A Dawn of Mammals Collection

by Lou Cadle

  She said, “This is good news, at least.”

  Nari, just ahead of her, said, “What is?”

  “Ferns. A lot are edible, and even tasty if we can find them before they unfurl.” As she said that, she saw one, a fiddlehead fern at her feet. She pulled her knife out of her pocket and snipped it off, then trotted to catch up with the rest of them, glancing behind her to make sure some predator hadn’t already caught their scent.

  So far, so good. Nothing dangerous trailed them.

  As she walked, she peeled back the edges of the fern to study its structure. There might be two dozen species here, and some would taste better than others. Some might even be poisonous, so she’d better be able to distinguish one from the other. When she had noted the structure of the fern and thought she could recognize a second example of the same species, she crushed the leaves, rubbed the pulp on the back of her hand, tucked the fern into her shirt pocket, and wiped her fingers on her pants.

  They were headed toward a dense patch of trees ahead. The plateau was surrounded on three sides by this patch of low-growing plants, a couple hundred yards wide.

  They reached the forest canopy. Here, it was much darker, if not much cooler. She checked the sun in the sky and thought Bob’s guess had been correct. It was morning, as the sun was still rising. By noon, she’d be able to guess the time of year using the sun’s angle.

  And Rex, their amateur astronomer, could confirm that.

  By the time they had gathered in the shade at the edge of the forest, her pants were soaked through to the knee with dew.

  Claire mentioned it. “My khakis are wet.”

  Bob said, “That’s good, actually, in one way.”

  “It’s uncomfortable,” said Nari.

  Laina said, “Why?” at the same time.

  Bob said, “We’ll never want for drinking water, if it stays this damp. Every morning, we could wring out our clothes and get water, if we needed to.”

  “I’m thirsty,” said Dixie. “Anyone have water in their bottle?”

  Garreth said, “I do.” He shrugged off his backpack and dug inside for a bottle. “Only half.”

  “Share it,” Hannah said, seeing Dixie tip the bottle back. “Sucking dew out of our pants legs will keep us alive, but I’d rather find a spring or fast-running stream.”

  Ted said, “We need to find a place to live, don’t we?”

  “That’s right. And before sundown,” Hannah said.

  Bob said, “We’re unlikely to luck into finding another cave for shelter. So everybody keep your eyes peeled and your brain working.”

  Garreth said, “We can always build another stockade. Looks like there are plenty of trees for that.”

  Jodi said, “But they’re weird trees. Aren’t they?”

  They were. This, more than anything, confirmed to Hannah that they were not in the 21st century. Some of the trees were palms, more like bushes than trees. Some were towering conifers. She didn’t see anything like an oak, or elm, or linden, or fruit tree, or at least none she knew about from the 21st century.

  Bob walked over to one tree and pulled at a low-hanging branch. “Hmm,” he said, as he plucked a leaf and looked at it.

  “Do you know it?” Hannah said.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Let’s explore a little more.”

  “Don’t stray,” Hannah reminded the kids. “Keep an eye out for danger.”

  Packed tightly together, they moved into the deeper shade of the trees. There were still ferns and vines underfoot. Claire tripped on one, and a moment later, so did Zach.

  Zach struggled to free himself. “Shit—I mean shoot, these are tough.”

  Garreth bent to help the other boy free his foot. “They are. Really thick too.”

  Hannah said, “Remember that, folks. If we have to run from something, pick your feet up.” She had a horrible image of one of them being chased by a saber tooth, falling, and ending up like M.J.

  Bob had gone to another tree. “This is a ginkgo, I think,” he said, looking up at it.

  “Does that tell you anything?”

  “Mmm,” he said, a noncommittal noise. “Gingkoes exist in our day, so I don’t want to say yet.”

  Hannah suspected that Bob knew more about paleontology than he had let on. He had probably been deferring to M.J. before. But she could almost see his brain working, taking in the evidence and weighing it.

