A Dawn of Mammals Collection

by Lou Cadle

  Or could they?

  “Laina,” she said. The girl and Rex were still talking about the formulas. Rex was clearly frustrated at himself for not being able to fully understand Laina. Hannah raised her voice. “Laina.”

  “What?”

  “How far forward?”

  “I haven’t narrowed it down. I know it’s going to be close to what we have jumped already, though the forward jumps will be shorter than the backward jumps. No more than 25 million years, I believe. I think there’s going to be something within the gate itself too, that might allow for more precise adjustments. I’m still working on that, but I need more data.”

  “Working on it how?”

  “The calculations are hard,” she said. “And I won’t know for sure until we test it. But I am sure that 20 million is a good estimate, plus or minus twenty percent.”

  “You’re saying you can’t get us back to our time?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “Not in one jump.”

  Hannah could sense the enthusiasm of the believers deflating. “But you think you might. That you might be able to figure it out.”

  “Eventually,” she said. “Give us a couple jumps, and I’ll know more.”

  “Do you know why we lost people the first time?”

  Laina said, “I think they just didn’t walk through. It’s possible they did after a delay and ended up somewhere else, but I don’t think so. I think once someone breaks the wall, that causes a stability in the fl—” She stopped herself and allowed herself a wry smile. “I think the gate stays stable, aimed to when it’s aimed, until nothing else with minimal mass is disturbing it any longer.”

  “Like people,” Hannah said.

  “Like people,” Laina said. “Probably even a boot would do it, but people, definitely, as we’ve seen.”

  “So, to dumb it down for someone like me, as long as we walk through one after the other, we’ll all end up in the same place.”

  “It might even be possible to prop it open with something like a boulder for a dozen minutes. It would be a test worth running.”

  “Is there a way to run a test without risking getting separated?” Hannah realized she was talking as if she believed everything Laina was saying. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but maybe she was starting to believe. Laina certainly sounded rational enough.

  “It’s one-way, so that’s a challenge. It’s not like propping open a swinging door. I’ll give some thought to it.”

  “Thank you,” Hannah said, “for everything.”

  “It was fun,” Laina said, with a sweet smile.

  “If you insist,” Hannah said. “Looks like a lot of work to me.”

  Bob said, “If you enjoy a thing, it doesn’t feel like work, does it?”

  “No, sir,” Laina said.

  Dixie said, sarcastic, “Well, at least we know why—” and then at Hannah’s look she stopped and glanced away.

  Hannah’s glares didn’t have the range, the subtleties of Bob’s, but all she needed was the one, the shut-the-eff-up glare. That’d do.

  “But that’s all to worry about tomorrow,” said Bob. “We still have to eat today, right?”

  Hannah said, “We’ve waited too long, so let’s skip visiting the spring this morning. The terror crane is hunting by now.”

  “So we have to filter water again?” Jodi asked.

  Zach said, “We do every morning anyway, so we can drink while we work. It just means a little more work.”

  “I prefer the taste of the spring water.”

  A few others nodded.

  Hannah said, “We can go to the spring just before dinner.” They’d never seen the terror crane hunting then, either. It seemed to eat its fill in the morning, and then it either settled into a hidden nest or went scavenging through another territory in the afternoon.

  Jodi said, “Okay. Especially if it’s the last day, I guess I can live with the lake water.”

  Rex got the net balanced over his shoulder, Jodi grabbed her club, Ted and most of the rest of them had spears, and Hannah loaded her backpack with most of the empty water bottles. As always, at Hannah’s insistence, everyone wore the geologists’ equipment belt, bearing the weight because, from time to time, something on the belt did prove useful.

  Hannah was in the lead, so she saw it first. She stopped dead in her tracks, just before the trees ended at the beach. “Shh,” she said.

  “What is it?” whispered Ted, pushing up beside her.

  She pointed to the beach and the bank. The entire sandy surface was covered with crocogators.

  Chapter 38

  Perhaps “covered with” was an exaggeration. But there were—she counted them—fourteen of the animals, ranging from a three-footer to one that had to be seven feet long, lazing on the beach.

  Were they sunning themselves?

  She heard the commotion behind her as the whispered news was passed back. Hannah stuck her hand into the air and waved, trying to get them to start backing off. If one of the creatures caught sight of her, she wanted a clear path to run away from it.

  Ted was still at her side, and he tapped her shoulder.

  She glanced to see his eyebrows raised, the question clear on his face. She shrugged. She had no more idea than he did what was going on. Was this something they did often? Had the morning fishing been disturbing a reptile ritual all along?

  Then one of the smaller crocogators moved, walking on its tiny legs in a slow semicircle, getting itself headed back toward the water. In its wake, she saw the answer. It had left a pile of six pale green eggs. Each was the size of a turkey egg.

  “Gross,” Ted breathed in her ear.

  She turned her head, smacking his nose with hers, and tugged at his earlobe to turn his head and whisper in his ear. “Lunch,” she said.

  He looked, if anything, even more disgusted at that idea.

  She waved him back, and they followed the trail back until they came to the group, waiting about a hundred yards back up the trail. Still in a low voice, she explained what she had seen.

