Cretaceous Dawn

by Lisa M. Graziano

  “Of course I asked him,” Julian said, realizing as he spoke that he hadn’t asked all that much after that first day with Carl. Perhaps his amazement had been blunted by Carl’s familiarity and the natural way he seemed to fit into the landscape; and his curiosity had been buried under his desire to find Yariko and Dr. Shanker.

  “He talked about people coming from the east, from the edge of the sea. They traveled west: so maybe they did know what they were doing, if they were trying to revert.” Julian eased his shoes back on over the blisters. “He’s referred to maybe several generations, but I can’t be sure. I told you, he isn’t much of a talker. In his own good time, I suppose.”

  “Your lack of curiosity astounds me, Whitney. And here you are a scientist, a Cretaceous expert at that. You’d never let a new dinosaur off that easily. I intend to get answers from the guy. His horrible voodoo medicine was just what I needed, anyway. I’ll never underestimate aspirin again.”

  “Yes, he’s remarkable. He saved me from Corla.”

  “Corla?” Dr. Shanker peered at Julian from under his bushy brows. “You’ve led a whole life, I see, since the last time I saw you. You’ll have to tell me about it.”

  Perhaps he was right, Julian thought. It has been like a new life.

  Dr. Shanker nodded at the gully. “Here he comes.”

  Carl was approaching with a bulging sack slung over one shoulder. He stopped in front of the others and put down the sack without a word. Dr. Shanker winked at Julian and said in a low voice, “You’re right. Not a talker.”

  Thanks to Dr. Shanker’s kindling, they ate a warm meal of fresh tangy roots and stems, a nice change from the dried meat, and drank from a stream that trickled down the wall of the gully. Then they set out. Carl took the lead; Dr. Shanker came next, crutching along at a surprising pace with his spear, trying to gain the lead but not succeeding. Julian came last of all, trying to contain his impatience. He was eager to find Yariko again, although he supposed Dr. Shanker was just as eager to find Hilda.

  As Carl had warned them, the terrain was rough and cut by gullies and sudden clefts. Shrubs and gnarled pines dotted the area, but did not give much shade. The sun burned down on them. Julian’s hair was noticeably hot to the touch and his back, underneath the water sack, was soon drenched in sweat and chafed by the leather. They stopped now and then to drink from a brook or a trickling waterfall; Dr. Shanker bathed his foot each time, sighing as the cool water ran over it. The swelling, to Julian’s relief, was going down.

  Carl did not show any fatigue but as the day went on Dr. Shanker lagged and his limping grew worse. He never complained, but kept pegging away with the butt end of his spear. For all his arrogance, Julian had to allow him a certain tenacity and consistency of character. The man seemed completely unfeeling about his own condition. Julian wondered when he would begin questioning Carl.

  After several hours of hard traveling they began to climb steeply uphill. At the top of a ridge, panting and leaning on their spears, they looked to the west and saw the whole immense landscape spread out like a map. The broken ground continued, stained brown and green and laced with canyons and gullies. In the distance the ground rose again, easing up toward a group of isolated hills.

  To the best that Julian could calculate, those hills marked the place they had been trying to find, the end of their thousand-mile journey. He hoped that Yariko at least would reach them in safety. The region, open and burning in the sun, seemed to hold fewer carnivores and might be less dangerous. But the hunters were scarce precisely because their prey was scarce. There was obviously little food to be had, and Yariko probably did not have a supply slung on her back, as Julian and his companions did. And Dr. Shanker’s injury was a reminder that large carnivores were not the only things to fear.

  At some point the old river bed they’d been following fanned out and disappeared in the rocky landscape. Julian never expected to find a trail nicely laid out all the way to their destination; still, he was disturbed to see it disappearing, because their path would probably begin to diverge from Yariko’s.

  They rested while the sun went down and then continued in the dark under the moon, now nearing the third quarter. More gullies, ridges, broken ground; a bleak and barren landscape. Julian saw no animals, and no signs of Yariko either. Another cliff face loomed ahead, and they stopped in its shadow to give Dr. Shanker a rest. Progress had been good; but reaching their goal within the limited time window would be meaningless to Julian if they did not find Yariko.

