by Will Hubbell
As they tramped by the river, Rick looked at Con's pale, thin face and wondered if his calculation was correct.
Light faded from the sky, forcing them to halt before total darkness fell. "We're going to need a place to store our food," said Rick. "Someplace safe from animals."
"We haven't seen a living thing all day," said Joe.
"We can't risk losing our food to raiders," replied Rick. "We'd best play it safe."
"Why don't we keep it in the tent?" asked Con.
"And have visitors?" replied Rick.
Con grew wide-eyed at the thought of a nightstalker in the tent.
"I'm with Rick on this," said Joe. "Better safe than sorry."
"The ground's too frozen to dig, and there are no trees to hang our food from," said Rick, "so a stone cache seems our only choice."
"We'd better build one quick," said Joe. "It's getting hard to see." While Con set up the tent, Rick and Joe searched the river's shore for stones to construct a food cache. They dis-covered a rocky stretch of riverbank not too far from camp that was covered with stones of various sizes. They carried the largest ones they could lift to higher ground and fitted them tightly together to form a circle. Working together, they carried two flat rocks to serve as a cover. Rick returned to the campsite and extracted the night's rations from the food bag before bringing it to the cache. He placed it within the circle of stones, then he and Joe lifted the two flat rocks to cover it. As an extra measure, they piled more stones on top and pushed snow around the cache.
"That looks safe enough," said Joe. "How much did you leave out for our dinner?" Rick sighed. "Probably not as much as we need. It's so damned hard to figure out how to do this. If I could be sure how long we'd be walking, that would help."
"My guess is we're seventy-five to a hundred miles from the sea," said Joe.
"I figured a hundred," said Rick. "If we make twenty miles a day, we'll get there in four more days."
"Do you think we covered twenty miles today?" asked Joe.
"It's hard to say," admitted Rick. "I decided to be pessi-mistic and divide our rations for six more days of travel."
"You think like an engineer," said Joe. "It's good to have a safety factor."
"It'll make for skimpy meals, unless we find some game."
"Let's split everything four ways," said Joe. "Con gets half and you and I get a quarter each."
"That sounds like a good plan," said Rick. "I hope Con goes along with it."
"We'll make her," said Joe.
"She can be real hard headed."
"She'll eat," said Joe. "She has to."
Joe and Rick returned to find the tent set up. Con had brushed the snow from its interior and spread the conifer boughs for bedding. She was in the process of packing snow around the outside edges of the tent as they arrived.
Rick made one of his calculations and decided to make a fire. That way, they could have warm broth with dinner, and there would be a lighter load to carry the next day. He ra-tioned out the wood, which was almost as precious as the food, to start a blaze. He cleared the snow from a patch of ground close to the tent and set nightstalker down next to some tinder. By the time he had a fire going, it was pitch-dark. While the small fire was cheerful, it also emphasized the totality of the blackness surrounding them. The flames quickly died down to embers, and they barely had enough time to cook their broth. As Rick expected, Con protested the division of the rations, but, in the end, he and Joe pre-vailed. They finished their meal in near-total darkness, with the dull red embers providing more of an impression of light than its actuality. Afterward, they huddled together in the tent and went to sleep.
CON AWOKE TO cold and hunger. Both had become con-stants in her life, waxing and waning in intensity, but never leaving entirely. Usually, the hunger manifested itself as a dull ache and the cold as a wearing discomfort. She had learned to ignore both, and they did not wake her. The sound did. A soft, distant scratching noise dis-turbed the black quiet of the world. Con instantly thought of the meat cache.
"Rick! Joe!" she cried. "Something's stealing our food." Instantly, the feeble yellow light of a flashlight broke the darkness inside the tent. It was enough light for Joe to find the gun. He switched it on, and he and Rick burst from the tent. Cold air flowed in as Con stared into the dark. The flashlight's pale beam stabbed into the night, but petered out before reaching the stone cache. Con could not tell if the scratching had stopped or was drowned out by Rick and Joe's noise. She watched the yellow light advance into the darkness until it illuminated a pile of snow-covered stones. When the light stopped moving, Con heard Joe curse and confirm her fears. "God damn thieving bastards!"
Guided by the light, Con walked over to the food cache. The circle of stones and the heavy stone lid were intact. They had been too heavy for the nightstalkers to move. Instead, they had tunneled beneath them in two places. The tracks in the snow told the story of the raid.
"There were two of them," said Rick after a moment's study. "They're traveling together."
"Our friends from back at the ledge?" asked Joe.
"Maybe," said Rick. "Who can tell?"
"I bet it was them," said Joe. "They were smart enough to stay out of sight all day, then go straight to the meat."
Rick said nothing, but began to pull away the stones that lay atop the cache's lid. "Let's see how much they got."
The batteries in the flashlight were almost dead, mak-ing it maddeningly difficult to determine the extent of the damage. Like anxious misers, they counted their remain-ing food. The skills the nightstalkers used to invade mammal's burrows had served them well in this case also. The tunnels were small, but obviously sufficient. Half the food was gone.
Con had a sick feeling in her stomach. She felt as-saulted in a fundamental way. She needed that food to live, and these creatures had taken it. Rage and despair fought within her.
