge," said Delarue. "He'd fit in lying down, I'm sure."

"Yes? And suppose I did give him a tranquilizer shot. He'd just fie down and doze; and then how should we get him to the chamber? We must be a kilometer from the camp, and almost as far from the pallet." That was what we called the canvas sheet attached to the chamber. "Besides, he must weigh at least five or six tons. Anybody want those tusks for trophies?"

"Not I," said Blackelk. "My ancestors did enough of that."

"Then let's return to camp."

"Hey, wait!" said Delarue, fiddling with his camera. "I want a close-up shot."

Off he trotted, right towards that bull mammoth. I had read that lone males of the elephant tribe are likely to be short-tempered; lack of regular sexual outlets, I suppose. I called:

"Hey, come back here!" But Delarue just gave a vague wave and kept on towards the mammoth.

When he had covered half the distance, the mammoth noticed him with its rather dim eyesight, I suppose; or perhaps it caught his smell. It dropped the ranch it was eating and started towards Delarue with its trunk up and waving about, sniffing. Delarue, who had no gun, kept his eyes glued to the camera finder.

The mammoth gave a squealing grunt and kept coming. I got ready to shoot. Delarue at last caught on to what was happening and rose to his feet. As he turned to run back to us, with the mammoth looming over him, the silly galah tripped over his own feet and fell sprawling. Now I dared not shoot for fear that the mammoth would fall on Delarue and squash him.

Then, to one side, the Raja's gun went off. The mammoth staggered as if from a tremendous blow. It regained its balance and shuffled away, shaking its head.

"I shot him through that bump on top of his skull," said the Raja. "Knowing you didn't want him killed. The bullet just went through that spongy mass of bony cavities. He may have a headache for a while, but the holes should soon heal up." That dome atop the heads of mammoths provides anchorage for the huge neck muscles, which have to be bloody powerful to support those tusks.

"You should have killed him," said Delarue. "I could have gotten a paper out of a study of its head, or even my thesis."

"You didn't speak up," said the Raja.

"But I should think anyone with brains—" began Delarue.

My own temper was getting frazzled, and I did my lolly: "Look, God damn it, you almost got us into serious trouble by going close to the mammoth when I told you not to, and then falling over your own stupid feet in the animal's path. The next stunt of that kind you pull, we'll hogtie you, put you in the chamber, and tell Cohen to drop you off at Present."

"I—I'm sorry," he mumbled.

More days passed without a sign of mastodon, although all the paleontological finds indicated that at this time the place should swarm with them. The Raja and I began to worry, since the charges for keeping the chamber back in the Pleistocene were mounting up. Norman Blackelk worried, too, saying:

"I don't know, Reggie, how much more money the directors of the Redintegration Society are willing to sink in this trip. Perhaps we ought to shift camp after all."

"That would run the charges up pretty fast, too," I said. "We should have to go back to Present and round up some extra crew and our train of asses—burros, if you prefer—to help with the move."

Hockersmith said: "Why don't we try to catch one of the smaller mammals: say, a Pleistocene horse or beaver; or even that ground sloth."

Blackelk looked dubious. "We may come to that; but first I'd have to consult the exec committee of the Society. They were pretty definite that they wanted a young mastodon. They already have a breeding stock of several other Pleistocene species, and they want to spend their money where it'll do the most good."

"Hey, Norm!" said Hockersmith. "Just had an idea. You're a real Native American, aren't you?"

"So they tell me," said Blackelk. "Less than one-quarter white genes."

"Well, the Indians used to put on ceremonies, with dances, to encourage animals of the kinds they hunted to come around and let themselves be killed. I seem to recall that the Ghost Dance, which got poor old Sitting Bull killed, was supposed to bring back the buffalo. It didn't, of course, since by then the whites had shot most of the buffalo with repeating rifles."

Delarue cleared his throat. "Don't you mean 'bring back the bison'?"

"No; I said 'buffalo* and I meant 'buffalo.' That's what the animal was always called in that time and place. A 'bison' is something an Aussie like Reggie here uses to wash his hands in."

"Oh, bulsh!" I said. "A dinkum Aussie does not pronounce 'basin' and "bison' alike. Unless you're hearing-impaired, you can hear the difference: 'basin,' 'bison,' 'basin,' 'bison.'"

"I see," said Delarue. "You move "basin' halfway to 'bison,' and 'bison' halfway to 'boyson.' "

Blackelk asked: "Is there such a word as 'boyson'?"

Delarue shrugged. "I once knew a Mr. Boysen." He turned to Blackelk. "What did the Crows call it, Norm?"

