Monsters In The Clouds

by Russell James

  Rosy sunlight shined through the half-open container door. Dixit and Hobart hung forward against their straps, with Dixit emitting a stuttering snore. Griggs also still slept in a seat by the door, but everyone else had already escaped the box.

  Grant stretched and stepped outside. The air still held the cool of the night and a slight breeze made it a bit chilly. McCabe and the others were gathered around the containers from the first pallet, eating breakfast out of brown pouches. Janaina smiled and approached him carrying two of the little sacks.

  “Coffee and croissant?” Janaina asked.

  “I was more in the mood for the brown pouch special,” Grant said.

  Janaina handed him one. “Then it is your lucky day.”

  “That was my first thought as I awakened in my torture chair.”

  “Wasn’t it awful? I woke myself up from my snoring. I am so embarrassed.”

  “I didn’t hear a peep.”

  “You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”

  Grant raised three fingers held close together. “No way. Scout’s honor.”

  “You were a Boy Scout?”

  “For about a week. Then came the flood.”

  “Your house was flooded?”

  “No, the canyon about a mile from our town. We lived in Utah and horrendous spring rains sent a flash flood through the arroyos. The next day I went out to see the damage. The rush of water had sanded one of the walls down. The uncovered sedimentary layers were like a rainbow done in blacks, reds, and browns. I felt like I was standing in a time machine, looking at history.

  “Then I saw something sticking out of the wall. It looked like a big sharpened stick. I took a rock from the stream bed and began to chip away the dirt around it. Soon I realized it was a tusk. My teenage mind imagined an entire mastodon behind it. In reality, it just turned out to be the tip of a tusk. But that thrill of discovery was enough. From then on, all I wanted to do was be a paleontologist.”

  “And how did you end up chasing live dinosaurs in Brazil?” Janaina said.

  Grant thought his experience with the giant scorpions in the Montana cave system might be a little too much for Janaina to swallow. “That’s a longer story for later. What set you on this path?”

  “We have a dolphin native to our Amazonia rivers. You are familiar with this species?”

  “It’s pink, isn’t it?”

  “Yes and very rare. Many myths surround them. As a teenager, it, how you say, captured my soul. After completing university with a biology degree, I joined a group on a trip to clear one of its habitats of debris and old fishing lines. We traveled upriver for a few days, working along the shore each day and sleeping in our canoes at night.

  “One night I awakened to a high-pitched scream, an awful chirping. The others still slept, so I paddled upstream under the moonlight to investigate. I rounded a bend to see a young dolphin beached on the riverbank. A great sore covered most of its head.

  “Before I could paddle over to help it, a native Amazonian stepped out of the jungle. He wore practically nothing, just body paint and a headdress I couldn’t even describe. He picked the dolphin up, gentle as a baby, and floated it out into the river. He massaged some kind of thick paste into the sore on the dolphin’s head as he whispered something I couldn’t understand to the dolphin. A minute later, the dolphin made a little splash, and he released it. It swam a circle in the river, and returned to blow a spray of water at the man who saved him.”

  “Wow,” Grant said. “Amazing.”

  “Indeed it was. I realized that my quest to save the dolphin was too small. It wasn’t just about the dolphin. It was about the river, and everything around it. Especially this native tribesman who could heal and communicate with the dolphin in a way I could only dream about. It all had to be protected, and if we protected the native tribes, they would protect the rest.”

  Grant ripped open a pack of crackers. “But to keep them in isolation from the present day seems a bit… I mean with all the advances we have, it seems callous.”

  “We can’t add anything positive to their lives.”

  “But you saw that medicine. Maybe they can add to ours.”

  “At what cost? We may turn their culture into a present day cargo cult. At a minimum, we would introduce diseases. No peoples can be brought from pre-history into the 21st century unscathed. I’m content to learn through passive observation.”

  Grant smiled at her zeal. “Passive observation, passionate isolation.”

