Cretaceous Dawn

by Lisa M. Graziano

  Then he caught a sudden motion among the stragglers. A young animal, only the size of a small rhinoceros, had wandered to the edge of a patch of trees and was now running back to the safety of the adults, its short legs pumping madly. As the uncertain breeze shifted Julian heard a high, piercing squeal. It sounded like a distress cry. Julian realized he’d just learned more in that instant than any paleontologist had ever known; for dinosaur vocalization is one thing that cannot be fossilized.

  He was so engrossed watching the baby Triceratops that he nearly overlooked the tiny, insignificant thing that now emerged from the trees. It was laughably puny, shorter than a human and no bigger in body than Hilda. The head was birdlike with large, forward-facing eyes. The forelimbs were held well off the ground, and the long, curving claws were curled back toward the chest. The hind limbs propelled it forward with immense, graceful strides, the feet only rarely touching the ground. The run was much like that of an ostrich, and with each powerful thrust the animal seemed about to take to the air. It was a raptor; and had he been in Mongolia instead of North America, Julian would have said it was one of the Velociraptor. Of the North Amercian species, it was too big for Saurornitholestes, too small for Dromaeosaurus; but without a look at the skeleton, he would never know for sure.

  He wondered how it could try to bring down something as large and well-equipped as Triceratops. Surely even a young one, if attacked head-on, would merely step on the little intruder and squash it. But the carnivore streaked past its prey and, wheeling, headed the young animal toward the trees again.

  Julian now saw that three more were hunting with it. The attack was beautifully coordinated. Before any adult Triceratops could reach the scene, the animal was steered straight into the claws of the other three hunters. One leaped gracefully onto the youngster’s back. Perched up there it looked ludicrously small; but where its claws were buried, streaks of bright crimson ran down the smooth hide. The youngster leapt and twisted, and a thin shrieking sound came up on the breeze.

  Four of the adult Triceratops thundered to the scene; the attackers left their prey and vanished into the trees. But the damage had been done. The injured animal followed the adults for perhaps two hundred yards before it staggered, sank to the ground, and finally tumbled onto its side. The adults circled it a few times, grunting, and then lumbered off to join the herd.

  “They’ll come back for the meal,” Julian said, thinking out loud. Then he added, “But it’s a good thing they’ve already made their kill. I suppose we’ll be passing right through their territory.”

  “And then into the territory of the next pack,” Carl said.

  That was not a comforting thought. Julian turned away and silently followed his guide along the ridge as the light faded.

  He stayed close to Carl, not wanting to lose him again. But as they walked, his thoughts turned back to Yariko. She and Shanker had passed through a violent storm without shelter, and were now exposed to hungry predators. The image of the raptor skimming over the ground toward the young Triceratops replayed itself over and over in Julian’s mind. Those small predators did not have the majesty of Corla; but because of the eerie, almost unearthly grace of their movements, they were more frightening, more the stuff of nightmares.

  He was about to ask if they should stop and search for signs of the others when Carl suddenly stooped and looked intently at the ground. Julian knelt beside him.

  In a small depression of mud and trampled leaves were the four-toed prints of a large mammal: a dog, in fact. They were smudged and blurred, probably by the fierce rain, but still clear enough; Hilda must have walked through a puddle, and the prints remained after the water dried up.

  “Hilda!” he cried. “They were here. Let’s hurry!”

  Carl stood slowly, gazing down at the clover-shaped prints. “This is a strange creature,” he said.

  Impatient as he was, and wanting to dash off in hot pursuit, Julian could understand the man’s confusion.

  “It’s a dog,” he explained. “A large mammal—a carnivore. A pet.” When Carl only stared at him, clearly not understanding the word “pet,” Julian added, “Like Corla. An animal to feed who will then protect you.”

  Carl nodded as if he now understood. “This animal then would stay with your friends?”