Blackelk spread his hands. "Don't know. I learned Absaroka in school, although all the tribe are Anglophones now. The theory was that the language mustn't be allowed to die out, because it was a priceless cultural heritage or something. I never became fluent in it. Actually, 'bison' and 'buffalo' are both names for several kinds of Old World wild cattle. The white invaders carelessly applied both Old World names to the one American species, since they couldn't pronounce the Native American words for the animal."

Hockersmith said: "We're getting away from the subject. Norm, we want you to do a ghost dance to bring back the mastodon. It may not work, but what have we got to lose?"

"Don't know that I could do that," said Blackelk. "Even if I could remember enough Absaroka, the language has no word for 'mastodon.' Maybe it did once, but if so it must have been forgotten soon after the animal went extinct."

"Well then, simply call it 'mastodon.' Your Native American gods would understand."

"I'll see what I can think up—"

"Don't do it, Norm!" said Delarue. "It's just pandering to primitive superstition. The world will never be able to manage its affairs in a rational manner as long as people go in for irrational, unscientific cults and sects, with gods and other spooks."

Delarue's cocksureness even got under the skin of Joe Hockersmith, usually an even-tempered, self-controlled man. "Look, squirt," he said. "We'll make it a sporting proposition. If Norman comes up with a ghost dance, what'll you bet the mastodon don't appear in a reasonable time, say ten days? How about ten bucks?"

"Make it fifty," said Delarue. "I don't ordinarily bet, but against a silly superstition it's a sure thing."

They shook hands. Blackelk said: "The first thing I need is a drum. Too bad we didn't bring one."

After much yabber, we decided to convert Hockersmith's barrel of apples into a drum. We dumped the apples out in the chamber, took a sheet of plastic used as a tarpaulin, and with much tugging and grunting got it pulled tight over the empty barrel and dogged down. It gave a satisfactory boom when Blackelk slapped it. He said:

"Now I need some dancers. Reggie, you and Joe ought to do."

"Me, dance?" said Hockersmith. "Never have in my life. My wife's been after me for years to take lessons—"

"You thought up this project," said Blackelk, "so you can damn well play your part in it."

"What steps have we got to learn?" asked Hockersmith.

"I'll show you." The steps proved simple enough, with much stamping and raising the knees, as in that British parade step the Commonwealth armies used to practice.

After tucker that night, when full dark came, we cleared a space and went to work. Blackelk sat on a camp chair with the barrel between his knees. Stripped to the waist, he had a necktie knotted around his forehead for a headband and some feathers, which Ming supplied from a fresh turkey in our commissariat, stuck in the band. He began a chant in Absaroka. I can't reproduce any of it. It had a rather monotonous little tune with about three notes, while Blackelk slapped his drum. Hockersmith and I hopped and stamped around him in circles, as Blackelk had taught us. The rest of the crew, standing about in the firelight, kept time by clapping. After a while the rhythm and the pounding got into our blood, as they got into mine when I once took part in a corroboree with some Native Australians in the outback.

When Blackelk ran out of song and Hockersmith and I out of wind, we paused. From the dark woods came a squeal, and then another. Then several proboscidean throats let loose with that sound called 'trumpeting,' because it does sound like some sort of trumpet, only a horn with spit in it.

Everybody turned to look while the Raja and I got our guns. Presently an animal hove into view, near enough so that we could dimly make it out by firelight. It stared at us and turned away; the light showed it to be an American mastodon. I guessed it to be a female from its slender tusks. I had read that elephant herds are commonly bossed by the oldest cow; they have alpha females instead of alpha males.

After this first mastodon came another, then a couple of little ones no more than waist high; then another big one, following the track of the first. More went by until at least a dozen had passed. All, as nearly as I could judge, were cows and young. At the tail of the procession, a big bull ambled along. This one looked our way, hoisted his trunk to sniff, and flapped his ears. Then we heard a loud toot, which seemed to come from the head of the line. The bull turned away and single-footed it after the herd like a Bondi tram. It must, I thought, have been the big cow who headed the line, the matriarch, telling the bull:

"Hurry up, you stupid male! Close up!"

With his hand out, Hockersmith walked up to Delarue. "Fifty bucks, please!"

"Damned coincidence!" grumbled Delarue. But he paid.

Did I think our ghost dance had anything to do with the herd's appearance? Not really; but I try to keep an open mind in such matters. There is so much that human beings don't yet understand.

It did not seem practical to go after the herd that night. We got up extra early next morning and set out with our helpers and equipment. Hockersmith carried not only his gun but also a big bag of apples hanging round his neck. He explained:

"In my experience, you can train almost any animal of the smarter kinds, such as elephant or bear, to come for a free handout. The trouble starts when you run out of goodies. Then the animal may decide to take you apart to see where you've got the rest of the stuff hidden."

