Bone Beds of the Badlands, page 10
Dorothy didn’t even respond to him. The canteen stayed strapped over her shoulder. Instead she kind of leapt to her feet and tried to smile. “Why don’t we just look at this as an adventure?” she said.
We couldn’t believe it.
“An ADVENTURE?” cried Rhett.
She started walking as she talked. “Don’t tell me I’m being unrealistic again! What else can we do? It is very important that we keep a positive outlook. If we panic, if we are frightened out of our minds, WE WILL DIE!”
Her voice echoed around the hills. She stopped for a moment, then continued.
“I’m just as afraid as the rest of you, and I don’t have some perfect plan, but we have to get it together here. Besides, I’ve spent my whole life in Drumheller without anything exciting to do, and today I have something. This is life-and-death. I’m going to make the best of it. Now…think for a second, you guys, and let’s come up with a plan.”
There was silence. We were all staring at each other.
“Well, we can look for the flag,” I said quietly.
We had been so freaked out that we hadn’t even thought of the simplest solution to our problem: find the flag. I guess we had all felt, at first, that our sense of direction would eventually lead us back to the tour bus, but now we knew we couldn’t trust our instincts in a badlands desert for a minute.
“Let’s see,” I continued, “when we were looking at it in the late afternoon the sun was kind of getting in my eyes, so that means…”
“The flag was in the west,” said Terry.
“Right!” exclaimed Rhett, still sounding emotional.
“You’re right, Bomber,” said Dorothy.
“But…it’s still a good idea to try to find the flag—we just won’t know exactly where to look.”
We all got up and started checking out the horizon. We spun around in every direction. No flag. But how could that be? Hadn’t KD said that you could see it from everywhere?
“We must be really, really lost,” said Rhett, sounding frightened again.
Our other problem was even scarier. In about half an hour we wouldn’t even be able to see the flag if we were looking straight at it. It was getting dark.
“We have to get to higher ground,” said Dorothy.
There was a hill not too far away that all of us were sure was higher than most of the others we could see. We started out towards it. But trying to reach it seemed like a bad dream. The more we walked, the farther away it seemed to get. Slowly the sun began to set.
“We have to stop,” said Dorothy. “We have to find a place to sleep tonight and try our luck in the morning.”
As frightening as that sounded, she was right. Human beings are useless in the dark.
We had passed quite a few caves during our walks, but no one wanted any part of them. Who knew what lurked inside? The best idea was to get down low somewhere so we would be sheltered from the wind if it picked up and wouldn’t be easy prey for an animal. We wanted to be as hard to detect as possible.
Soon we found a place that seemed well protected, and we settled in. All of us were shaking by now and not trying to hide it. We were petrified out of our minds.
Dorothy tried to get us to play the “I wish I were…” game to get our thoughts off our fears. She went first and said “Somewhere else!” She tried to make a joke of it, but no one laughed. The answers got kind of weird. Terry said, very quietly, that he wished he were “brave”; Bomber said “smart,” and Rhett said “emotional.” I didn’t know what to say, so I just whispered, “Something I’m not right now,” and that ended the game. We all grew silent and kind of huddled near each other, and had a little drink of our water. I heard someone sniffling and thought of the parental units again. I wanted them near me in a way I hadn’t since I was a little kid. This had to be one of my nightmares.
But it wasn’t. It was so brutally real that I couldn’t even sleep. It was deathly silent in the badlands at night, and I lay there listening. Then I heard a coyote howl and some sort of a growl…a bobcat? Suddenly, I felt something crawling on me. No! I leapt to my feet, quivering, and shook at it, jumping up and down and shrieking.
“Sorry,” said Rhett. It had been his hand. He had reached out and put it on my shoulder. I couldn’t believe that he, of all people, needed comfort. We were all feeling pretty freaked.
I lay down again. After a while I heard louder breathing and knew the others had somehow gone to sleep. I felt alone in the middle of the badlands. Mom and Dad always talked about the beauty of nature, and here I was out in one of the most stunning parts of our country…and absolutely terrified by it. It just didn’t seem beautiful now. I remembered that when we were in Horsethief Canyon I’d thought that trekking way into that dangerous terrain and even getting lost would have been thrilling. That seemed incredibly stupid now. I sat there with my eyes open, not seeing very much in the darkness, just the outlines of those evil hills. Once or twice I thought I heard footsteps, and then a crawling sound, and a hiss. But it was all in my mind.
I lay there for what seemed like hours. Then, still unable to sleep, I sat up. Far off in the distance, I thought I saw something. I stood up and walked a couple of steps towards it. It was a light! And it seemed to flicker like a flame.
But then I started getting realistic. What could we do about it now? If we got up and walked towards it we would soon be even more lost, and who knew what we might stumble upon out there in that black wasteland? Cactus spikes through our shoes? Real black widow spiders crawling up our legs? There just had to be light to move.
I lay down again. Who, or what, could have made that fire? I finally drifted off to sleep, curled up and lying on my side, still trying to focus on that distant flicker until my eyelids became too heavy, despite all my worry and fear and desperation. A tear rolled down my cheek. For some reason, that light didn’t comfort me. Did it mean hope…or danger?
