Dawn of Mammals (Book 4): Killer Pack

by Lou Cadle

“You’re on the right side. Or rather, my left side, which is the correct side.”

  “The other ear is still lagging behind?”

  “Very much so. There’s a real difference, and it’s getting more pronounced.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Not your fault. Just an act of nature.” He veered away from her. “Here’s one.” He bent to lift the end of a limb. “Hardly have to trim it. Can you see a stump or rock to set it on?”

  There was nothing nearby, but a few minutes of wandering later, they found a big rotting tree trunk that would serve.

  She said, “I’m not seeing a stream. I think the trees are feeding off ground water. An underground stream, maybe.”

  “Or just rain, flowing down those ravines and into this flat area.”

  Hannah bent to push aside leaves and forest litter, feeling the ground. It wasn’t wet right now. “Okay, that’s far enough, I think. We’re not finding anything of note.”

  “I wish there was a fruit tree.”

  “We’ll find some, I imagine. Or nuts, maybe, if the squirrel-like critters have left us any.”

  As they walked back, he said, “I miss the old place. Isn’t that funny? We’re getting closer to home, I know, but I want the cabin back. And the trees we knew. The lake that most of us knew how to fish.”

  “Yeah, and the clay deposits and soap plants and whatnot. We have to hunt for replacements for all that.”

  “And test food again.”

  “All true.”

  They regrouped back by Bob. Nobody had found anything of note except Jodi and Zach, who had found pine trees with sap. Jodi said, “And pine cones. Lots of ‘em.”

  “And they look just like normal ones. Like ours, I mean,” Zach said.

  “We’re burning daylight,” Bob said.

  “Feel how cold it is,” Hannah said.

  Claire nodded. “We need debris huts again.”

  “Rex and I found one good spot. Anyone else see more?”

  Dixie said, “I wasn’t looking. And I don’t want to sleep inside one again.”

  Bob smiled kindly at her. “Any snakes will be smaller now. I think the constrictors are gone from North America.”

  “Think?” she said.

  “Pretty sure,” Bob said. “Almost positive.”

  “There’s always something. Snakes or spiders or whatever.”

  Claire said, “I’m more worried about things like the saber tooth. Let’s all go where Rex and Hannah were, and we’ll find five—no, four—places to build shelter for the night.”

  Bob said he was okay again, at least for that much walking. They found a big fallen tree first. Claire said, “Dixie, you’ll stay with me and Jodi. We’ll sleep on the outsides, and you’ll be more protected between us. Let’s everybody pitch in to building this one, and then we’ll do the others.”

  Bob took the job of leaning sticks against the main spine of the shelter. Ted limbed the trunk with a stone axe. Everyone else gathered or piled up leaves. Hannah used the travois to haul, and within minutes there was enough material gathered to cover the whole thing. Nari helped Bob build the structure. Ted, who was done with the axe, said to Hannah, “Let’s look for the next. We’re losing light fast.” In ten minutes, they had found a sturdy limb, dragged it to a stump, and Ted had limbed the whole thing.

  Ted whistled sharply. “Over this way, when you’re all done.” To Hannah, he said, “Let’s get the other two started, stay ahead of everyone else.”

  By the time the woods were growing dim, two shelters were half-completed, and two were finished. Claire told Ted and Hannah to build a fire ring somewhere central to all four. Ted hauled rocks while Hannah cleared out a space down to the dirt, dug down six inches more to make sure their campfire would not set the woods ablaze, and cleared all the leaves and twigs from a circle two yards in diameter beyond that. Ted built a ring of rocks around the area of bare dirt. Hannah used her magnesium fire starter to get a blaze going, and by the time all the debris huts were done, Ted had gathered several flat rocks to sit on, as well.

  They ate a meal of jerky and water together, and then dispersed to their huts. Hannah shared one with Nari. “Big day tomorrow,” the girl said, once they were settled down.

  “Yeah. Lots to accomplish.” Ten minutes later, Nari was asleep, and not long after, Hannah dropped off too.

