Time Travel Omnibus, page 491
When camp was pitched, we still had the afternoon, so the Raja and I took our sahibs on their first hunt. We already had a map of the local terrain from previous trips.
The Raja and I have worked out a system for dinosaur hunting. We split into two groups of two men and walk parallel from twenty to forty yards apart. Each group consists of one sahib in front and one guide following and telling the sahib where to go.
We tell the sahibs we put them in front so they shall have first shot, which is true, but another reason is they’re always tripping and falling with their guns cocked, and if the guide were in front, he’d get shot.
The reason for two groups is that if a dinosaur starts for one, the other gets a good heart shot from the side.
AS WE walked, there was the usual rustle of lizards scuttling out of the way: little fellows, quick as a flash and colored like all the jewels in Tiffany’s, and big gray ones that hiss and plod off. There were tortoises and a few little snakes. Birds with beaks full of teeth flapped off squawking. And always that marvelous mild Cretaceous air. Makes a chap want to take his clothes off and dance with vine-leaves in his hair, if you know what I mean. Not that I’d ever do such a thing, you understand.
Our sahibs soon found that Mesozoic country is cut up into millions of nullahs—gullies, you’d call them. Walking is one long scramble, up and down, up and down.
We’d been scrambling for an hour and the sahibs were soaked with sweat and had their tongues hanging out, when the Raja whistled. He’d spotted a group of bonehead feeding on cycad shoots.
These are the troodonts, small ornithopods about the size of men with a bulge on top of their heads that makes them look quite intelligent. Means nothing, because the bulge is solid bone and the brain is as small as in other dinosaur, hence the name. The males butt each other with these heads in fighting over the females. They would drop down to all fours, munch a shoot, then stand up and look round. They’re warier than most dinosaur because they’re the favorite food of the big theropods.
People sometimes assume that because dinosaur are so stupid, their senses must be dim, but it’s not so. Some, like the sauropods, are pretty dim-sensed, but most have good smell and eyesight and fair hearing. Their weakness is that, having no minds, they have no memories; hence, out of sight, out of mind. When a big theropod comes slavering after you, your best defense is to hide in a nullah or behind a bush, and if he can neither see nor smell you, he’ll just forget all about you and wander off.
We sneaked up behind a patch of palmetto downwind from the bonehead. I whispered to James: “You’ve had a shot already today. Hold your fire until Holtzinger shoots and then shoot only if he misses or if the beast is getting away wounded.”
“Uh-huh,” said James and we separated, he with the Raja and Holtzinger with me. This got to be our regular arrangement. James and I got on each other’s nerves, but the Raja, once you forget that Oriental-potentate rot, is a friendly, sentimental sort of bloke nobody can help liking.
Well, we crawled round the palmetto patch on opposite sides and Holtzinger got up to shoot. You daren’t shoot a heavy-caliber rifle prone. There’s not enough give and the kick can break your shoulder.
HOLTZINGER sighted round the last few fronds of palmetto. I saw his barrel wobbling and weaving and then off went James’s gun, both barrels again. The biggest bonehead went down, rolling and thrashing, and the others ran on their hindlegs in great leaps, their heads jerking and their tails sticking up behind.
“Put your gun on safety,” I said to Holtzinger, who’d started forward. By the time we got to the bonehead, James was standing over it, breaking open his gun and blowing out the barrels. He looked as smug as if he’d inherited another million and he was asking the Raja to take his picture with his foot on the game. His first shot had been excellent, right through the heart. His second had missed because the first knocked the beast down. James couldn’t resist that second shot even when there was nothing to shoot at.
I said: “I thought you were to give Holtzinger first shot.”
“Hell, I waited,” he said, “and he took so long, I thought something must have gone wrong. If we stood around long enough, they’d see us or smell us.”
There was something in what he said, but his way of saying it got me angry. I said: “If that sort of thing happens just once more, we’ll leave you in camp the next time we go out.”
“Now, gentlemen,” said the Raja. “After all, Reggie, these aren’t experienced hunters.”