Who was out there?
11
The Flag
It was horribly depressing waking up the next morning. Several times in my life I’ve awakened in places I wasn’t used to, and for a moment I didn’t know where I was. Each time I panicked for an instant, felt totally at sea, but then got my bearings and was okay. I know that’s a feeling everybody gets a few times in their lives. But I’d never felt anything like this. That first part, that panic, just kept right on going, for all of us, when we realized where we were.
It had been cold at night, and most of us woke up shivering. We started running sprints to get warm. Usually that sort of thing would have made us start goofing around. But there was none of that this time. When we started slowing down, I remembered what I had seen in the night.
“I saw something when we were sleeping,” I said to no one in particular.
“A fire?” asked Dorothy.
“Yeah,” I replied, a little startled.
“Saw it too. This way?” She pointed off into the distance.
“That’s right.” I was surprised, and a little excited, to see that we agreed on the direction, too.
“A fire?” cried Rhett. “You guys saw a fire? Well, let’s go!”
We headed out. We hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before; I could feel my stomach rumbling. And soon it would get hot again. I knew the other guys were thinking about the same things, but no one said a word. We just walked steadily. The sun was in our eyes. There we no aircraft in the skies.
Dorothy moved up beside me.
“Uh, we seem to be going east. If we’re still east of the field station, like we were on the tour, then we’re going away from where we want to be.”
“Right,” I said, and paused. “But if someone did have a campfire out this way last night, our best bet is to go towards it, isn’t it?”
“Probably.”
I didn’t ask her why she said that. I didn’t want to know. We kept trudging along, and as we did I started to realize that we were looking for a needle in a haystack—everything looked the same again. But this seemed like the only hope we had. Dorothy and I were both convinced that we knew where we had seen the fire. And about twenty minutes later, much to our surprise, we found it.
It was a campfire, all right. But there was no one around. There weren’t even footprints. Then Bomber found a clue. He was standing a few metres away on the other side of the still-smouldering fire and looking down.
“Whoever this is, he’s alone. And he has a horse.”
There were footprints all over the place. They came from a single horse. And whoever had been on it had cleverly covered up his own footprints before he mounted. Why would anyone do that? We followed the tracks for about ten or fifteen metres. The spaces between them began to widen.
“The horse is starting to move faster,” said Dorothy, studying the prints. She walked several more paces, her eyes glued to the sand. “And here…it’s galloping. This person left in a hurry and could be a long way off by now.”
“Rats,” said Terry.
I felt like saying more than that. Our spirits sank. We all sat around the dead fire and took another little drink of water. Only Bomber got up and wandered around.
A few minutes later, we heard him screaming. Our heads shot up and we leapt to our feet. We couldn’t see him. He screamed again. It was blood-curdling. Racing off in the direction of his voice, we sprinted up a hill in no time and came down the other side. And there he was, pointing. And screaming.
“What?” I yelled. “Bomber! What?”
He turned around. He had a tear in his eye, but he didn’t seem sad.
“The flag!” he shouted. “THE FLAG!”
We looked up. And there it was! The field station flag, high on a hill! I grabbed Dorothy and hugged her. She hugged back. Wrong move. We separated. Then I hugged Rhett. Even more wrong. We started slapping each other on the back and high-fiving instead.
“Let’s head out, team!” I said. “Good adventure, Dorothy. But it’s time to go home!”
There was a spring in our steps as we started off in the direction of the flag. It seemed as though it was pretty close, maybe about a forty-five-minute walk. And we would likely reach the edges of the Restricted Area long before that. We goofed around as we walked and teased each other about who had been most afraid. Dorothy seemed more relieved than any of us, and she kept talking about what she was going to do when she got home. It was great to finally feel that horrible desperation evaporate. We celebrated by drinking the canteen almost dry.
But forty minutes later the flag didn’t seem any closer. Well, at least we knew where we were going. It couldn’t be long now.
It was. Another forty minutes of walking passed and we still weren’t closer. It almost seemed as if the flag were moving. Then Dorothy, good old Dorothy, said something that put just a little of that desperation back into me.
“Notice anything strange about the flag?”
I looked at it, still so distant.
“No.”
“It’s, uh, in the east, too.”
She was right. I didn’t know what shape the Restricted Area was, but unless it sort of encircled the field station and we had doubled back and walked all the way around to the other side, then we seemed to be moving in the opposite direction from the way we should have been going.
“That is strange,” was all I could say.
“Sure is,” she mumbled.
“But look at it. That’s the flag, all right. We must be going in the right direction.”
“Must be,” she said. But she didn’t sound convinced.
Two hours later the heat was becoming unbearable, and the flag was still distant.
“We have to get out of the sun,” groaned Bomber.
“Good idea,” said Terry. “But where?”
I noticed Rhett wasn’t saying much. In fact, he had hardly said anything all day. He seemed to be really struggling. His face looked white, and that worried me.
“What do you think, Rhetter?”
“Sure. Out of the sun.”
