by David Drake
“Not so surprising,” Linda Weil said, the binoculars still at her eyes. “After all, there were more traps in the direction they came from. They’re probably full.” She lowered the glasses. “We’ve got to follow them.”
“Look at the way they quarreled over the coney,” Nilson protested. “They’re hungry. And it’s not natural for hungry animals not to eat a fresh kill.”
Vickers eyed the Sun and shrugged off his parka. If they were going to be moving, he could get along without the insulation for the present so as not to have to carry the warm bulk later in the day. “All right,” he said, “they seem to be foraging as they go. It shouldn’t be too hard to keep up, even without a vehicle.”
“They should have sent a Land Rover with us,” complained the Norwegian guide as he stood, slinging his Mauser. “We are bound to make some changes in the environment, are we not? So how can they worry that a Land Rover would be more of a risk to the—to Topside?”
“Well, we’ll manage for now,” Vickers said, stuffing a water bottle and several packets of dehydrated rations into his knapsack. Despite the bandage, it felt as though his chest was being ripped apart when he raised his arm to don the pack. He kept his face still, but beads of sweat glittered suddenly at the edge of his sandy hair. “I think it’s as well that we all go together,” Vickers added after a moment to catch his breath. “There’s nothing here that animals can hurt and we can’t replace, and I’m not sure what we may be getting into.”
The three hominids were out of sight beyond one of the hills before their pursuers left camp. Both men carried their rifles. The paleontologist had refused the auto-loading shotgun, saying that she didn’t know how to use it so it would only be in her way. Weil and the younger guide began pressing ahead at a near run through the rust and green grass. Vickers was more nervously aware than the others of the indigenous predators lurking in these wilds. Aloud he said, “Don’t be impatient. They’re not moving fast, and if we blunder into them over a rise, we’ll spook them sure.” Nilson nodded. Linda Weil grimaced, but she too moderated her pace when the guides hung back.
At the looted trap, the paleontologist herself paused. Vickers glanced around for sign, but the ground was too firm to show anything that could be called a footprint. Dark smudges on the otherwise dew-glittering grass led off in the direction the hominids had taken, but that track would stand less than an hour of the Sun’s growing weight.
Weil turned from the trap. “What’s this?” she demanded, pointing. “Did you bring this here when you set the trap?”
Nilson frowned. “It’s just a piece of branch,” he said.
“Holgar, there’s no tree within fifty yards,” said Vickers quietly. To the paleontologist he added, “It was pretty dark when we set up the trap. I probably wouldn’t have noticed it anyway. But I didn’t see any of the—others—carrying it either. For now, it’s just three feet of acacia branch, broken at both ends.”
Weil nodded curtly. She uncapped her neck-slung camera and took several exposures of the trap and the branch lying beside it. She did not touch either object. “Let’s go,” she said and began striding along the dim trail again at almost the pace she had set at the start.
When they crested the next rise, even Vickers felt a momentary concern that they might have lost their quarry. Then he caught the flash of sun on blond fur a quarter-mile away and pointed. They watched through their binoculars as two, then all three hominids moved about the trunk of a large tree.
“They’re trying to dig something out of a hole at the root of the tree,” Vickers said, “and I’ll swear they’re using a stick to do it.” Then he added, “Of course, a chimpanzee might do the same thing.
“Linda,” said Holgar Nilson, “what are these creatures?” He rubbed his forehead with the back of the hand holding his binoculars. His right thumb tensioned the sling of his rifle.
Linda Weil at first gave no sign that she had heard the question. The blond guide’s eyes remained fixed on her. At last she lowered her glasses and said, “I suppose that depends on when we are. If we’re as far back as preliminary indications suggest we are, those are ramapithecines. Primates ancestral to a number of other primate lines, including our own.” She would not meet Nilson’s stare.
“They’re men, aren’t they?” the younger guide demanded.