  Her bladder woke her. When she crawled from the debris hut, dragging her pack out with her, it wasn’t yet dawn. Her watch read 4:10 a.m. May as well get up. She relieved herself away from the hut and, using her flashlight, found her way back to the fire, gathering deadfall fuel as she walked. A few small coals still burned, and she built the fire back up in no time at all. It cast flickering lights over the trunks of the surrounding trees. The dusty smell of forest was all around her: decaying leaves, pollen, dirt, and the subtle smells of the trees themselves, their wood oils releasing volatile compounds that the human nose had evolved to detect. As the fire grew hotter, the smell of burning wood overwhelmed the more subtle scents.

  Zach was the first up, joining her at the fire. “So what’s the agenda for the day?”

  “You need to ask Claire. But I assume water, food, and a more secure shelter site are the priorities.”

  “I wouldn’t mind a weekend off.”

  She smiled at that. “Not possible in a survival situation. We had some pretty easy days before we made the jump, remember.”

  “Yeah, but I wouldn’t mind lying in bed half the morning. A real bed too, not just a pile of leaves. Maybe flip on the TV.”

  “You could sing some Saturday morning cartoon theme songs right now. Almost the same experience.”

  “Not hardly,” he said. “And I wouldn’t mind a Pop-Tart.”

  “Fruit, we might find. But sugar and flour, no way, sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll be fine without. Just a thought.”

  “Your wrist okay?”

  “Bandage is getting kind of loose.”

  “Let me re-do it, okay?”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  She was working at the bandage when Jodi walked up, yawning. “Stealing my boyfriend, Hannah?”

  “No offense, but you’re all a bit young for me.” Hannah smiled at her, hoping Jodi was just joking and not developing a streak of paranoid jealousy. That could send cracks through the group.

  But Jodi looked more sleepy than angry or jealous. She sat next to Zach and said, “What’s for breakfast?”

  “Nothing,” Zach said.

  “There’s more jerky left,” Hannah said.

  “Is there?” he said.

  “We have a fire and fuel. We can make a stew of it tonight if we don’t find anything else to eat.”

  “We’ll find something else to eat,” said Zach. “Or you guys will. I’m useless without my good arm in action.”

  “Not useless,” Hannah said. “You could still fish or gather or do a lot of things.” She finished wrapping his wrist. “There. You’re good for today.”

  Jodi rubbed her eyes. “I wonder if they just killed people who got badly injured.”

  “Who?”

  “Anybody. People a half-million years ago. If Zach had lost a hand rather than broken a wrist bone, would his tribe have kicked him out?”

  Zach said, “Probably depends on the tribe.”

  Jodi thought a minute and said, “On their resources, maybe. In lean times, you might not be able to carry an extra person, a person who can’t contribute and never will be able to. Babies, you would know would contribute one day, so you’d forgive them a couple years of uselessness. But not any adult who had lost an arm. Or who had become a burden.”

  “Like putting old people out on the ice flows, if that ever really happened,” Hannah said.

  Dixie’s scream had Hannah running before she knew she’d stood.

  Chapter 14

  “What is it?” Hannah yelled as she ran up.

  “Nothing,” Claire said.

  “It was huge
!”

  “Just a bug,” Claire said.

  “It could have eaten me, it was so big,” Dixie said. She continued to brush at herself as if covered by an army of insects.

  “I saw it. It was a little large,” said Claire to Hannah. Then her voice grew stern as she turned back to Dixie. “Get control of yourself. It wasn’t more than one, it didn’t bite you, and it’s long gone.”

  “Shut up,” Dixie said.

  “I can’t shut up. I’m in charge,” Claire said. “I’d love to shut up more, believe me.”

  “I’m going to reconnoiter,” Hannah said, happy to not be involved in the argument for once. “If that’s okay with you, Claire, I mean. I want to go out just to the edge of the woods and look at the open field, see if there are animals or birds moving to water at dawn.”

  “Sure, go ahead. We’ll get organized here. And Dixie, quit hitting yourself. There isn’t anything on you.”