“What now?” asked Holtzinger. “Haul the beast back ourselves or send out the men?”
“I think we can sling him under the pole,” I said. “He weighs under two hundred.” The pole was a telescoping aluminium carrying pole I had in my pack, with yokes on the ends with sponge-rubber padding. I brought it along because in such eras you can’t always count on finding saplings strong enough for proper poles on the spot.
The Raja and I cleaned our bonehead, to lighten him, and tied him to the pole. The flies began to light on the offal by thousands. Scientists say they’re not true flies in the modern sense, but they look and act like them. There’s one conspicuous kind of carrion fly, a big four-winged insect with a distinctive deep note as it flies.
THE REST of the afternoon, we sweated under that pole. We took turns about, one pair carrying the beast while the other two carried the guns. The lizards scuttled out of the way and the flies buzzed round the carcass.
When we got to camp, it was nearly sunset. We felt as if we could eat the whole bonehead at one meal. The boys had the camp running smoothly, so we sat down for our tot of whiskey feeling like lords of creation while the cook broiled bonehead steaks.
Holtzinger said: “Uh—if I kill a ceratopsian, how do we get his head back?”
I explained: “If the ground permits, we lash it to the patent aluminium roller-frame and sled it in.”
“How much does a head like that weigh?” he asked.
“Depends on the age and the species,” I told him. “The biggest weigh over a ton, but most run between five hundred and a thousand pounds.”
“And all the ground’s rough like today?”
“Most of it. You see, it’s the combination of the open vegetation cover and the high rainfall. Erosion is frightfully rapid.”
“And who hauls the head on its little sled?”
“Everybody with a hand. A big head would need every ounce of muscle in this party and even then we might not succeed. On such a job, there’s no place for side.”
“Oh,” said Holtzinger. I could see him wondering whether a ceratopsian head would be worth the effort.
The next couple of days, we trekked round the neighborhood. Nothing worth shooting; only a herd of fifty-odd ornithomimes who went bounding off like a lot of bloody ballet dancers. Otherwise there were only the usual lizards and pterosaurs and birds and insects. There’s a big lacewinged fly that bites dinosaurs, so you can imagine its beak makes nothing of a human skin. One made Holtzinger leap into the air when it bit through his shirt. James joshed him about it, saying: “What’s all the fuss over one little bug?”
The second night, during the Raja’s watch, James gave a yell that brought us all out of our tents with rifles. All that had happened was that a dinosaur tick had crawled in with him and started drilling into his armpit. Since it’s as big as your thumb even when it hasn’t fed, he was understandably startled. Luckily he got it before it had taken its pint of blood. He’d pulled Holtzinger’s leg pretty hard about the fly bite, so now Holtzinger repeated: “What’s all the fuss over one little bug, buddy?”
James squashed the tick underfoot and grunted. He didn’t like being twitted with his own words.
WE PACKED up and started on our circuit. We meant to take them first to the borders of the sauropod swamp, more to see the wild-life than to collect anything.
From where the transition chamber materializes, the sauropod swamp looks like a couple of hours’ walk, but it’s an all-day scramble. The first part is easy, as it’s downhill and the brush isn’t heavy. But as you get near the swamp, the cicads and willows grow so thickly, you have to worm your way among them.
There was a sandy ridge on the border of the swamp that I led the party to, for it’s pretty bare of vegetation and affords a fine view. When we got to the ridge, the Sun was about to go down. A couple of crocs slipped off into the water. The sahibs were so exhausted, being soft yet, that they flopped down in the sand as if dead.
The haze is thick round the swamp, so the Sun was deep red and distorted by the atmospheric layers—pinched in at various levels. There was a high layer of clouds reflecting the red and gold, too, so altogether it was something for the Raja to write one of his poems about. Only your modern poet prefers to write about a rainy day in a garbage dump. A few little pterosaur were wheeling overhead like bats, only they don’t flutter like bats. They swoop and soar after the big night-flying insects.