  Rex said, “There’s not a path or anything. Which way should we go?”

  Hannah said, “The thinnest vegetation, I suppose. Or downhill, hoping to find a stream.”

  “Those are opposite directions,” Rex said, pointing.

  “Downhill, then.”

  Dixie screamed and jumped.

  Chapter 3

  “What?” Hannah said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Something bit me.” She was hopping on one leg, rubbing the other ankle. “Like a spider or something.”

  “Let me see,” Hannah said, pushing forward to get to her.

  The girl had failed to obey the instructions about dressing for hiking in the badlands, and she was in shorts and a tight tank top. Both were stained with sweat and starting to fray—as were many of the less well-made clothes in the group. Hannah’s own Park Service uniform was holding together well, as were the jeans all of the boys and Jodi wore. Claire’s khaki pants were well made. Hannah kept herself from lecturing Dixie once more about her stupid choice in clothing while she squatted to look at the ankle.

  There was a red mark, definitely. Hannah said, “Did you see what it was? You know it was a spider?”

  “No, but I hate spiders.”

  “It could have been anything. A mosquito.”

  “It hurts. It doesn’t itch.” There was a tone in her voice that said she’d like to add “you idiot” at the end of the sentence.

  Hannah stood and shrugged. “I don’t know what to do for it.” She raised her voice. “I know the answer already, but none of you has anything for allergies on you? Benadryl or whatever?”

  “Nobody has anything,” Dixie said.

  “I know.”

  “Then why did you ask? Ow. It hurts.” She rubbed her ankle again.

  “Don’t,” Hannah said, her voice sharper than she intended. More gently, she said, “Leave it alone, okay?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Make yourself.” Hannah was worried that if it were a spider, and its venom did something like a brown recluse’s, rubbing the bite would increase the area of damage.

  Garreth came up with the water bottle. “If we filled this with water, you could hold it against the bite, maybe make it feel better.”

  Dixie curled her lip. “But we don’t have water, do we? It’s empty.”

  Hannah said, “Dixie, shush. He was trying to help.”

  “You like him more than me.”

  True enough.

  Nari had sidled up to Dixie and looked sadly at her. They were the closest thing to good friends the group had begun with. In the month they had spent in the Oligocene, a few other friendships seemed to have formed. Claire and Jodi seemed the closest of those. Zach, Laina, and Rex seemed to have the strongest inclination toward being loners, though Hannah thought both Rex and Zach would both like having a close friend, but didn’t entirely know how to go about that. Zach had said this group included his closest friends, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of intimacy between him and anyone else. Hannah couldn’t decide if that was a guy thing or not, if mere proximity to people counted as friendship to him.

  Laina was simply different. Some sort of math whiz, her intelligence set her apart from even this smart bunch of teens. She wasn’t aloof, but she seemed...“self-contained” might be the word.

  Hannah’s thoughts about the others had calmed her irritation at Dixie.

  “Let’s try and be kind to each other,” she said, and she turned away from the girl. She’d check the bite later to see if it really was anything of note, though she doubted it. And if it were, there was noth
ing she could do about it. Pack it with cool mud, perhaps, and that might reduce any swelling. “Rex,” she said, “lead us downhill.”

  As the trees thinned, the vegetation underfoot grew thicker and their progress was slowed.

  The same bird scream as before sounded, but more distant now, back from the direction they had come.

  “That’s a relief,” Bob said. He was fingering the leaves of a bush that had yellow and pink flowers on it.

  “What’s the plant?”

  “I’m not sure,” Bob said.

  “Guess,” she said, because she thought he did know.

  “Cocoa.” He gestured around them. “This is a tropical forest, or semi-tropical.”

  She moved closer to him and lowered her voice. “And that tells you what?”

  “It depends entirely on where we are. Longitude, latitude.”

  “But you have a guess.”

  “I do. If we’re where we started. Let’s assume—making an ass out of me, no doubt—that the timegate is stable in location, at the same longitude and latitude. Then a tropical forest means....”