"We'll get them!" said Joe with murderous intensity. "Tonight, we'll wait for them like we did before. They'll repay us for what they stole. They'll pay with their own damned flesh!" They left the plundered cache and returned with the food sack to the tent. They did not need the flashlight to guide them, for a hint of light had returned to the sky, and they could discern the tent against the snow.
"They're able to see in dimmer light than we can," said Rick, "and they've taken advantage of it, but I suspect they're as blind as we are in the middle of these black nights."
"So far," said Joe, "most of your theories about night-stalkers have not panned out."
"You're right," said Rick, "but we should be extra careful right after dusk and just before dawn."
"I'm going to be careful every damn minute until those two are dead!" said Joe. Rick built a tiny fire to boil some dried meat in an attempt to extend it by making broth. By the time the pot boiled, the fire had reduced to embers. Rick, Joe, and Con huddled around them, passing the pot to drink. After-ward, they shared the gray, soggy meat. It was a meager breakfast and a melancholy one. Rick was starting to pack up when he heard Con say "Oh, great!" and saw her head for the bag of clothes. She began to rummage through it with a frustrated and upset look on her face.
"What's wrong, Con?" he asked.
Con did not answer. Instead she muttered to herself. "Of all times, why now?" She pulled a faded tee shirt from the bag. It had a dinosaur skull printed on it, along with the words "Hell Creek Dig—2056." She turned to Rick, and asked, "Can I have this?"
Rick looked at his favorite shirt, one that evoked mem-ories of a special summer with Tom. Nevertheless, he said, "Sure."
"You won't get it back," said Con.
"That's okay."
Con read the puzzled look on Rick's face. She red-dened a bit, and said, "It's that time of the month. Can I borrow your knife? I'll need to cut this up."
Rick handed Con his knife, and she retreated to the tent. She emerged after fifteen minutes, looking grumpy and uncomfortable.
"Will you be all right today?" he asked.
"Just be glad you're not a woman."
They finished breaking camp and followed the river through the cold, desolate landscape. Rick assumed they were traveling over an upland plain like the one where they had found the ceratopsid herds. Only a trace of car-bonized vegetation hinted he was correct. He had seen the aftermath of a wildfire once, but it was nothing com-pared to this. He imagined a hurricane of fire passing over the plain, incinerating everything to ash. The land it left behind appeared devoid of life, sterilized by flame and scoured by flood. If there were any creatures about, they were hidden.
Joe, for one, was absolutely sure there were at least two creatures about. He stared into the gloom, hoping to spot the two nightstalkers. The gun was slung in front of him, ready at an instant's notice. Yet Joe was almost cer-tain his adversaries would not reveal themselves. They would wait until dark. The three slowly trudged mile after mile. Twice, they had to ford streams. Both were shallow, merely requiring that they remove their shoes and roll up their pants. De-spite that, the brief crossings were torture. The streams' edges were lined with ice, and the near-freezing water left their feet stinging long after they had crossed. Later, they encountered a thirty-foot meteor crater, filled with floodwater. A scum of slushy ice covered the water's sur-face. They halted there for lunch. Rick handed out extra rations, for in his careful arith-metic of calories, he had decided to gamble on catching the two nightstalkers. He looked at the extra food they ate at the meal as an investment that could be recouped, even multiplied, through a successful hunt. Success would require they be alert and rested. They would stop early today, build a fire, and eat well. He made these decisions without consulting Joe or Con. The burden of leadership had become his alone. When he rationed out extra meat, they accepted it without questioning. Like-wise, they accepted his other decisions—even those that risked their lives.
Rick had not grown comfortable with risk, as much as he had grown numb to its danger. Everything they did was potentially life-threatening. In the twenty-first cen-tury, none of them would have drunk from a river. Here, they often had no choice, even though a waterborne ill-ness could easily be fatal. So could a simple scratch. Luck, as much as good judgment, had kept them alive so far. Although Rick tried to weigh each move, in the end, each move was a bet where lives were wagered. Tonight he was betting that they could kill the nightstalkers.
Long before it grew dark, Rick began looking for a campsite that would favor them in the night's hunt. When they encountered a broad, level area, he decided to stop. "We should camp away from the riverbank," he said, "so they'll have to approach us in the open. We'll make a tripod from the travois poles and hang the food bag below it. After dinner, we'll set the pot there and rig it as an alarm."
"I can hardly wait," said Joe, grinning in anticipation. "I want the last watch."
"Con," said Rick, "you take the middle shift. You and Joe should sack out early. I'm going to start dinner now." Rick went to the food bag and took out a generous ration of food. Tomorrow, he thought, this should be heavy with frozen meat.
Joe and Rick began to erect the tripod while Con set up the tent. After the tent was up, Con retreated inside for a few minutes. When she emerged, she carried a small bundle to the river. It was a while before she returned. When she did, besides carrying her wet bundle, she dragged a large branch. "I brought you guys a present," she said.
"Driftwood!" said Rick as happily as if she had brought them a cake. "Is there more?"
"This was all I saw."