Trailing the herd presented no problem. I am not the trailsman that some black trackers are down-under. Some claim these Native Australians can track an animal across bare rock. I don't believe that; but what they can do is remarkable enough. However, between the big, round footprints wherever the soil was a little soft, and the droppings, following that herd needed no Native Australians. We could tell when we came near the herd by the sound of breaking branches.

We scouted round to get up-wind and stole up on them. Everybody was told to keep quiet. Hockersmith warned that if startled, the animals might charge, forcing us to slaughter them, or all run off along their migration route and not be seen again in this area for a year.

"All right, Joe," I said. "Your turn."

"Which one do you want?" asked Hockersmith.

"That young bull," said I, pointing to an animal not quite old enough to have gone off on its own yet. It stood about two meters at the shoulder, with thick male-mastodon tusks only about half as long as those of the herd bull, and a coat of golden-brown fur like that on the mammoth that Delarue had bothered. I asked:

"Where is the big bull now?"

"Don't see him," murmured Hockersmith. "Ah, here he comes. Seems to have something on his mind."

Out from behind some trees came a young female mastodon and, right behind her, the big bull. This last obviously had something on his mind, for his huge penis, the size of a big man's arm with the fist clenched, was fully extended. It seemed, though, that his lady love did not want any just now. After her came the bull with squeaking sounds, which I suppose were mastodontic endearments. She single-footed away fast, weaving among the trees and other members of the herd with the bull behind her. Soon the two passed out of sight, so we never did learn whether the bull consummated his passion.

It took self-control not to burst out laughing. In fact, young Delarue did emit a sputter until the Raja shushed him.

"Okay, here goes!" said Hockersmith.

He stole in Red Indian style towards the young bull I had pointed out. When there was nothing between him and the juvenile male but a big bush, he took an apple from his bag and tossed it. It bounced off the flank of the mastodon, which was munching a shrub it had uprooted. The mastodon jerked up its head and turned this way and that to see what had disturbed it.

Hockersmith tossed another apple, so that it landed on the ground a couple of meters from the mastodon's head, in the direction of the pallet.

The mastodon stood weaving this way and that and sniffing in all directions. It located the second apple, walked to it, and ate it. This brought it in sight of Joe Hockersmith. It gave him a suspicious stare but otherwise followed the trail of apples that Hockersmith was laying down by tossing them ahead of the beast.

An hour of this brought us to the canvas pallet. When, by the use of more apples, Hockersmith had maneuvered all four of the mastodon's feet on the canvas, he slipped a tranquilizer charge into his rifle and fired. Tranquilizers nowadays work much faster than those of the last century, when this method of immobilizing animals began. The mastodon squealed, gave a prodigious yawn, and sank down on the canvas. I called the camp on my communicator and told Beauregard to start the winch.

The rest of that capture was routine. With the help of the winch, we got the mastodon, still tranquilized, into the chamber. The transition back to Present went off without a hitch, save that the beast crapped on the floor. This led Cohen to put on one of his expositions of high-class cursing.

Thank Aljira that Prochaska's transition chamber was on the ground floor of its building! Otherwise I don't know how we should ever have got a couple of tons of mastodon down a flight of stairs and round corners. With all members of the safari pulling and heaving on the canvas, we got the tranquilized beast to the exit. By detaching the winch from inside the chamber and rigging it with extension cords in our timber pen, we gave the winch a clear shot at hauling the mastodon into the inclosure.

During a break in this chore, Norman Blackelk telephoned Redintegration headquarters and told them to send a lorry to pick up their specimen. He also told them to bring a few hundred kilos of lettuce and cabbages to feed the creature on its way to California.

The lorry took a week to reach us. Meanwhile we got better acquainted with the animal, for which someone suggested the name 'Lancelot.' Once a day we opened his cage door to shove in a hundred-kilo bundle of hay and a few cabbages. Lancelot gobbled the cabbages but did not much like hay. He let the bundle sit for hours before starting to eat it. Delarue explained that, while the mastodon would eat anything vegetable, it was really more of a browser than a grazer. What he would really have liked was an equal weight of cuttings from the branch ends of trees and bushes; but we lacked the time to arrange for that.