“ ‘Men’ isn’t a technical term!” snapped the paleontologist, raising her chin. “If you mean, ‘They belong to the genus Homo,’ I’d have to say no, I don’t believe they do. Not yet. But we don’t have any data.” She spun to glare at Vickers. “Do you see?” she went on. “What a, what a laughingstock I’ll be if I go back from my first time intrusion and say, ‘Well, I’ve found the earliest men for you, here’s a smudgy picture from a mile away’? They drove Dubois into seclusion for finding Java Man without an engraved pedigree!”
Vickers shrugged. “Well,” he said, “it isn’t anything that we need to jump the gun about.”
Licking their fingers—the leader still carried the hyrax—the hominids wandered away from the trees again. Weil snapped several photographs, but her camera had only a lens selected for close-ups of animals too large to carry back whole.
The landscape itself was beyond any camera, and the profusion of life awakening with the dawn was incredible. Vickers had been raised on stories of the great days of African hunting, but not even Africa before the advent of nitro powders and jacketed bullets could equal the animate mass that now covered what someday would be Israel. Standing belly-deep in the grass they cropped were several species of hipparion, three-toed horses whose heads looked big for their stocky bodies. The smallest of them bore black-and-white stripes horizontally on their haunches. When the stripes caught sunlight at the correct angle, the beasts stood out as candid blazes. The horses were clumped in bodies of twenty to forty, each body separated from the others by a few hundred yards. These agglomerations could not be called herds in the normal sense, for they mixed hipparions of distinctly different sizes and coloration.
Indeed, antelopes of many varieties were blended promiscuously among the hipparions as well. Vickers had vaguely expected to see bovids with multiple, fanciful horns during the intrusion. Linda Weil had disabused him with a snort. She followed the snort with a brief disquisition on the Eurasian Cenozoic and the ways it could be expected to differ from the North American habitat which the popularizers were fonder of describing.
Oryx had proven to be the most common genus of antelope in the immediate area, though the region was better-watered than those Topside which the curved-horned antelopes frequented. There were other unexpected antelopes also. On the first day of the intrusion, Nilson had shot a tragelaphine which seemed to Vickers to differ from the rare inyala of Mozambique only in its habits: the lyre-horned buck had stared at the rifle in bland indifference instead of flashing away as if stung.
The hominids were moving on; the human trio followed. Weil was leading as before but Holgar Nilson had begun to hang back. Vickers glanced at the younger man but did not speak. In the near distance, a buffalo bellowed. The guides had scouted the reed-choked bottom a mile away, beyond another range of undulations, but they had not actively hunted it yet. Earlier, the dark-haired paleontologist had commented that a sampling of bovine skulls and horn-cores might be helpful in calibrating their intrusion. Vickers nodded toward the sound. “On our way back,” he suggested, “if it’s late enough that the buffs have come back out of the reeds after their siesta, we might try to nail you some specimens.”
“For God’s sake, let’s not worry about that now!” snapped Weil. She stumbled on a lump of exposed quartz which her eyes, focused on the meandering hominids, had missed. Vickers had guided tourist hunters for too many years to think that he had to respond.
The clumps of grazing animals seemed to drift aside as the hominids straggled past, but the relative movement was no more evidently hostile than that of pedestrians on a crowded street. Still, when one of the hominids passed within a few yards of a group resting under
a tree, up started a 400-pound antelope of a genus with which Vickers was not familiar. After a hundred yards, the antelope turned and lowered its short, thick-based horns before finally subsiding beneath another tree. A jackal might have aroused the same reaction.
The hominids had skewed their course twice and were now headed distinctly southward, though they still gave no evidence of purpose. “Reached the end of their range and going back,” Holgar Nilson said. He spoke in a tone of professional appraisal, normal under the circumstances, and not the edged breathiness with which he had earlier questioned the paleontologist. “Do we still follow them?”
Linda Weil nodded, subdued herself by embarrassment over her outbursts at the two guides. “Yes, but I want to see what they were doing at the base of this tree first,” she said, nodding toward the acacia ten yards away. She unlimbered her camera in anticipation.
Vickers stopped her by touching her elbow. “I think we can guess,” he said quietly, “and I think we’d better guess from here. Those bees look pretty peeved.”