Rick brushed dried mud from the branch. Four inches in diameter and dry, it promised warmth when they needed it most. Working together, Rick, Joe, and Con were able to break it into three pieces. As Rick began to build the fire, Con used some firewood to construct a makeshift drying rack close to it. "I'll need to dry my rags," she said, with a mixture of annoyance and embar-rassment. The fire was the biggest they had made since the last night on the ledge. The meal they cooked upon it seemed ample to their shrunken stomachs. The hunger that gnawed at Con's insides, diminished to mere discomfort.
"I hope it's warmer by the sea," said Joe. "Being cold all the time is tiring."
"It sure is," said Con. "I'll sleep well tonight." Her mood had improved with the food and once she was able to remove her dried rags from sight.
"You should go to bed soon," said Rick. "I'll set up the alarm."
"I will when the fire dies down," said Con. "I haven't been this warm in two days." After the fire, the tent felt frigid to Con, and huddling with one person was not as warm as sleeping with two. Nevertheless, she and Joe quickly fell asleep. Rick sat at the entrance of the tent with the gun and the flashlight in his lap. Only his head protruded into the cold night. He clutched the two sides of the tent flap beneath his chin, like a buttonless overcoat. The flap provided no warmth, but it did keep out the drafts. As Rick sat, the cold en-tered and stiffened him. There was nothing to see. He probed the darkness with his ears, listening for the crunch of taloned feet in the snow and the soft clink of stones against the pot. Like Joe, Rick assumed the nightstalkers would come just before dawn. That assumption did not ease his vigilance. Fear kept him alert. He was not afraid of the animals as adversaries, but he feared the conse-quences of another successful raid. By stealing food, the nightstalkers would kill them as surely as if they tore out their throats.
There was no way to measure the passage of time. Un-counted hours of blindness passed, and still Rick did not wake Con. He wanted her to rest as long as possible. Sleep was one of the few gifts he could give her. The thought of her sleeping, oblivious to worry and suffering, filled him with tender satisfaction. Only when fatigue be-gan to overwhelm him did Rick reluctantly shake Con and whisper, "Your watch." Con grunted and sat up. She could see nothing and groped about until she touched Rick. They did everything by feel. Rick guided her to the tent flap, then handed her the flashlight and the gun. Before Rick settled next to Joe, he whispered, "Don't keep too long a watch; Joe really wants his chance."
"I'll be sure to wake him in time."
Con felt Joe's warmth leave her back as Rick's breathing became slow and regular. Her grogginess left her. Outside were things that threatened her and those she loved. She feared them in a more primal and instinc-tive way than Rick. They were not mere thieves to her. She had sensed their lurking presence too long to think of them in impersonal terms. She felt that nightstalkers had watched her from the beginning and had drawn ever closer. Tonight, Con prepared for a confrontation that had been building for weeks. Her fingers felt the gun until they rested on the safety. She was ready for them. Like Rick, Con had no way to tell how long she stood watch. The approach of dawn was not heralded by the coming of light, but rather by the quiet sound of feet in the snow. A rush of adrenaline brought her cold-numbed body to a state of tense readiness. Con turned on the gun and switched off the safety. Her right finger gripped the firing trigger. With her left hand, she aimed the flashlight toward where she thought the tripod stood, ready to turn it on when she heard the pot clink.
The footsteps stopped and, for a moment, Con thought that she might have imagined them. Then she heard them again. They proceeded more slowly, as if the animals were suddenly aware of her presence. Con waited for the clink of the pot. It seemed forever before she heard it. She pressed the flashlight's switch.
Nothing happened. The darkness was still unbroken. The pot chinked more loudly, then she heard it fall to the ground. There was a tearing sound. Con imagined a head in the meat bag. She became aware of a second set of footsteps off to the left. An image came to her, one of the nightstalkers approaching the Hypsilophodon from different directions. A terrible insight came to her. The food bag isn't all they're after.
How can I shoot them in the
dark? Con had mere sec-onds to answer her question. Suddenly, she knew. She felt along the barrel for the control switches and moved one until the yellow lights indicated the power was at maximum level. Next, she adjusted the firing spread to its widest setting. To her fear-sensitized ears, the dark was alive with noises—the crunch of feet in snow, the tearing of cloth, and the click of teeth. Con pointed at the sounds and fired. A loud "crack" resounded. Con moved the gun to the left and fired again. She pointed to the right and fired once more.
Joe called out in the dark, "What's happening?"
Rick's groping hand touched her shoulder. "You're shaking," he said.
"They were here," said Con.
"Did you get them?" asked Joe.
"I don't know. The flashlight's dead. I had to fire in the dark."
Rick and Joe hushed and strained their ears for any indication of the nightstalkers. The dark was absolutely silent. Con looked down at the gun. Its indicator lights were dark. She pressed the gun's switch to make sure she hadn't turned it off unaware. She hadn't. The gun had expended the last of its charge. "Better grab the spears," she said in a shaken voice. "The gun's useless now." Huddled together for warmth, they sat in the tent and waited for the light. Both flashlights were dead, and only dawn could reveal what had happened. Rick held his un-sheathed knife while Con and Joe gripped spears that were next to useless in the confined tent.