Beauregard Black collected firewood and lit a fire. We’d started on our steaks, and that pagodashaped Sun was just clipping below the horizon, and something back in the trees was making a noise like a rusty hinge, when a sauropod breathed out in the water. If Mother Earth were to sigh over the misdeeds of her children, it would sound just about like that.
The sahibs jumped up, waving and shouting: “Where is he?
Where is he?”
I said: “That black spot in the water, just to the left and this side of that point.”
They yammered while the sauropod filled its lungs and disappeared. “Is that all?” yelped James. “Won’t we see any more of him?”
Holtzinger said: “I read they never come out of the water because they’re too heavy.”
“No,” I explained. “They can walk perfectly well and often do, for egg-laying and moving from one swamp to another. But most of the time they spend in the water, like hippopotamus. They eat eight hundred pounds of soft swamp plants a day, all with those little heads. So they wander about the bottoms of lakes and swamps, chomping away, and stick their heads up to breathe every quarter-hour or so. It’s getting dark, so this fellow will soon come out and lie down in the shallows to sleep.”
“Can we shoot one?” demanded James.
“I wouldn’t,” said I.
“Why not?”
I SAID: “There’s no point in it and it’s not sporting. First, they’re even harder to hit in the brain than other dinosaurs because of the way they sway their heads about on those long necks and their hearts are too deeply buried in tissue to reach unless you’re awfully lucky. Then, if you kill one in the water, he sinks and can’t be recovered. If you kill one on land, the only trophy is that little head. You can’t bring the whole beast back because he weighs thirty tons or more. We don’t need thirty tons of meat.” Holtzinger said: “That museum in New York got one.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “The American Museum of Natural History sent a party of forty-eight to the early Cretaceous, with a fifty-caliber machine gun. They assembled the gun on the edge of a swamp, killed a sauropod—and spent two solid months skinning it and hacking the carcass apart and dragging it to the time machine. I know the chap in charge of that project and he still has nightmares in which he smells decomposing dinosaur. They also had to kill a dozen big theropods who were attracted by the stench and refused to be frightened off, so they had them lying round and rotting, too. And the theropods ate three men of the party despite the big gun”
Next morning, we were finishing breakfast when one of the helpers called: “Look, Mr. Rivers! Up there!”
He pointed along the shoreline. There were six big duckbill feeding in the shallows. They were the kind called parasaurolophus, with a crest consisting of a long spike of Borie sticking out the back of their heads, like the horn of an oryx, and a web of skin connecting this with the back of their neck.
“Keep your voices down,” I said. The duckbill, like the other ornithopods, are wary beasts because they have no armor or weapons against the theropods. The duckbill feed on the margins of lakes and swamps, and when a gorgosaur rushes out of the trees, they plunge into deep water and swim off. Then when phobosuchus, the super-crocodile, goes for them in the water, they flee to the land. A hectic sort of life, what?
Holtzinger said: “Uh—Reggie, I’ve been thinking over what you said about ceratopsian heads. If I could get one of those yonder, I’d be satisfied. It would look big enough in my house, wouldn’t it?”
“I’m sure of it, old boy,” I said. “Now look here. I could take you on a detour to come out on the shore near there, but we should have to plow through half a mile of muck and brush, up to our knees in water, and they’d hear us coming. Or we can creep up to the north end of this sand spit, from which it’s four or five hundred yards—a long shot, but not impossible. Think you could do it?”
“With my ’scope sight and a sitting position—yes, I’ll try it.”
“You stay here,” I said to James. “This is Augie’s head and I don’t want any argument over your having fired first.”
JAMES grunted while Holtzinger clamped his ’scope to his rifle. We crouched our way up the spit, keeping the sand ridge between us and the duckbills. When we got to the end where there was no more cover, we crept along on hands and knees, moving slowly. If you move slowly directly toward or away from a dinosaur, it probably won’t notice you.