  “Exactly! We owe it to them to allow them to live their lives the way they have for thousands of years. You Americans have that attitude about wildlife. You set aside millions of acres for bison and antelope and bears to live free. Don’t people deserve the same?”

  “You have me convinced.”

  Janaina sighed. “Now I just need to convince a hundred million Brazilians and I win.”

  “I’m putting my money on you.” Grant stuffed his trash back in the pouch. “Ready to solve all this place’s mysteries?”

  “Roger that!”

  “What did you say?”

  “It is a new American phrase I picked up from McCabe.”

  “Feel free to put that one back down.”

  They headed over to container where Katsoros and the security detail stood. As they arrived, McCabe sent Riffaud to “wake up the two geeks.” Grant and Janaina took the soldier’s place in the circle.

  McCabe tossed his empty food pouch on the ground and flicked his little plastic spoon after it. He unfolded a photomosaic map and laid it on a box in front of the group. The highlands to the west were clear. McCabe pointed to a spot further east. “We’re here.”

  Katsoros stepped up. “We’ll start the search where the picture showed the apatosaurus.” She pointed to a location near the plateau’s eastern edge.

  “Transworld Union will be preparing that rescue flight,” McCabe said, “But their destination will be our intended landing site. We aren’t near it and we don’t have a way to tell them where we are.” He pointed to the low clouds that covered the sky. “That perpetual low ceiling will make finding us tough.”

  “We’ll need to make our location unmistakable from the air,” Katsoros said. “And give the plane somewhere to land.”

  “I’ll interrupt Griggs’s beauty sleep and get him and the Bobcat on it,” McCabe said.

  “Should we try to rescue our pilots?” Janaina said.

  “One of them is certainly dead,” Grant said.

  “And I wouldn’t give the second one good odds of surviving that kind of impact,” McCabe said.

  “We have to focus on the mission with the limited time we have,” Katsoros said.

  “If you were the one in the plane, you’d think differently,” Janaina said.

  “But I’m not.” Katsoros stuffed scraps of breakfast trash into the little plastic pouch. “Let’s get moving.”

  Katsoros and McCabe stepped away with the map and a compass. Janaina balled her fists and stared after them.

  “You two seem to get along well,” Grant said.

  “She tried to get me to stay back as an advisor instead of participating. She has something here to hide.”

  “Perhaps the dinosaurs?”

  “Perhaps more than that.”

  Grant hoped not. Dinosaurs would be plenty.

  ***

  Dixit went to work setting up his lab equipment and organizing some other larger boxes. Griggs set to work with the Bobcat stripping the charred trees from the clearing. Riffaud sat atop the container, sweating and watching for whatever this world was going to throw at them.

  Hobart joined Grant, Janaina, and Katsoros on the trip to find the location from the photograph. Katsoros led the way, switching her focus from a compass to the map in her hand every minute or so. McCabe followed, rifle at the ready, in a non-stop scan of the jungle around them.

  “Wow,” Hobart said. “It will be so exciting to find scat.”

  “I say that every tim
e I’m out for a walk,” Grant said. He plucked up one of the leaves off a tree. “All these plants are… basic.”

  “How do you mean?” Janaina said.

  “See how simplistic its structure is, the wider spacing between the sections of the leaf? It’s all inefficient, unevolved. I’ve seen this species a hundred times, but only as fossils. Evolution took a pause up here a few million years ago. We are looking for dinosaurs, but the plant equivalent may be all around us.”

  About thirty minutes later, Katsoros froze. McCabe approached her and she whispered something to him. He moved back to the other three in the group.

  “The spot from the photograph is just ahead. Just in case something’s there, we’ll go in slow and stay quiet.”

  Grant couldn’t help but feel an upwelling of excitement. “Even if nothing’s there, we should see evidence that something was there.” He slapped Hobart on the shoulder. “Get the pooper scooper ready.”

  Hobart didn’t smile.