“Ah,” Weil agreed. The dots flashing metallically as they circled in and out of the shade crystallized in her mind into a score or more of yellow-bodied insects. Fresh dirt of a pale reddish tinge had been turned between a pair of surface roots. The stick that had done the digging was still in the hole. Up and down it crawled more of the angry bees. “Surely they aren’t immune to bee stings, are they?” the woman asked.
Vickers shrugged, wincing at the pressure in his chest. “I’m not immune to thorn scratches,” he said. “But if I’m after an animal in heavy brush, that’s part of the cost of doing business.”
The hominids were almost out of sight again. “We’d best keep going,” said the paleontologist, acting as she spoke.
While they walked uphill again, Vickers swigged water and handed his bottle around. The water was already hot from the sun on his dun knapsack, and the halogens with which it had been cleared gave it an unpleasant tang. Neither of Vickers’ companions bothered to comment on the fact.
“This is where we got the horses two days ago,” Nilson said, gesturing toward the low ridge they were approaching.
Vickers thought back. “Right,” he said. “We got here due west from the bottom of the trap line. We’ve just closed the circuit in the other direction, is all.”
They heard the growling even before they crested the rise. Nilson unslung his Mauser. Vickers touched Linda Weil to halt her. He knelt to charge his Garand, using the slope of the ground to deflect the sound of the bolt slapping the breech as it chambered the first round of twenty. The paleontologist’s face was as tense as those of the guides. “All right,” Vickers whispered, “but we’ll keep low.”
In a swale a quarter mile from their present vantage point, Vickers had dropped a male hipparion. It was large for its genus; a good 400 pounds had remained to the carcass after the hunters had removed the head and two legs for identification. Hyenas are carnivores no less active than the cats with which they share their ranges, but virtually no carnivore will refuse what carrion comes its way. A pack of hyenas had found the dead horse. They were still there, wrangling over scraps of flesh and the uncracked bones, as the hominids approached the kill. The snarls that the intrusion team heard were the warning with which the hyenas greeted the newcomers.
“We’ve got to help them,” said Nilson.
Vickers glanced at the junior guide out of the corner of his eye. He was shocked to see that Nilson was watching over his electronic sight instead of through his binoculars. “Hey, put that down!” Vickers said. “Christ, shooting now’d screw up everything.”
“They’ll be killed!” the Norwegian retorted, as if that were an answer.
“They know what they’re doing a whole lot better than we do,” Vickers said, and at least on that the men could agree.
There were six of the shaggy carnivores. Two of them paced between the remains of the hipparion and the hominids who gingerly approached it. “I’d have thought they’d be denned up this time of day,” Vickers muttered. “When you don’t know the animal, its habits don’t surprise you . . . But those’d pass for spotted hyenas Topside without a word. Damned big ones, too. They ought to act like the hyenas we know.”
At the distance and through the foreshortening of the binoculars, it was impossible to tell for certain how near the hominids had come to the kill. The foremost of the brindled hyenas was surely no more than twenty feet from the hominid leader. The carnivore turned face-on and growled, showing teeth that splintered bones and a neck swollen with muscles like a lion’s. Holgar Nilson gasped. His hand sought again the pistol grip of his slung rifle.
The white-flashed hominid jabbered shrilly. He squatted down. The hyrax was still clutched in his left hand, but with his right he began to sling handfuls of dirt and pebbles at the hyena. To either side, the other hominids were also chattering and leaping stiff-legged. One hominid held a rock in each hand and was clashing them together at the top of each jump.
The pelted hyena only snarled back. Its nearest companion retreated a few paces to the scattered carcass, its brushy tail lifted as if to make up for the weakness of the sloping hindquarters. The other four members of the pack were lying on their bellies in a loose arc behind the hipparion. One of them got to its feet nervously.