  “What? Spit it out.”

  “Earlier.”

  “Dinosaur earlier?”

  “I don’t think so. But there’s not a blade of grass, so earlier than forty. Probably fifty.”

  “Million years ago, you mean.”

  “And if we don’t see dinosaurs, later than sixty-five.”

  Hannah’s heart sank as he confirmed what she had feared all along. “We went in the wrong direction.”

  Chapter 4

  “We went in the direction we went,” Bob said. “In a way, it’s better.”

  “It is?” Hannah could only see the bad news, which was that the timegate might be unidirectional, going backward, never forward. They’d never get to the present again. The 21st century was farther away than ever. Home was farther away. These kids’ parents, impossibly far. Medicine, as imaginary as dragons.

  Dragons, maybe not so imaginary. That bird scream—it could have come from a pterodactyl, for all she knew.

  Bob said, “Buck up, leader. We need you.”

  “My face showed it, eh?” she said. She took a deep breath. “Okay, and the good news you see in this guess is...?”

  “Smaller animals,” Bob said. “If we’re still in the Cenozoic, after the dinosaurs, in the time of the mammals, the mammals haven’t evolved to be all that big. If there are nimravids yet, and there may not be, they’re smaller. All the creodonts are smaller. I doubt there’s a predator much bigger than a wolf. Not that wolves existed until recently, but as a size comparison.”

  “Wolf-sized is plenty big. Let me know when you see something that narrows down the time. And then I’ll have you give a lecture about the epoch.”

  “Lecturing, I know how to do.”

  “We need to know the animals of whatever the hell time we’re in right now, and how to avoid getting eaten by them.”

  “Let’s take it as it comes.”

  Hannah could feel despair wanting to overwhelm her. She steeled herself against giving in to it. “You’re right.”

  “I’m thirsty,” Zach said, walking up to them.

  “It’s hot, isn’t it?” Hannah adjusted her pack and realized her shirt back was soaked through with sweat under the pack. “So we need to find water. Either something close, or head to that water we saw from the plateau. Stream, lake, or whatever it was. Ready, Zach?”

  He nodded.

  “Let’s get to it.”

  They continued pressing through the forest—almost a jungle, with all the vines and dampness. Hannah saw a different sort of fern and found another closed frond. She picked it and gave it to Zach, who was one of her food testers. “Let’s see how this works as food,” she said, and watched as he rubbed it on the back of his hand and pocketed it.

  They came to a clearing surrounded by tall trees. The bases of the trees were really interesting, a bunch of protruding parallel lines, looking like a cross between high roots and low curved branches. Small bare branches emanated from a few of them. Then above those, at about head height, the tree formed into what she thought of as a normal trunk with thin branches coming at frequent intervals.

  “A metasequoia,” said Bob.

  “Can we rest?” Jodi said. “I’m hot and sweaty.”

  They all were, Hannah suspected.

  Rex said, “At least we can see all around ourselves right here.” The trees had formed a circle around an empty space in which they stood.

  “Okay, let’s rest for a minute,” Hannah said. “I guess it’s something in the trees themselves that makes it hard for ferns and vines to grow in here.”

  Sitting, Garreth said, “What do you mean?”

  “Like the leaves it drops are acidic, and it makes the soil toxic to the ferns and vines. Some plants even emit chemicals to stop competitive plants from growing too near.”

  Claire said, “It’s sort of soothing, somehow. The clearing.” She flushed and ducked her head, as if embarrassed by what she had said.

  “No, you’re right. It is,” Hannah agreed.

  “Maybe we could live here,” Garreth said. “Build another stockade around it. The trees are doing half the work. And the ground isn’t too hard for sleeping.” He patted the duff.

  Hannah looked around at the spaces between the trees. “It’d take some work to build a stockade this big.”

  Dixie said, “I wouldn’t mind having a little space at night. Especially if we’re going to be sweating like this. Everyone stinks.”