  As he sat there, trying to make himself comfortable on the hard stones, Julian thought that he felt the faintest trembling of the ground.

  Carl seemed to have caught it too. He rose. “We need shelter. We have no escape here in the open.”

  “Escape from what?” Dr. Shanker asked, looking at Julian. “I thought you said there’d be fewer of those pesky large animals out of the swamp, Whitney.” He pulled himself to his feet with the help of his spear. “What do you see, you two?”

  “She is following us,” Carl said.

  “Who’s he talking about?” Dr. Shanker said. “A pet dinosaur?”

  “I have fed her over the years,” Carl said, “and now she expects it.”

  “Corla?” Julian asked, amazed, and Carl nodded.

  Julian wondered if T. rex had that kind of memory. Tyrannosaurids had immense heads, but they were mostly bone and muscle. The braincase was relatively tiny. Still, she might have learned to associate humans with a steady supply of food; and she could certainly trail them by scent.

  Carl led them toward a thicket of pine trees that crowded the base of the cliff. He said the strong scent of the needles would help to hide them. They settled in the darkness under the trees, backs up against the shaggy trunks, and ate a little dried food.

  “What is it that’s following us?” Dr. Shanker asked.

  “One of the Big Ones,” Carl said, as if that made everything clear.

  “A friend of yours?”

  Carl said nothing. He continued to cut off plugs of meat with his bone knife and chew them.

  “Our wise old guide refuses to speak,” Dr. Shanker said, irritably. “What does he know about Cretaceous animals anyway? How can he be sure this thing won’t crash over here and attack us? Whitney, maybe he’ll answer you. He seems to like you.”

  Carl looked at him for a moment, his eyes narrowed. But there was no anger in his expression; instead he seemed to be weighing his opinion of Dr. Shanker. Finally he thrust a plug of meat into his cheek and said, “I am sure of nothing.”

  “It’s a T. rex,” Julian explained. “She must have followed our scent from Carl’s hill—from near the river.”

  With his mouth still full of chewed food, Dr. Shanker laughed, a little uncertainly. “Is that plausible? Do they even have such a well-developed sense of smell?”

  “They’re known to have enormous turbinal bones, the spiral bones in the nose,” Julian explained. “Her sense of smell, I’d guess, is probably uncanny with a surface area like that.” He didn’t mention the other thing he was thinking: Corla was used to being fed by this man; she had followed him into the barren hills, far from the river valley, where there was no prey to be caught. Carl had nothing to give her. Dr. Shanker interrupted his thoughts.

  “And you imagine that this animal is specifically tracking us? Up hill and down? Brainy, for a dinosaur. Ph.D., perhaps?” He snorted. “I think you’re giving it too much credit. It isn’t like Hilda, you know. We seem to have thrown it off our trail, anyway. I don’t hear anyone stomping around out there.”

  Carl seemed impervious to the sarcasm; he may not have understood it. He chewed, spat out the end of the meat that had become too dry to swallow, and said, “Would you like to see her?”

  Dr. Shanker stared at him, then stared wildly around at the trees. “What, here? It’s that close?”

  Carl nodded, continuing to eat.

  Julian was also surprised; horrified, in fact.

  Dr. Shanker
carefully set down his piece of meat on a rock. “Then what are we doing, sitting here waiting to be killed?” For the first time he spoke directly to Carl.

  “Resting. Safer here than in the open.”

  Dr. Shanker scratched his beard and continued to stare at Carl. Julian could not tell through all the hair on the man’s face whether he was angry, or frightened. After a moment Shanker said, as if to himself, “I’d hate to leave here without ever having seen one . . . that is, if it doesn’t involve getting killed.”

  “Then be silent, and follow me,” Carl said, rising.