  “So you’re thinking we can just pick up the eggs?”

  “It depends entirely on what the mothers do to protect them,” she said. “I really don’t want to be wrestling another one.”

  “It was kind of fun,” said Ted wistfully.

  “It was kind of crazy,” she said. “Not to mention, there are more than a dozen of them. And we know better now than to take one on. We need to wait until they quit laying, and check it out again, see if they stand guard, or what.”

  “Don’t all animals protect their young?” Nari said.

  Bob said, “Most do, but not all, no.”

  “So we just wait here?” Dixie asked.

  “No,” Hannah said. “Ted, Garreth, Claire, Jodi. You four stay with me. The rest of you, go back to the camp and get organized, in case we do decide to take the timegate tomorrow. Pack what can be packed.”

  “What about cooking the eggs if you can get them?” Zach said.

  “We can do it in the ashes, so the pots and bowls can get packed now. Rex, get the net wrapped up nice and secure. Everybody else, figure it out.”

  “What about water?” Nari said.

  “See if you can soak up some dew. We can survive until the afternoon without, especially if you aren’t working hard in the sun. Go on, now.”

  She kept her hunting group with her. Jodi had her club, and everyone else had a spear. In quiet tones, she told them what her plan was. “I’ll go back up there alone, every half-hour, until I see the beach is clear.”

  “What do we do until it is?”

  “Sit. Talk quietly. Wait.”

  Ted said, “I’ll take my turn checking the beach.”

  “No, that’s okay.” She didn’t trust Ted—not like she didn’t trust Dixie. But he was sometimes foolhardy in his choices. She could too easily imagine him deciding he could beat a crocogator to its eggs and get his hand bitten off in the process. “I’ll sneak up, sneak back, and when it’s time,
we’ll figure out a plan together.”

  “I’m the fastest runner.”

  “I know you are,” she said. “I rely on that.”

  Jodi said, “You never did do what you said, back in the Oligocene.”

  “What’s that?” Hannah said.

  “It was Ted I was talking to. He said he was going to coach us on sprinting. I think I have the potential to run faster, but I don’t know how.”

  “Great. Ted, teach us what you can while we sit.”

  “It’s easier to show.”

  “Do what you can with words,” she told him.

  She stood while they sat, checking her watch, half-listening to Ted’s coaching instructions. He was unable to sit entirely still, and after he had given them a couple principles—faster steps, shorter steps, keep your arms bent in an “L,” stay on the balls of your feet—he was up and demonstrating.

  When twenty-five minutes had passed, she held up a hand, hoping they stayed where they were, and went back up the trail, moving slowly and silently as she approached the beach. There were only five female reptiles on the beach now, still laying. The various piles of eggs weren’t covered with sand. They just sat there, exposed. She wondered if raptors wouldn’t find them, or the ants. Maybe there was a two-step process. Maybe one of the females stayed on shore to protect them all. Maybe they had to harden for a day and then got buried.

  She also wondered if this all happened in a single day, or if for the next week the animals would lay claim to the beach.

  If that were the case, better to risk the timegate. They had not developed a second source of food beyond the ferns and the low-growing flower buds Traveller had showed them were edible. Because of Traveller, she didn’t think she could convince the group to hunt the little horses to replace the fish as a food source. It would be like Rover dying back home, and then trying to convince the family a week later that the rest of the neighborhood dogs were available as meat now.

  Not going to happen.

  She returned to the group and, when they all looked at her, shook her head. “Another half-hour maybe.”

  They had turned to talking about sports in general, what they had played at various times of their life, what they enjoyed, what they wanted to try.

  Jodi said, “I’d never really considered martial arts, but I don’t know. Now, maybe I would. One of those things with swords or sticks.” She patted her club.

  Garreth said, “Bo staff, that’s a Japanese thing. Some other countries have something similar. It probably was developed when bladed weapons were outlawed.”

  Ted said, “Like gun control?”

  “Exactly,” said Garreth. “History teaches us there’s nothing new, ever. It has all been done before. Blade control left people with nothing but sticks to defend themselves with, so they turned it into an effective martial art.”

  Jodi said, “Were there ever whole armies of guys carrying them?”

  “Not that I ever learned of, but probably. If we can think of it happening, it has probably been done by some people, somewhere, at some time in history.”

  Jodi lifted her club onto her lap. “So somewhere, someone has developed a martial art that involves a club like this.”

  Ted said, “I don’t know how much art you need. Just whack someone with it. If you can.”

  “I’ll whack you if you don’t shut up,” she said.

  But they were both obviously bantering in a good-natured way, so Hannah didn’t say a word to stop it.

  From that topic, they got on their favorite martial arts scenes in movies, and Hannah tuned them out. She tried to clear her mind, think of nothing at all, wipe the slate of worries and resentments, wipe the to-do list, wipe the past and the concerns for the future. She was tired of worrying, and tired of planning, and just plain tired.

  In a way, fighting a crocogator was an easier job than trying to prod Dixie into becoming a better member of the group. At least it was a more simple job. And you either won, or you lost, and the job was over.