  Ted unabashedly sniffed his armpit. “I guess so.”

  Dixie said, “What I’d give for a bar of soap.”

  “I agree,” said Hannah.

  Dixie looked at her, surprised.

  “And I might be able to help with that. This time, in addition to food plants, I’ll be on the lookout for some saponaceous plant.”

  “What’s that?” Rex asked.

  “Soapy. There has to be some plant that works like soap.”

  “We need water first,” he said, “for soap to work.”

  “In a world this damp, we’ll find water, rest assured,” she said. She was getting overheated. It wasn’t just that she was sweating, but that it wasn’t evaporating. The humidity made that impossible, so sweat couldn’t do its job of cooling them.

  They were all seated on the ground, except for her and Bob. Bob was examining the base of a metasequoia. She was turning in a circle, watching for danger.

  The kids all fell silent. There was something a little magical about this tree circle that made you want to be quiet and appreciate it.

  Into the silence, there came the sound of the snap of a twig, muffled, but distinct. Hannah spun toward it, ready to fight or run.

  A tiny animal stepped past the trunk of a metasequoia, its neck bent, its nose snuffling along the ground. It was not even ten inches high at the shoulder. It was no animal she had ever seen before. Colored a light brown above and lighter brown below, with a hint of green tinge to the lighter fur, it moseyed along on four feet. It had a snout, a little like a dog’s.

  She was 99% sure, at once, that it wasn’t a predator, just a little herbivore, hunting for breakfast.

  Nari said, “What is it?”

  The animal froze, then in a flash it had spun and run off.

  Hannah said, “Did you see it, Bob?”

  “I did.”

  “You know what it was?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What?” she said.

  “An ectocion, I think.” He rubbed at the back of his neck.

  “Where are we, then? When are we?”

  He hesitated, looking at the kids, whose eyes were all turned toward him now. “It’s a sort of pre-horse. So sixty million years back, more or less.”

  Chapter 5

  Oh boy.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I want to go home.”

  “Are there dinosaurs?”

  “No, of course not.�
�

  Laina’s voice was quieter than the others, but Hannah heard her clearly. “I wonder if it’s thirty million every time. Thirty million, sixty million. Or if it doubles every time.” Her eyes went unfocused, and Hannah imagined her doing more of her quick mental math.

  It was math even Hannah could manage. If it was doubled next time to 120 million years ago, and then 240, one more jump would take them back to a time before life existed, and they’d starve. If that were true, this had to be their last jump.

  For the rest of her life, she realized, she’d live here, in this jungle. No more electronics. No more medicine. No possibility of marriage or children. No more clothes made of synthetic fibers. Eventually, barefoot, wearing tanned hides or grass skirts, carrying a spear, she’d be fighting a rearguard action to save the kids until some predator claimed her.

  Not how she had planned her future, that was for sure.

  But it was the life she had. So deal with it, Hannah.

  When the kids had wound down, she said, “So tell us more about it, Bob.” She tried to make herself sound pleasantly curious.

  He cleared his throat. “The Paleocene was one of the hottest times in recorded history, with the average winter temperature being over sixty degrees. But this is probably summer, so it’s going to be pretty hot. There were no polar ice caps. There were palm trees in Alaska, but of course there really wasn’t an Alaska. You remember when I talked to you about big continents, like Laurasia, where everything was connected?”

  “I remember that,” Rex said.

  “What does that matter?” Dixie said.

  “It doesn’t,” Bob said. “Not to us directly. We’re unlikely to ever move more than ten miles from right here. But I’m pretty sure that we’re in a time where Alaska and Asia are connected, so the animals could be almost any animal at all—at least that was ever seen in the Northern Hemisphere.”

  “What did M.J. call it?” said Jodi. “The apex predator. What’s that?”

  “A bird,” he said.

  Ted laughed. “I can take a bird.”

  “A big bird,” Bob said.

  Ted, grinning, said, “Like from Sesame Street?”