When the cage door was opened, Lancelot backed away, snorting and grumbling. If I could sum up his attitude towards us, I should call it 'surly,' although I know better than to attribute human emotions and attitudes to an animal of another species. The only one for whom Lancelot seemed to have slightly warmer feelings was Joe Hockersmith. Every day he came to the cage with a couple of apples, which Lancelot learned to take from Hockersmith's outstretched hand. When Hockersmith went away, you could see regret in the mastodon's stance, with drooping head, trunk, and eyelids.

At last the lorry arrived. It was not a semi-trailer rig but a one-piece ten-wheeler. Still, its body was just about the dimensions of the transition chamber, so there should be no problem with fitting Lancelot into it.

My crew wrestled the timber ramp into place outside the door of the cage, and the driver backed the lorry up against its high end. At its rear, the lorry had a pair of swinging doors. When closed, they were secured by a pair of big vertical bolts, running from top to bottom. When the lorry was buttoned up, these bolts were held down by a couple of hinged latches, which in turn were secured by padlocks.

Lancelot plainly did not like the looks of the lorry. He backed into the farthest corner of his pen and, whenever one of us tried to coax him to climb the ramp into the lorry, he trumpeted and swiped at us with his trunk and tusks.

"Think we'll have to tranquilize him again?" said Blackelk.

"I hope not," I said. "He's had so much of that already that it might impair his health."

"Let me try," said Hockersmith. He came back soon with the bag of apples round his neck.

In the cage, Hockersmith approached Lancelot with an apple, talking in friendly, man-to-mastodon tones. Lancelot took the apple, ate it, and began sniffing round until he located the bag. Hockersmith pulled the bag open and let Lancelot extract an apple. Then he moved slowly towards the open gate. Lancelot took another apple, and another, and another. Soon Hockersmith had him up the ramp and inside the lorry. I heard a shout:

"Hey, you dumb brute, let go! I'll give you the goddam bag!"

Peering round the door frame, I saw that Lancelot, having figured out where the apples were coming from, had wrapped his trunk around the bag and was trying to pull it away from Hockersmith. The latter ducked and slid out of the loop just in time to keep Lancelot from breaking his neck. Hockersmith came out, saying:

"Okay, Mr. Barnes, close her up!"

The sun was setting; getting the equipment in place and Lancelot into the lorry had taken us all day, and we were bloody tired. So it was decided not to send Barnes off with the lorry that night but to let him get a good night's sleep.

"Lancelot won't really mind being in the dark," said Hockersmith. "In the elephant tribe, the sense of sight is weak, while those of smell and hearing are very keen. He will sniff out the rest of those apples."

Barnes pulled down the door-holding bolts into their bolt holes. But he did not bother to fasten the padlocks.

Next morning, my wife drove me to the University grounds early. Instead of the Redintegration Society's lorry, backed up to the timber pen outside the transition-chamber building, there was no lorry but a lot of people talking excitedly and a couple of coppers. One of these troopers was taking down statements from Norman Blackelk on a pad. I hurried up, saying:

"What's happened? Has Barnes left already?"

"Hell, no!" said Hockersmith. "Lancelot's been hijacked!"

"Eh? What happened?"

"When people came to work this morning, they found poor old Fitz bound and gagged, with a story of having been held up after midnight by masked men with an assault rifle." FitzHerbert was the University's night watchman. "They tied him up, hot-wired the truck, and drove away."

That is how, a couple of hours later, I found myself riding a police helicopter over the southern suburbs. We quartered back and forth over a huge area, looking for our lorry, with another vehicle nearby. Alarms had been sent out for our lorry, of course, and there was little chance of its even getting to the state line. With its description and known license number, it would easily be picked up: the mastodonnappers had not had time to disguise it.

Since the drongos would probably have figured this out, it seemed likely that they would have brought another lorry to which to transfer Lancelot. I thought they might not have an easy time with this. Lancelot had got used to the Raja's and my people to the point of tolerating us; but any lot of strangers who confronted him might suffer difficulties.

At last I pointed down and told the pilot policeman: "That looks like it." I tried to read the license number with my binoculars, but the aircraft's vibration made this impossible.

A lorry just like the Redintegrationists' stood in a clear space in a bushy area that the cockies had abandoned but that developers had not yet cut up and built over. That was not all; a big semi-trailer rig was backing towards the rear of the smaller lorry. I could understand why the hijackers would bring a larger vehicle, since they would not know how big a Pleistocene animal we should fetch back to Present.

The cop spoke on his radio to headquarters. He had to study a map to give the exact location. Then he circled and went to a small airfield, used by private-aeroplane owners. He got permission to land, and down we went.

More cops drove up, and one of their cars took me. The cop who was driving said: "Mr. Rivers, I don't think we can go busting in shooting like it was a show. They got one of them assault rifles, and all we got its pistols. Have to wait for more artillery."