  The group followed Katsoros, slow as a procession at Sunday Mass. They broke out into a small, grassy clearing. The far side stopped at the plateau’s edge and gave a clear view of the cloud cover over the land below.

  On the ground in the center of the clearing lay the neck and head of an apatosaurus.

  Or at least a crude approximation of one. Hand-carved from solid wood, it appeared to have started life as the trunk and branch of a tree. The totem matched the head from the photograph perfectly in shape, though the long distance photo had masked its lack of detail and uneven surface. The head’s only defining feature was a single groove around the middle. The toppled totem had broken away from a rotted base.

  “Mystery solved,” Katsoros said.

  Grant sagged with disappointment at the hoax. Janaina rushed to it with a shout of joy.

  “Look at this!” She practically cooed it as she ran her fingertips along the crosshatched pattern etched on the creature’s neck.

  “My nephew whittles better-looking things than that,” McCabe said.

  “I’m sure he does. With a knife. Look at the pattern of the cuts. This was shaped with stone.”

  “A local tribe?” Grant asked.

  “And an isolated one. Metal blades from the developed world are always an early bit of assimilation for these isolated groups. Whoever carved this had none.”

  McCabe walked off and started to examine the clearing’s perimeter.

  Katsoros face went red. “Dammit, how could there be people up here? There’s no other animal life.”

  “That would be a good question,” Grant said. “And why would they carve something like that?”

  Janaina wasn’t listening. She started a slow survey of the area around the carving. She stopped and scooped up a second totem buried in the grass. This one was clearly older, more weathered and riven with cracks. Grant walked over and inadvertently stepped on another. It disintegrated into powder on contact.

  “They’ve been doing this for a long time,” Janaina said. “Keeping this place clear and making these carvings. In your Pacific Northwest, the animals on a totem aren’t representing animals, but attributes, or sometimes a tribal clan. Perhaps that’s what these represent.”

  McCabe returned. “Whoever put it up here isn’t here often. There aren’t any worn footpaths through the jungle coming to this spot. And that thing was put up a long time ago.”

  “These would have taken many months to make with stone tools.” Janaina returned to the newest totem and gave it a closer inspection. “This wood is from a walking palm. That’s how it got that graceful curve. That grows in the rainforest where it floods, not up here with these plants from the past. This came from the river valley.”

  She marched to the edge of the clearing. It ended in a cliff. She went to her hands and knees and peered over the edge.

  “Well, look what we have here,” she said.

  The others joined her. Up the cliff face ran a series of crudely carved hand holds. Between some, mahogany stakes protruded from crevices in the rock.

  “Someone climbed up here?” Katsoros said. “Carrying those things?”

  “It looks that way. I’ve done a lot of climbing, some of it free climbing. Those little divots in the stone are the right spacing for someone a bit shorter than we are.”

  Grant wanted to add the climbers were also a lot stronger.

  Hobart stepped to the edge, and looked down. He swooned a bit and his face went pale. He took two steps back. “Heights aren’t my thing.”

  “Heights are fine,” Grant said, taking a step back himself. “It’s falling off them that doesn’t appeal to me.”

  “The clearing faces east,” Janaina said, “so I’d guess they come here yearly, tied to the solar cycle, like Aztec and Mayan rituals.” She sat back from the edge and stared into the jungle. “The tribes have many stories they pass down through the generations. Oral tradition is all they have. One is about monsters in the clouds, living in the violent world from which all things were born, a gateway to the chaos before the gods imposed order through man. The stories were believed to be allegorical, like Mount Olympus to the Greeks. Perhaps they have more basis in fact than we believed.”

  “And these totems?”

  “Are supposed to keep everything up here,” Janaina looked over the cliff, “from going down there.”

  “More superstitious crap,” McCabe said. “I’ve been all over. Everyone has their ghost stories. None of them are true. The more backward the group, the more BS they believe.”

  “You can’t just discount native traditions,” Janaina said.