  “Yes. They’d be together.” Julian looked out over the darkening plain, and then back the way they’d come. “It’s amazing that we found these prints. In all this area, we walked right up to a low spot that still had some mud.” He looked at Carl, wondering if it wasn’t chance.

  Carl smiled, or at least gave his version of a smile, very small and humorless although comforting. It reminded Julian of a particular look of Yariko’s when she was preoccupied and not quite attentive to him, but still trying to be gentle and reassuring.

  Carl turned away and began walking again with his long stride. “It was not chance,” he said after a moment. “I tracked the man nearly to here and marked his heading against the trees.” He raised his arm and pointed to a distant smudge of darkness, another clump of stunted trees. “I was looking for prints in low places,” he added, as if that should have been perfectly obvious. “That is why we have been moving slowly.”

  Julian hadn’t noticed the decrease in pace; obviously his idea of “slowly” was not shared by Carl. With renewed spirits, and renewed faith in his guide, he looked happily around at his surroundings.

  A group of the Triceratops could be seen fairly close by, and in the last of the evening light Julian saw them engage in a strange behavior. One adult began it by flopping over on its side and then, unbelievably, rolling onto its back in the dust, legs waving in the air. A faint snorting sound came from it. Others soon joined in, grunting and sending up clouds of reddish dust. After a while they rolled back onto their bellies all at once, shaking their immense heads so that their long ears flapped audibly.

  “Are they playing?” he asked, incredulous. “How can they do that?” Big animals just couldn’t roll like that without injuring themselves; elephants were the perfect example. But he didn’t mention them.

  Carl gave him the usual expressionless look. “They are cleaning themselves,” he said. “Removing parasites. Also, it feels good to them.”

  The animals were moving off now. Soon the ridge of land hid them from view, and Julian’s thoughts, momentarily diverted by the feelings of Triceratops, went back to Yariko.

  Hilda’s prints had lifted his heart; but now he began to wonder if Yariko was with her. So far there’d been no signs of her, and Carl had only tracked one person, probably Shanker, the day before.

  The clump of stunted trees was before them. Carl stopped suddenly and said, “Your friends stopped here.”

  Julian pushed forward into the trees and looked wildly around, as if expecting Yariko to pop out from behind a thick trunk. He saw nothing.

  “Smell,” Carl said, quietly.

  The light breeze brought Julian the scent of mud, rotting leaves, a heavy animal smell wafting up from the trampled path of the herd; and, very faintly, ashes. There was no mistaking it, now that it was pointed out to him.

  “Maybe they’re nearby,” he cried eagerly, hurrying forward.

  Carl shook his head but Julian was already under the trees. He searched the ground for a mound of ashes, but saw nothing although the smell was stronger.

  “They were here before the rain,” Carl said. “The ashes were scattered in the storm. We too will stop here.”

  They sat down on the stony ground between the knobby trunks of bushes and took out strips of dried meat from Carl’s sack. The meat was tasteless and leathery, but Julian was happy enough to put something in his stomach after such a long day. He had not eaten since breakfast, and neither, it seemed, had Carl. The water in the skins tasted terrible; he could hardly choke it down. After the meal, he propped his back against a tree and dozed off.

  A soft scuffling noise startled him out of his sleep. Opening his eyes he looked down at a tiny lizar
d-like, or maybe bird-like creature, surely one of the smallest of dinosaurs. He sat as still as he could while it rooted around in the soil, perhaps looking for grubs, until at Carl’s approach it darted away through the dead leaves.

  “We must go now,” Carl said. Julian stood quickly and shouldered his food and water sacks. Carl set off immediately, keeping within the shrubs and trees, walking fast.

  They held the rapid pace until the clouds broke and the moon showed. By its position Julian estimated that the night was half done. Carl seemed especially watchful. He did not look about but rather seemed always to be listening. They continued even after the moon disappeared beneath the horizon. Julian thought Carl would stop to light a fire in the chill before dawn; but instead he paused only to drink from a cold stream and hand Julian a scrap of dried meat, and then, later, when the worn strap on his shoulder bag broke and had to be retied.