"Too bad I haven't got my dinosaur gun," I said. "Didn't have a chance to pick it up."

"Okay, but it don't spray bullets like an assault rifle does. So keep your head well down when we get near these perps."

Eventually we found a little rise from which with glasses we could sweep the area where the lorries were parked. There seemed to be three in that push: one carrying the gun, while two others worked to erect a movable platform between the two lorries. This was one of those steel contraptions on wheels, where the platform is raised on scissor legs by a hydraulic jack. One man was turning a crank to pump up the platform, now about halfway up to the lorries' doorsills. The other of that pair I recognized as Horace Dunbar, the game-ranch owner.

"Don't you blokes keep rifles handy for such occasions?" I asked my cop.

"Yeah," he said, "but you gotta go through red tape to take 'em out. Takes time." He spoke in low tones into his handset, then back to me: "Keep your shirt on, Mr. Rivers. They're sending some of the boys with more fire power."

We left the car to creep up a little closer to the lorries. When I looked through the glasses again, I saw that the platform wallah now had the thing all the way up to the lorry sills.

The man who had worked the hydraulic jack climbed up on the platform. He undogged the bolts that secured the doors of the smaller lorry. I saw that Bames had made a mistake in not closing the padlocks. Even if he had, that would only have delayed things a bit, provided the hijackers had brought a bolt cutter or some such implement with them.

The fellow hoisted the two long bolts out of their sockets and dogged them in the raised position. Then he climbed down to the ground again and went to the tractor unit of the eighteen-wheel semi. He climbed up into the cab, and soon the door at the arse end of the trailer began to rise. It had one of those roll-up doors in sections, which rises like a window shade and stows itself against the roof of the trailer. Soon the end of the trailer yawned wide open.

Then this bloke climbed down, came aft again, and climbed back on the platform. Meanwhile Dunbar stood watching and giving orders, while the cove with the rifle stood with his back to the lorry, looking in all directions.

The man on the platform took hold of the door handles and pulled die doors open. Dunbar handed him up a dowel rod about a meter and a half long, with a steel hook in the end. I recalled seeing a circus man control an elephant by catching his ear with such a hook. I had a feeling that Lancelot would not take kindly to such treatment.

Then Dunbar climbed into the cab of the smaller lorry. I could not see what the ratbag did; I suppose he opened the window in the back of the cab, and that in front of the lorry body, and poked something through. At any rate, Lancelot gave a shrill toot and emerged on the platform between the vehicles. The man with the goad leaped off the platform when Lancelot took a swipe at him.

It's a comfort to know that we were not the only ones to make mistakes. I suppose the man who jacked up the platform neglected to turn the handle that locked the platform in the raised position. As soon as Lancelot put his full weight on the device, it started to sink slowly back to ground level, while the crank handle spun in reverse.

Even at that distance, we could hear the shouts of the three men. As the platform neared the bottom of its travel, Lancelot stepped down to the ground. He trumpeted, lashed the air with his trunk, and started off.

Dunbar, who had come down from the lorry cab, yelled and put himself in front of that mastodon, waving his arms, like those people who stand in front of tanks when a government tries to put down an insurrection. Lancelot gave a swipe of his trunk, brushing Dunbar to one side but not quite knocking him down.

Dunbar yelled, stepped back to the mastodon, and grabbed the animal round the foreleg. I suppose he had counted on Lancelot to keep him out of bankruptcy, by the money he would get by letting his rich client shoot the beast; and he couldn't bear to see his last financial hope shuffle away. Desperate, he did one of the most foolish things you can do, which is to try to match muscle with a big wild animal. Even a fifty-Mo chimp is much stronger than any mere human being. But desperate men often go a bit nuts.

Lancelot just gave a kind of sidewise kick, which sent Dunbar flying into a bush. Then cops with rifles sprouted from the shrubbery, yelling to the remaining two. The one with the assault rifle dropped it and raised his hands. With the leader of the push down and out of action, there was no reason for the subordinates to make it a fight to the death.

Joe Hockersmith appeared with another bag of apples. The mastodon gave a happy squeal and grabbed it.

There's little more to tell. Horace Dunbar died on his way to the hospital in the ambulance. He was in his sixties, and that kick had broken some things inside him. Blackelk and his Society got their mastodon, and Lancelot is growing into a fine big tusker. But the only one who can safely approach him on foot is Joe Hockersmith, provided he brings some apples with him.

You asked what had caused us the most trouble in Present. I think this case, the only one where we brought an extinct form forward to Present and had it hijacked, qualifies, eh, Mr. Schindler?