The duckbills continued to grub about on all fours, every few seconds rising to look round. Holtzinger eased himself into the sitting position, cocked his piece, and aimed through the ’scope. And then—
Bang! bang! went a big rifle back at the camp.
Holtzinger jumped. The duckbill jerked up their heads and leaped for the deep water, splashing like mad. Holtzinger fired once and missed. I took a shot at the last duckbill before it disappeared. I missed, too: the .600 isn’t designed for long ranges.
Holtzinger and I started back toward the camp, for it had struck us that our party might be in theropod trouble and need reinforcements.
What happened was that a big sauropod, probably the one we’d heard the night before, had wandered down past the camp under water, feeding as it went. Now the water shoaled about a hundred yards offshore from our spit, halfway over to the edge of the swamp on the other side. The sauropod had ambled up the slope until its body was almost all out of water, weaving its head from side to side and looking for anything green to gobble. This kind looks like the well-known brontosaurus, but a little bigger. Scientists argue whether it ought to be included in the genus camarasaurus or a separate genus with an even longer name.
When I came in sight of the camp, the sauropod was turning round to go back the way it had come, making horrid groans. It disappeared into deep water, all but its head and ten or twenty feet of neck, which wove about for some time before they vanished into the haze.
When we came up to the camp, James was arguing with the Raja. Holtzinger burst out: “You bastard! That’s the second time you’ve spoiled my shots!” Strong language for little August.
“Don’t be a fool,” said James. “I couldn’t let him wander into camp and stamp everything flat.”
“There was no danger of that,” objected the Raja politely. “You can see thee water is deep offshore. It is just that our trigger-happee Mr. James cannot see any animal without shooting.”
I SAID: “If it did get close, all you needed to do was throw a stick of firewood at it. They’re perfectly harmless.” This wasn’t strictly true. When the Comte de Lautrec ran after one for a close shot, the sauropod looked back at him, gave a flick of its tail, and took off the Comte’s head as neatly as if he’d been axed in the Tower.
“How was I to know?” yelled James, getting purple. “You’re all against me. What the hell are we on this goddamn trip for except to shoot things? You call yourselves hunters, but I’m the only one who’s hit anything!”
I got pretty wrothy and said he was just an excitable young skite with more money than brains, whom I should never have brought along.
“If that’s how you feel,” he said, “give me a burro and some food and I’ll go back to the base by myself. I won’t pollute your air with my loathsome presence!”
“Don’t be a bigger ass than you can help,” I snapped. “That’s quite impossible.”
“Then I’ll go all alone!” He grabbed his knapsack, thrust a couple of tins of beans and an opener into it, and started off with his rifle.
Beauregard Black spoke up: “Mr. Rivers, we cain’t let him go off like that by hisself. He’ll git lost and starve or be et by a theropod.”
“I’ll fetch him back,” said the Raja and started after the runaway. He caught up as James was disappearing into the cycads. We could see them arguing and waving their hands, but couldn’t make out what they said. After a while, they started back with arms around each other’s necks like old school pals. I simply don’t know how the Raja does it.
This shows the trouble we get into if we make mistakes in planning such a do. Having once got back into the past, we had to make the best of our bargain. We always must, you see.
I don’t want to give the impression Courtney James was only a pain in the rump. He had his good points. He got over these rows quickly and next day would be as cheerful as ever. He was helpful with the general work of the camp—when he felt like it, at any rate. He sang well and had an endless fund of dirty stories to keep us amused.
We stayed two more days at that camp. We saw crocodile, the small kind, and plenty of sauropod—as many as five at once—but no more duckbill. Nor any of those fifty-foot super-crocodiles.
SO, ON the first of May, we broke camp and headed north toward the Janpur Hills. My sahibs were beginning to harden up and were getting impatient. We’d been in the Cretaceous a week and no trophies.
I won’t go into details of the next leg. Nothing in the way of a trophy, save a glimpse of a gorgosaur out of range and some tracks indicating a whopping big iguanodont, twenty-five or thirty feet high. We pitched camp at the base of the hills.