  “Sure I can. We’ve spent almost a day here. Haven’t seen any monsters, haven’t even seen traces of any monsters. I’m going to go with there being no monsters. Not to say there might not be dangers, like jaguars and anacondas, but I’m taking dinosaurs off my worry list.”

  “Agreed,” Katsoros said. “Let’s head back.”

  McCabe led the way this time, his weapon held much more casually, his pace much quicker. Hobart looked downright disappointed. Katsoros, the opposite, which Grant thought odd since she and Transworld Union had organized the whole expedition around the dinosaurs’ existence.

  “Sorry it appears we are without dinosaurs,” Janaina said to Grant about half way back to camp. “You made the trip for nothing.”

  “It was a long shot,” Grant said. “Sorry we didn’t discover any isolated tribes up here. You also made your trip for nothing.”

  “Not at all. I found out there’s a tribe down there in the valley. One with a pretty rich belief in monsters in the clouds. I have enough evidence to get the right people interested in doing area observations.”

  Hobart plucked a leaf from a passing tree. “And if these species are new to science, there’s still some new genetic material to bring back and study. Not as exciting as a dinosaur, but you never know what it will lead to.”

  Collecting plant specimens wasn’t the most exciting way to kill the time before extraction, but Grant figured it beat doing nothing.

  When they returned to the camp, Riffaud had set up the solar panels. Griggs had made some progress knocking down and removing the trees left standing in the burn area. He’d started a decent pile of trunks at the area’s edge. Dixit had set up his mobile lab under the parachute near the container. A laptop and some analyzing equipment sat on a folding table. A stack of boxes made a wall behind him. He seemed busy for a guy without any DNA samples to process. Katsoros broke from the group and went to Dixit.

  McCabe called Riffaud and Griggs in to brief them on what they’d found.

  “Can I buy you lunch?” Grant asked Janaina. “I know a place that serves a great pouch.”

  “Can we get a table without a reservation?”

  “I have some pull with the staff.”

  She smiled and they walked over to the open box of military rations in the supply stacks. She pulled out two.

  “Pick your poison,” she said.

  Grant took the bag
on the right.

  “Now see,” Janaina said. “I got that phrase right, and it makes no sense at all. Why offer someone poison?”

  Chapter Nine

  While the group ate lunch, Katsoros did a rapid, increasingly irritated search of the supplies they’d parachuted in from the aircraft. She grimaced and slammed closed the lid of the last crate. A few minutes later, she called the group together beside the sleeping container. She’d stuck the map to the container wall. She looked worried.

  “We just finished inventory,” Katsoros said. “The situation is we have most of what we packed for the mission. But I think we need some insurance that the rescue flight will find us. We need to find the crash site and find a radio.”

  “Yesterday that was a bad idea,” Grant said.

  “No, looking for dead bodies was a bad idea,” Katsoros said. “Salvaging a working radio might save our lives. Plus, there might be first aid kits, who knows what.”

  McCabe stepped up and pointed to a section of the map. “We are right here.” He pointed to another spot on the map. “Based on Dino Doc’s description and the smoke I saw, the plane is likely somewhere here.” McCabe circled an area on the map to the northwest. “This flatter ground here? That’s where they’d try to put down the damaged plane.”

  “How far is that?” Katsoros said.

  “A few klicks. Depending on the terrain and the jungle, at least two hours out and two back.”

  “Then we’d best get moving,” Katsoros said. “I want us all back in the box before sunset.” She turned to Grant and Janaina. “You two are with us.”

  “Dixit shouldn’t miss this fun,” Grant said. “Let me be the one to tell him.”

  “I’ll take care of that. You two pack water for the trip.” Katsoros headed off in Dixit’s direction.

  “I really wanted to tell that weaselly lab rat he needed to trek through the jungle,” Grant said.

  “Is that an American thing?” Janaina said. “Mixing your animal descriptors like that?”

  “He deserved both references. Who am I to deny him his due?”