  Dixie mumbled something and went off into the wood, still slapping at herself.

  Claire, watching her go, said, “Trade you roommates.”

  “You’re in charge,” Hannah pointed out. “You can assign me wherever you want.”

  Claire shook her head, a rueful look on her face. “It is what it is. Go on, check the animals out there. Take someone else—your rule, remember. See you in a few.”

  Hannah took Zach with her, but they didn’t catch sight of any animals anywhere; just a few birds, hunting in the field for insects. She had to assume that there were big animals in this world and that they had a water source. The group simply needed to find it, and then they’d have water, and probably fish, and game.

  And more danger from predators.

  That day, they explored in teams, except Bob. Claire told him to stay with the fire and keep it going. “I hate to leave you on your own, but I think you’ll be safe. And if you feel up to wandering through the woods and find a fruit tree or nut tree, that’d be great, but please do stay under cover in the trees.”

  The rest of them paired up. Four teams explored in four cardinal directions. She and Nari were a team. They had been spending so much time together that, for Hannah, Nari had gone from being “one of the kids” to being a friend. It was impossible, in a leadership position, to single out anyone as a better friend than anyone else. (Though she had singled out Dixie as an enemy, a guilty little voice reminded her.) Nari wouldn’t be the best partner to have in a fight to the death, but she was good company on a hike.

  They were walking due west. As the land rose beyond the bowl, they found berry bushes that had been stripped nearly bare, but Hannah picked a few of the green berries showing just a tinge of yellow and began her test for safety on them, smashing one berry and rubbing the pulp on her inner wrist.

  Nari said, “I could do that.”

  “Next likely plant we find, I’ll take you up on that offer. Look around, if you would, and see if you can find berry-studded dung. There has to be some.” After she had stowed a bag of underripe berries in her pack, Hannah joined Nari in the hunt.

  “Here’s some,” the girl called.

  Hannah examined it. “Looks more like a small predator than a grazer.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Think people poop or dog poop or cat poop for meat-eaters. It’s more solid. Grazing and browsing animals tend to leave either pellets or you can see the grass and twigs that didn’t get digested. Seeds and underripe berries would come out whole.” In a visual flash, she remembered the javelina droppings from her summer ranger gig in Arizona. Those had been full of gourd seeds and skins and so much of the gourd itself, she wondered how the animals had absorbed any calories from the food.

  Nari turned in a circle, gazing out over the plain. “I don’t see a sign of anything living. A couple birds, that’s it.”

  They moved on and were soon headed up a cleft between hills, a different one than the one they’d emerged from originally. Hannah pointed out the high water mark. “So in a flash flood during the rainy season, we don’t want to be caught below that level.”

  “Yeah, I see. How did you learn all this?”

  “I’ve hiked a lot. And I learned more during my summers as a ranger. I’ve been to different places, so I’ve seen what desert washes are like, and mountains, and the coast.”

  “I’d like to travel more.”

  As they explored, they talked about travel, the places they’d been, and those they wanted to visit. After almost a half-hour of the conversation, Nari said, “But I’m realizing as I’m talking that a lot of what I want to see has to do with human civilization. Art. Architecture. Culture. I guess Machu Picchu is just another green hill without the ruins. May as well be here as there.”

  Hannah understood that urge to see the great art of the world, or the pyramids, but what she wanted to see more were natural vistas. Coral islands. Coral itself, snorkeling off the Great Barrier Reef before it died. Mountains. Strange rock formations like Goblin Valley. “The Serengeti, for a photo safari, had been on my bucket list forever,” she told Nari. “But I think I’ve had my fill of big animals now.”

  “I wonder if Dixie took any pictures of animals when her phone was working.”

  “You can ask her, but I doubt it. We were usually trying to eat them or not get eaten. Not a great time to stop for snapshots.” The cleft they were walking in was narrowing as it climbed, and there were no trees at all, just some scrub brush, much of it leafless. Hannah spied a ledge that looked promising. “Let’s climb up there before we turn around. You up for it?”

  “Sure.”