  TWENTY

  The proverb of putting all your eggs in one basket could apply to putting too many dinosaurs in one mold. Dinosaurs became increasingly specialized, and by the end of the Cretaceous were restricted to a few ecological niches, primarily large animal niches. Hadrosaurs, for example, are known for their wonderful variety of size and shape, and especially for the range of fantastic crests on their heads. By the late Maastrichtian, however, the predominant hadrosaur was Edmontosaurus , uncrested, gigantic. Likewise, Triceratops, the largest of the ceratopsians, became predominant, while other ceratopsians disappeared. This loss of diversity almost certainly made them more vulnerable to extinction.

  —Julian Whitney, Lectures on Cretaceous Ecology

  2 September

  12:16 AM Local Time

  Earles closed her door again and turned back to Mark. “What something else?”

  He handed her the piece of paper.

  It was a printout of a digital picture; a picture of a garishly colored beetle with very long antennae and spiky legs. Earles looked up. “This is one of their mysterious beetles? The ones that appeared, and then disappeared?”

  “Yes,” Mark said. “I found the image file and printed it. Those scientists you brought in—they won’t let me near the main computer. I had to wait until they took a break.”

  “You think there’s something special about this insect,” Earles said, handing back the picture. “What’s the book?”

  Mark held it out; it was a field guide to North American insects. “I found this in the lab. It belongs to that paleontologist they called. His name’s inside it.”

  “And you’ve looked up the beetle?” Earles’ mind was racing; if this insect could be localized to a particular region, authorities there could be alerted to look for the missing people . . . unless it was a very remote region. Something about the beetle’s color made her think of tropical jungles.

  “This beetle isn’t in the book,” Mark said. “And why would they call a paleontologist? Why not that entomologist in the ecology department?”

  “Tell me what the difference is,” Earles said.

  “An entomologist studies insects,” Mark replied. “Usually modern insects. A paleontologist studies things of the past—fossils and such. Things that don’t exist anymore.”

  Earles wasn’t sure she was following him. “Those scientist thought they were recreating extinct beetles? You think that’s why they called in that guy Whitney?”

  “Why else would they call him? I’ve never heard of a physics lab bringing in someone like that. I showed the picture to the entomologist, Bob Heckwood. He couldn’t come close to identifying it.” Mark looked straight at her for the first time. “I think they were retrieving samples from sometime in the past. Like, millions of years in the past. I looked up that guy Whitney’s profile. He’s an expert in Cretaceous ecology. He wrote a paper on Late Cretaceous beetles, in fact.”

  “An expert in what?” Earles began to think she was taking a crash course in scientific terminology.

  “The Cretaceous Period. You know, dinosaurs and all that. It was just before the dinosaurs went extinct.”

  Earles nearly let her jaw drop but managed to control such an undignified response. “Are you suggesting that those missing people. . . .”

  “Were sent back to prehistoric times, maybe the time of the dinosaurs. Yeah.”

  Julian stared at Dr. Shanker as if seeing him for the first time. “You’re out of your mind!” he hissed.

  Dr. Shanker grinned. “Whitney, I’m surprised at you. And when you’re back home sitting in your office, sipping your coffee, you’ll never forgive yourself for passing up a chance like this.”

  Julian mumbled something about a chance to get swallowed whole. He had already stumbled on Corla one night and been very nearly killed. In retrospect, he knew the attack had been less than halfhearted, or he would not have survived. Maybe she had only been curious that time. But even the idle curiosity of a T. rex did not much appeal to him.

  Still, Julian hesitated only a moment before following his companions out of the trees and across the scrubby plain to a black mass of tall, tangled bushes. At the edge of the thicket Carl stopped, studied the ground, and paced silently back and forth. Then by gestures he indicated a huge gap in the hedge, leading into the darkness under the forest canopy. Something had already come that way and broken through the tangles of vegetation: something enormous.

  Carl leaned in close to Julian and said in the barest of whispers, “Listen to her breathing.”

  Julian had been listening to it for a while, thinking it was the wind in the branches. Now he realized that it was regular, and immense.