  Julian was exhausted and hungrier than he’d ever felt by the time the stars began to fade. It was a clear, cool morning, and very still. The ground was sloping upward. Sometimes they passed low cliffs. He leaned heavily on his spear, trailing behind, silently begging Carl to stop and rest; but he said nothing out loud.

  He realized suddenly that they were walking in an old stream bed. It ran more or less east-west, directly out of the western hills. It was strewn with boulders but made easier footing than the scrubby ground to either side; and it gave a path to follow. He would have liked to stop and study the exposed rock layers; but he was more impatient to catch up with Yariko. Carl would not have understood the delay, anyway.

  “Do you think they went this way?” he asked finally, as he almost trotted to keep up.

  “They followed this stream bed,” Carl said, with his usual finality of expression. His next words were not so comforting. “But it flooded during the night. They could not have stayed in it long.”

  Julian stopped. He was breathing hard, and felt wobbly. “You mean we might not be tracking them anymore?”

  In answer Carl held out his hand, palm up. Resting there was a wad of what looked like cloth. It was wet and dirty, and the color was hard to tell, but Julian guessed that it might be blue-jean material. It seemed to be knotted, and there were stains on it that could have been blood.

  “Where did you find that?” he asked in amazement.

  “Near some bushes,” Carl said. “I have looked at every small shelter as we passed. There have been few signs of your friends.”

  Julian took the scrap of cloth, wondering why it was knotted. Yariko wore jeans; perhaps she had been injured, and had torn off a strip for a bandage. “Maybe this was washed away when the streambed flooded,” he said, voicing one of his growing fears. “Maybe they were never even here.”

  Carl turned and set off again. “It was dropped after the storm,” he said. “This night, when the moon was high.”

  “Then we’re catching up,” Julian said. He hurried after Carl.

  In the first gray light before dawn they passed a low cliff, no taller than a man. It caught Julian’s attention because it was not the granite he’d come to expect in this terrain. It was made of layers of sedimentary rock, and had clearly been uplifted and then tilted slightly, but in no way metamorphosed. He guessed that they were walking along an old fault scarp.

  Peering at the exposed face in what light there was, Julian thought he could distinguish several layers of mud, some with impressions of shells, and one thin white layer. He scraped at this layer with a fingernail and tasted it. It was chalk: calcium carbonate.

  Here in their billions were the calcium shells of tiny one-celled organisms, deposited over millions of years when the continental seaway had covered the area. On top of this thin layer of white lay a dark, compressed mud, perhaps indicating shallow water with salt marshes or sea-grass beds. Over the mud lay a thick deposit of what looked like volcanic ash.

  There set out in successive layers was the history of the Niobrara Seaway. The slow transgression—the change from shallow to deeper water indicated by the chalk; and then in mirror image, the regression as the seaway shrank and left the region uncovered again. Volcanic ash could only have come from the west, from vast eruptions that sent their debris high into the atmosphere to rain down in a thick layer for many hundreds of miles around.

  “The layers tell an interesting story,” Carl said.

  Julian turned and stared. He could not have been more surprised if Carl had begun to rattle off physics equations. “What story do you see in it?” he asked.

  “What do you see?” Carl said. But before Julian could answer, he added, “We do not have much time. In a few hours we can rest.”

  They continued up the broad path of the stream bed. Julian felt certain that Yariko and Dr. Shanker would have kept to this path; it was the only obvious feature in the landscape, and certainly the easiest trail to follow westward. But there were no more signs. They found a good place to stop, a niche with an overhanging boulder and walls made of thick, tangled bushes. It looked ideal for a camp; but although he searched the ground, Julian saw no hint that anybody had stayed there. However, he was happy to put down his sacks and settle gratefully into sleep.

  They traveled along the stream bed for two days, sleeping only during the darkest part of the night when the moon was down. The pace was grueling, although Carl let Julian stop to rest every few hours. Julian would sink down on the ground or a convenient rock, feeling as weak as if he’d been swimming through molasses.