That wasn’t very encouraging.
There weren’t any of those cottonwood trees around. In fact, there didn’t seem to be really any shade of any sort. Except…I looked up high into the side of a hill. “We need to check out these caves.”
“Caves?” said Terry. “No way! You won’t catch me dead in any of those.”
“You may be dead, period, if we don’t get out of the sun for a while,” said Dorothy. “Let’s just rest for an hour or so and then move out again. The field station can’t be that far away now.”
The slow climb up the hill towards the caves was filled with dread. There were a dozen or more in the area we were approaching, and it was hard to tell what had made them. Wind? Water erosion? An animal? A human being? We hadn’t asked the ranger, and now we were about to find out the hard way.
Terry announced that, though he was probably more afraid of the caves than anyone else, someone had to go in first. He disappeared. We waited. And waited.
“Cool!”
“Terry?”
He popped back out.
“They aren’t very deep. I think they’re just made by wind erosion. And there doesn’t seem to be anything living in them, at least not now.”
We all went in, ducking our heads to enter. The temperature dropped dramatically the minute we got out of the sun. None of us was in the mood for exploring, so we just sat down and waited. Before long we were all asleep.
I guess it was the rattling that woke me up. I don’t have any baby brothers or sisters, so that was an unfamiliar sound to me. As exhausted as I was, it didn’t even occur to me that I shouldn’t be hearing a baby rattle, or that it was impossible for one to be shaking right near my ear when I was lost in the middle of Dinosaur Provincial Park. Slowly, reality began to dawn on me.
I opened my eyes. There was a hissing sound. For real. I leapt to my feet. My sleeping place was near the entrance, and no more than a metre away a prairie rattlesnake was making its way home…into our cave.
“Up! UP UP UP!” I shouted to the others.
“Dylan, go to sleep,” said Bomber.
“SNAKE!” I shouted. “SNAKE!”
I’ve never seen any of them move faster than that. Not even for the free chips and pop after our hockey games. They were up in a flash. We flattened ourselves against a wall and slid by the snake and back into the sun. Outside there were dozens of rattlesnakes baking in the heat ten metres from the cave entrance! We flashed down the hill in an instant. At the bottom we bent over, hands on our knees, breathing hard. All of us except Dorothy.
She was trudging slowly down the hill behind us.
“They aren’t apt to bite you, you know. Just stay clear of them and you’re fine. The worst thing you can do is startle them by, uh…running…and screaming.”
We ignored that.
“Let’s get moving,” I said. “We have to get to that flag before sunset.”
But we didn’t. We walked and walked. We grew so tired that we could hardly stand. And the flag just seemed to stay the same distance away. We couldn’t believe it.
The sun was getting low, casting an orange glow over the sands. Unable to move any more, and too tired to make decisions, we slumped to the ground. I rolled over on my side and curled up. My eyes were wide open like a wooden dummy’s and staring off into the distance, not registering anything. That’s why I didn’t clue in to what I was seeing at first. It was just a figure on the horizon. I was thinking about Mom and Dad, about my house and my room. All we had done was make a model of a dinosaur. And look where we had ended up.
Slowly that figure came into focus. I realized that Dorothy, who was right beside me, had sat up and was staring at the same thing. Though it was far away we could tell that it was a man standing on the edge of a cliff in the direction we had been walking. He was tall. Very tall. He was wearing a big black Stetson.
And he had the flag in his hand.
12
Hunting Him
When we had talked about the Reptile back at the Jurassic Inn in Drumheller, Terry had said that if there was going to be any hunting, then we would be the prey. Well, now we were. He had led us deep into the Restricted Area and had us exactly where he wanted us. God only knew how far away from the field station we were. Every step we had taken in pursuit of that flag had taken us farther away from rescue and closer to whatever he had planned for us. It was as if he had just given us a signal. Now, he was going to hunt us down.
Dorothy and I didn’t have to hide the Reptile’s presence from any of the guys. As we stared at him, terrified, we could sense that Rhett, Bomber, and Terry were looking, too.
“Oh, God,” said Rhett.
God didn’t have anything to do with it, near as I could tell. Satan was more like it. The Devil had come to southern Alberta and he was after us. Why was another question, one I didn’t care to think about.
It took us a long time to start talking. By then the sun had completely gone down and the Reptile had disappeared. I heard a little bit of sniffling but I didn’t ask any questions. I’d had a few moments of terror myself since I’d seen him, and I’d had to wipe away tears. Thank goodness it was dark out.
“Well.” Dorothy’s voice came out of nowhere, breaking the long silence. “Are we just going to lie here and let him come and get us?”
“No, let’s go and take him on in hand-to-hand combat…you twit,” shot back Rhett. He was tired, frightened, and angry.
“We’re sure in the movies now,” said Terry, his voice breaking.
But I figured Dorothy was right. We could either lie there like whimpering babies or do something. Maybe that something wouldn’t be good enough, but at least we could try. In the video games at the museum, the T. rex didn’t always win, and it must have been like that in real life, long ago in these badlands. But any time the prey actually got away, it was because it did something smart.