  Peering into the rent in the foliage, he gradually made out blotches of light where the moon filtered down through the canopy. He could see a rounded object. The large theropods were thought to have crouched down on their bellies when they rested, if they slept at all. Julian assumed, therefore, that he was looking at the curve of Corla’s spine. Enough was visible to give some sense of the scale of the animal. At eighteen tons, she would be two hundred times the size of a human. Julian began to get the shakes and wished like anything they had never come so close. But at the same time he was absurdly pleased that they’d succeeded in creeping up on the thing; stalking the stalker, this ultimate of predators.

  At a signal from Carl they turned and crept away. Carl did not follow immediately, but let the other two get some way ahead. Julian wondered if he was trying to protect them: if the tyrannosaur woke up, he would be the closest to her. Looking back, he saw Carl still standing there, staring into the darkness at his long-time friend. That friend, if she saw him, would probably kill him.

  Dr. Shanker and Julian had crossed the open, moonlit area and were near the shelter of the pine trees before they stopped to look back again. Carl had just turned to follow when behind him the monstrous head of Corla emerged out of the shadows and bobbed, as if sniffing the wind. Julian froze and stared; but Carl made a gesture for them to continue toward the trees.

  “Get under cover,” Dr. Shanker said in a low voice. “There’s nothing we can do for him, if that thing spots him.”

  “We can’t leave him,” Julian whispered back. He watched as Carl strode across the open area, through the rocks and low shrubs. The man’s life depended on reaching cover before the animal saw him; but if he ran, he would certainly attract its attention. With no hand-out of meat forthcoming, would the animal take Carl instead?

  Carl gestured again, and reluctantly Julian led the way into the shadows under the trees. But as soon as he was hidden from view, out of the direct moonlight, he stopped and looked back again. Carl was still walking toward them, carefully, silently. Well behind him, but still towering over him, paced the tyrannosaur. How, Julian thought to himself, can a thing so monstrous move with no sound?

  He picked up a small rock, hefted it, and stepped out of the fringes of the wood. Carl, seeing what he was doing, gave a slight shake of his head.

  “Does he know it’s there?” Dr. Shanker whispered from the shadows behind a tree.

  “Of course,” Julian said.

  They watched the scene progress, silent in the moonlight: the man in front moving with long deliberate strides, and behind him the huge beast stepping with strides five times as long. But she did not seem hurried; she kept an even distance, as if she intended only to keep him under observation.
r />   “Like a dog following its master,” Dr. Shanker said.

  The animal stopped when she reached the center of the open area. Her shadow in the moonlight stretched huge over the stony ground. She stood perfectly still, alert, watching Carl as he approached the trees. The stump of her clawless forelimb gave her a lopsided, almost pitiable appearance; but in reality it made little difference to her weaponry.

  “She has eaten,” Carl said, as he came up to them. “Do not provoke her.”

  They turned and crept into the shadows of the trees. For a long time nobody spoke. The moon set, and real darkness came on. Julian waited for Dr. Shanker to crack a joke, but instead he was silent. He seemed uncharacteristically subdued. After a long time Shanker said, quietly, “You’re a brave fellow, Carl.”

  They continued into the forest, following the line of the cliff. When Julian glanced back for the last time he could see her still standing there, filling the center of the stony clearing, gazing at the place where they had disappeared.

  The next morning the travelers increased their pace and rested only occasionally. All day there was no sign of Corla; Julian and Dr. Shanker had hopes that she’d lost their trail or wandered back to her home territory. Carl said nothing.

  In the mid afternoon they came upon a circle of char, a few burnt bones scattered on the ground, and at the very edge of the circle, pressed into the soft ash, the clover-shaped footprint of a dog. Julian was ecstatic. It was the first indication that Yariko was still alive, and that Hilda was with her. He felt immensely better knowing Yariko wasn’t entirely alone. But Carl sniffed at the ashes and said they were at least a day old.

  Far ahead, just visible on the horizon, a distinctive peak jutted out of a group of low hills. Carl said they would head for it. Julian nodded; it was the only obvious landmark in sight, and it would make a good base to search for Yariko. She might even make for the same point herself. It was probably an old volcano; but it could not have erupted in the past many years, judging by the patches of green clinging to the sides and the top.