  Carl usually stood by patiently or walked a short distance ahead to spy out the path. By the third morning Julian was beginning to adjust. His muscles were not so stiff, and he had the strange sensation that he could walk forever. He realized he was beginning to turn into another leathery, taciturn Carl.

  Early in the third morning the stream bed wound down into a gully. The bottom of the gully held a few stagnant pools of water and was nearly choked up with bushes and low-growing succulents. Spiders and small brown snakes seemed to have colonized this little muddy oasis; they were everywhere.

  For two days there had been no signs of Yariko, Shanker, or Hilda. Carl said nothing; Julian questioned him constantly, impatiently, and was almost beginning to lose faith in his guide. It seemed foolish to walk on and on at such a pace when it was no longer clear that his companions were ahead. But where else could they be? Why would they turn off this clear path leading straight into the west? Reason told Julian that scraps of cloth or other items were remarkable things to find, and that footprints couldn’t be seen in this dry, stony ground. There was simply nothing to track, and Carl must be going on assumption.

  Up ahead, Carl suddenly ducked behind some thorny bushes, signaling for his companion to get down. Julian dropped to the ground and crawled over to join him.

  “What is it?”

  “Listen.” It was barely even a whisper.

  Julian heard something moving over the rocks. It made an uneven sound, not at all like a quadruped, but like a biped with a strange shuffling gait. There was a sound like labored breathing. Then something heavy fell to the ground, and, quite distinct in the still air, there came a string of curses.

  NINETEEN

  Before Darwin’s monumental publication, evolution was held to be a rigid sequence of steps preordained by God to produce humans. According to Darwin, there was no preordained endpoint to evolution, and therefore one species was no “higher” or closer to the goal than another. A bee is just as highly specialized and adapted to being a bee as a human is to its specific circumstance. Both are the current endpoints of their evolutionary lines, the current tips of the twigs on the evolutionary tree.

  —Julian Whitney, Lectures on Cretaceous Ecology

  2 September

  12:01 AM Local Time

  Earles locked her desk, switched off her computer, and put on an old sweater over her uniform. Picking up the small box that Hann had just brought her, she went down the hall to the lobby. “I’m off,” she said to the cop behind the counter. “Time to ge
t a little rest. I’ll be back by five. If any calls come in from those scientists forward ’em to my cell phone.”

  “Will do,” the man said.

  But Earles didn’t get her few hours’ rest, as it turned out. Before she reached it the front door opened, and Mark Reng walked into the station. He looked startled to see Earles. “Oh, I was just going to leave you a message,” he said.

  “No need.” Earles led the way back to her office with a sigh. She unlocked the door and took off her sweater, placing the small box on her desk again. “Is the rewiring progressing well?”

  “Yes, all that’s fine. Maybe a few more hours and I’ll be done.” Mark held a small book in one hand and a piece of paper in the other. “I guess police chiefs keep hours like graduate students,” he said with a nervous laugh.

  Earles pushed a chair toward him. “Just say it right out,” she said, leaning back against the desk and folding her arms. “This can’t get much stranger than it already is. I’ll listen to anything.”

  Looking reassured, Mark sat down. “About that platinum bar,” he said, and stopped.

  “Right here. Brand new, ready to go. I measured it myself to be sure they made it correctly.” Earles opened the box on her desk and tilted it to show Mark the dull gray-white metal inside.

  “The thing is,” Mark said, “that bar won’t work. I mean it’ll work as far as getting the vault operating again, but it won’t create the same results.”

  “Those physicists think it will. Are you saying they’re wrong?”

  Mark looked uncomfortable again. “I know this sounds terrible, but I don’t think they want to find those people. I think they’re intentionally setting things up to work but with slightly different settings. You see,” and he looked up with almost a pleading expression, “they know as well as I do that a different chunk of platinum in the circuit will modify the results in small ways. They can’t replicate the exact conditions without the original bar.”