  The rock face wasn’t sheer, but it was steep, but with plenty of hand- and footholds. They climbed the ten yards up to the ledge.

  Nari looked up. “I wouldn’t want to climb the rest of it. It’s dead straight for the next little while.”

  Hannah touched the rock under her boots. “See how smooth the rock is here. Water carved it. It must be an old water level.”

  “It must really rain if it gets this high.”

  “I don’t see any sign that it does—or did this year. There’d be debris up here if it had, I think. Maybe the land is rising, being pushed up by geological processes. This might be what was the bottom a couple thousand years ago. Or maybe the world is moving into a dryer period.”

  “Maybe a couple thousand years ago, Laina was here for the rains. If she had been, would we find any sign of her?”

  Slowly, Hannah shook her head. “I can’t think of how. If she had written something on this rock face, for instance, it’d have been washed away long ago. If she had carved something with a dental pick, that might have worn off. Even her bones....” She didn’t finish the sentence and, when she saw Nari’s face, regretted having begun it.

  Nari let a long moment of silence pass and said, “Well, we’re not getting much accomplished here. I think we should turn around and explore more where there is vegetation.”

  “I wish we could find something like this near water. For a home site.”

  Nari looked around, as if seeing it anew. “Oh, I see. I mean, a fire would be safe here, not set anything else alight. And animals would have a harder time getting to us.”

  “Yeah, that was my main thought, making it harder for predators. We’d only have two ways to escape, but they’d only have two ways to get to us. And from up high, we’d see them coming.”

  “The ledge isn’t wide enough for nine of us, our gear, our crafts, and the cabin we’d build.”

  Hannah said, “All we need is one wall, curving, stretching from one side to the other. But you’re right. We need a wider and deeper platform than this.”

  They left the shelf and went on. Hannah came around a bend and there, on the path, was as weird an animal as she’d ever seen.

  “Whoa!” Nari said, drawing up short.

  Hannah was frozen, not terrified exactly, but not sure if this one was prey or predator. It was a foot taller than her, brindle-colored, with long front legs and a long neck. As it swung its hea
d, it revealed a patch of bristled fur on the back of its neck, like a punk rock version of a horse’s mane.

  It bared its teeth at them—no fangs, she noted—and raised a paw. The toes ended in massive claws.

  “Back off,” she said to Nari. “And yell something at it.”

  “What?” Nari yelled.

  “Anything.”

  Nari yelled the lyrics from a pop song as she backed up. Hannah gripped her spear, port arms, and made angry noises at the animal. Those claws were wicked, but the teeth didn’t look like carnivore teeth. So the claws were what—for pulling down branches, maybe? The long neck suggested it had filled a giraffe niche in this world. Whatever the claws were for primarily, they were also wicked weapons for self-defense.

  “Turn and run, Nari,” she said.

  “I won’t leave you.”

  “Do it! If you see a good ledge, climb to it.”

  Chapter 15

  A fusillade of pebbles sailed over Hannah’s head and hit the animal. It raised its claw to its head, looking befuddled at the rain of rocks. Hannah lunged with the spear, yelling, “Nari, run!” When she heard the young woman’s footsteps moving quickly and fading behind her, a good portion of her fear faded. Now she only had herself to worry about.

  The animal backed up a step—a giant step. Those long legs made it capable of covering a lot of ground quickly. Hannah knew not to turn and run too. She needed to stand her ground and make it back down first.

  “Ha! Ha!” she yelled, with each lunge of her spear. “Go! Get!” She kicked up some lose rocks with the inside of her boot and tried to send them at the animal. They fell short with a clatter.

  It backed up another step. “Ya!” Hannah yelled, punching the tip of her spear at its face.

  It swatted at her and the spear was torn from her hands.

  “Oh crap!” she yelled, trying to sound more aggressive than afraid. The spear clattered against the side of the ravine and skittered down, landing just behind and to the right of her. She kept her eyes on the animal as she bent and groped for it. “Go away!” she yelled.

  “Hannah!” came Nari’s distant voice. “I found a place. I’m climbing!”