The empty-handed hominid suddenly darted toward the carcass. He almost touched the ribs, streaked white and dark red with the flesh still articulating them. The nearest hyena leaped up snapping. Its jaw thumped the air as if a book had been slammed. The hominid jumped sideways with a shriek to avoid the teeth, then cut to the other side as the foremost hyena rushed him from behind. Sprinting, the hominid retreated to his starting position with the snarling hyena behind him.
The hominid doubled in back of his leader, still squealing. The carnivore skidded to a halt. The white-flashed leader had dropped the hyrax at last. He hunched with his head thrown forward and his arms spread like a Sumo wrestler’s. Each hand was bunched around a heavy stone, held in a power grip between the palm and the four fingers. Unnoticed by the watching humans, the leader had prepared for this moment. The angle hid the hominid’s bared teeth from the watchers, but his hissing snarl carried back to them on the breeze.
Only the one hyena had followed through on its rush; now it faced the three hominids alone. Snarling again to show teeth as large as the first joint of a man’s thumb, the carnivore backed away. The white-furred hominid hurled a rock that thumped the hyena in the ribs. The beast snapped and snarled, but it would neither attack nor leave its position between the carcass and the hominids. Its powerful shoulders remained turned toward its opponents while its hind legs sidled back and forth nervously, displaying first one spotted flank and then the other to the watching humans. Making as much noise as a flock of starlings, the hominids also retreated. At a safe distance from the hipparion carcass and its protectors, they turned and resumed their leisurely meander southward. The hominid with the pair of stones continued to strike them together occasionally, though without the earlier savage insistence. Chips spilled from the dense quartz glinted like sparks in the air.
Holgar Nilson let out his breath slowly. Linda Weil lowered her binoculars and said, “Holgar, what’s gotten into you? I know why I’m so tense.”
The Norwegian scowled. Vickers glanced at him and then raised his glasses again. He did not know how personal the conversation was about to become. “I—” said the blond man. Then, “Hyenas are terrible killers. I’ve seen what they can do to children and even to a grown man who’d broken his leg in the bush.”
“Well, we’re here as observers, aren’t we?” said the paleontologist. “I don’t understand.”
Nilson turned away from her gaze and did not reply. The woman shrugged. “We need to be moving on,” she said. Her face, like that of the younger guide, was troubled.
The hyenas had disappeared back into shallow burrows they had dug around the site of the kill. The humans skirted them at a distance, knowing that another
outburst might call the hominids back from the rise over which they had disappeared. “Sort of a shame not to bag one now when we know where they are,” Vickers said regretfully as he glanced toward the hipparion. The ribs stood up like a beacon. “I’d expected to be stuck with a night shot . . . and nobody’s as good in the dark, I don’t care what his equipment is.” Neither of the others made any response.
No unusual noise gave warning as the intrusion team neared the next crest, but Holgar Nilson halted them with a raised hand anyway. “They turned their direction to go where they knew carrion was, the horse carcass,” he said. The senior guide nodded, pleased to hear his partner use his flawless sense of direction. “But if they are making a large circle, so to speak, and they have been looting our traps west of the camp, then we must be close to where they started.”
Nilson’s logic was good; all three made the obvious response. Both men tautened their rifle and binocular straps and got down on their hands and knees. Since the grass was thick and over a foot high, there was no need to go into a true low crawl with their weapons laid across crooked elbows. The paleontologist looked dubious, but she followed suit. Her camera finally had to be tucked into the waistband of her trousers. The ground, prickly with grass spikes and flakes of stone, slowed their progress more than did concern over security.
The hominid camp was in a clump of acacias less than 200 yards down the next slope.
“Oh, the Lord have mercy,” whispered Nilson in Norwegian as his eyes adjusted to the pool of shade on which he focused his binoculars. It was hard to tell how many of the hominids were present; anything from a dozen to twenty was possible. Clumps of grass, shadows, and the emerald globes of young acacias interfered with visibility. The three hominids which the intrusion team had been following were standing. The white-flashed leader himself was the center of a clamoring mass of females and infants. Vickers noted that although many hands were stretched out toward the leader and the prey he carried, neither was actually touched by the suppliants.