  She realized she was tensing up again, thinking of Dixie, and she went back to her private ritual of clearing her mind of worries, of memories, of everything but the feel of her own breath moving in and out of her nose, the sensation of her chest rising and falling, the light tension in her legs as they kept her balanced there, the pull of the backpack on the shoulder straps. Simple, physical things. Nothing social. Nothing intellectual. It was her form of meditation.

  Ted was saying her name.

  “What?” she said, opening her eyes.

  “Isn’t it time yet?”

  She checked her watch. She had been in her meditative state longer than she realized. “Yeah. I’ll go check.”

  Back at the beach, there were no more crocogators on shore. She scanned the murky water and saw nothing. But she needed the younger, sharper eyes. She went back and gathered her hunting party. They moved quietly down the trail, approached the clearing and looked around.

  Garreth said, “I see something.”

  “What?” Jodi asked.

  “Out there, in the water, about ten feet off the right side edge of the bank. It’s pretty much the color of the water.”

  “I don’t see it,” she said.

  “I do,” said Ted. “Good eye, Garreth. It’s just a little lump, that protrusion they have on their heads. Its eyes must be just under the surface. It’s watching.”

  “I see another,” Garreth said.

  “Yup. They’re standing guard,” Ted said.

  “I’m still not—oh, I see it,” Jodi said. “Hannah, what should we do?”

  Hannah thought Ted might be able to dash out and get the nearest eggs. But it wasn’t worth the risk. “I think if we’re going to move forward in time tomorrow, it’d be silly to risk getting hurt today. Don’t you guys?”

  “I’ll be hungry by suppertime,” Ted said.

  “We can eat ferns,” Hannah said.

  Jodi said, “Not real filling.”

  “But we won’t starve. Remember, the first little while after our first trip through, we didn’t eat anything but grass. We survived that.”

  “But if we go forward, everything will be different,” Jodi said. “It’ll take some time to find food again.”

  “Not really,” Hannah said. “We’ve learned a lot. Think of all the crafts we’ve picked up.”

  Ted said, “The baskets are pretty pitiful.”

  “We’ll get better at that too. We can make weapons, and hunt, and fish, make nets and cords, tan hides.”

  “Well, barely,” Garreth said. “We haven’t practiced our tanning here.”

  “But we have a soccer ball of a hide, right? So moccasins aren’t that much more complicated.”

  “You only have the one needle.”

  “People made needles out of bones. Like bird bones, or fish bones. We just need to learn to drill a hole in them.”

  “Maybe with a dental pick?” Jodi said.

  “There you go. We have a lot figured out, and we’ll figure out more. The first three days, I wouldn’t have given us a fifty-fifty chance at survival. But now? I’m pretty confident that if we take care and have some luck, we’ll be okay. Even in a new epoch where we don’t know anything about the animals at first.”

  Ted said, “Do you think Laina is really going to get us back? To our own time?”

  Hannah figured she owed them the truth. “I don’t know. I know there’s a risk. If she’s wrong, we could go sailing back into T. Rex days. But if she’s right...?” She shrugged.

  Garreth said, “You think it’s a chance worth taking.”

  “Do you?”

  He didn’t have to think long. “I do. My mom is going to be sick with worry.”

  Jodi said, “Mine too.”

  Ted said, “No one wants to stay here forever. For one thing, it’s too hot!”

  “No argument here,” Hannah said. It was hot, buggy, humid, and unpleasant. If it were 100% safe, she might argue that they should stay. But it wasn’t
safe here in the Paleocene—not anywhere near it.

  Chapter 39

  Back at the camp, they all pitched in to packing. The cooking pot was still there, filled with a stack of bowls, and Hannah unpacked it. She collected fish bones from their refuse pile and tossed several handfuls in the pot. “We’ll have a sort of fish broth with ferns tonight,” she said. “As soon as we get water for the soup.”

  Rex had two people helping him repair the cast net. Another, he had collecting more of the thin vine for additional nets. He said they’d strip the leaves and coil it and take it along. Laina, they left to work on her equations. If she wasn’t indulging in wishful thinking, if more work could get them closer to home, let her do it.

  Hannah tried to assess what the backpacks would be used for, and how much space there was in them. She decided she had space for several fossil specimen bags full of the clay soil. Whenever they got to, whenever they were going, she’d be able to use it for mortar and for patching the bowls until she found another source. Now she knew what to look for: the soil was sticky and crumbled into fine particles when she rubbed it between her fingers. That, and a technique for refining it through soaking it in water, she had learned through trial and error.

  She took Garreth with her to dig more clay. He seemed fretful about the trip through the timegate.

  “I know,” she said. “I’m worried too. But at least if we stick together, wherever we go, it’ll be as a group, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “And there’s a possibility it won’t even appear.”

  “Maybe we should have been keeping an eye out for it all along.”

  “The plateau wasn’t a very good base camp, though. We had to worry about protection. And now that we know the terror crane is over there, it seemed an even worse site to hang out.”

  “Remember you promised to protect us?”

  “I do. And I promise it still.”

  “I know. I just wanted to tell you, I think you do a good job of it.”

  She felt warmed by the praise. “Thank you. Though I’d maybe give myself a C-plus on that.”