Jasper Flint and the Dinosaur Saddle

by Jack Geurts

  “Quick, you gotta come see this.”

  “See what?”

  “Just trust me.”

  “Honey, it’s...” She pushed the glow button on her watch and checked the time. “It’s two in the morning.”

  “I know. Just come on.”

  He scrambled back out of the tent, as quickly as he had come. Zoe looked over at Jonathan, who was already back to sleep. She sighed and threw off the blankets, wearing a pyjama shirt, pants and woolly socks. She pulled on her boots and a thick jacket, grabbing her glasses on the way out.

  Jasper was already down in the pit when his mother’s shadow obscured his view of the fossil.

  “Jasper?” she said, exasperated. Her hair was tousled from sleep, her eyes still not fully open. “What’s going on?”

  “Come here.”

  She relented and made her way down to his side.

  “Whatever it is, couldn’t it wait till...”

  “Look.”

  He pointed to the thing he had uncovered. She knelt down beside him, leaned in. Suddenly, her eyes didn’t have trouble staying open any more.

  “Is that...?”

  “I think so.”

  “It looks like some kind of...material,” said Zoe, scarcely believing her own words. “Like animal hide or something. But it couldn’t be... Something like that would have decomposed long ago.”

  “I don’t know what it is,” said Jasper. “All I know is...it’s there.”

  Zoe exhaled, trying to gather her thoughts. Right there, between mother and child, was the ragged edge of some impossible material, peeking out from the distant past. Neither of them could believe it.

  And neither of them knew they were not alone...

  A shadowy figure lurked in the darkness beyond the camp. If he had eyes, he would watch, but he did not. He heard and smelled his way.

  He tasted.

  He felt.

  *

  Before dawn, the team was at work – Zoe down among the students, Jonathan up above. Jasper stood there with his father, who was so excited that he couldn’t stop clapping his son on the shoulder and laughing in disbelief. Each time he did, Jasper smiled and laughed with him.

  By midday, they had excavated enough of the covering rock to realise what it was.

  “I’ll be damned,” said Jonathan, and no one said a word. They all stood, staring down at the thing. It was right there for all to see, a contradiction of everything they had ever learned. Everything they thought they knew.

  A saddle.

  A sturdy, leather saddle.

  A sturdy, leather saddle fastened around the base of the dinosaur’s neck.

  “Is that a...saddle?” said Troy, down in the pit with Zoe.

  Lucy, who was standing up above, recoiled from the idea. “It can’t be a saddle.”

  Troy grew instantly defensive. “Then what do you think it is?”

  Lucy tried to come up with an alternative, but could not.

  “See?” said Troy. “Saddle.”

  “How could it be a saddle? If that’s a saddle, then...”

  “Someone must have ridden this thing.”

  Jonathan said what everyone else was thinking. He looked down at his wife, who was at just as much of a loss to explain it. The ragged edge of material Jasper had uncovered formed the roughly-cut end of one of the belts that would have looped around the dinosaur’s neck and ribcage. There were two others.

  Jasper imagined someone riding the dinosaur, galloping forth at full speed, maybe in some kind of ancient battle. He pictured a bladed weapon cutting the belt, wounding the dinosaur. The beast pitching forward, headlong into the ground. The rider sent flying.

  Jasper’s eyes traced a line outward from the dinosaur’s snout, imagining where the rider might have fallen – where he might still be buried.

  He snapped out of it when Zoe tapped her hammer lightly on the two belt buckles. Each one resounded with a sharp, metallic clang. She tapped again on what seemed to be a stirrup. Another clang.

  “Belt buckles,” she said. “And a stirrup. Made of metal.”

  No one argued.

  “And see here...” She pointed to the seat of the saddle. “It’s almost like one you’d use for a horse. Same basic design, just bigger. No sign of reins or a bridle, though. I wonder how they controlled...”

  “They?” said Lucy, incredulous. “Who’s they?”

  Zoe didn’t have an answer to give her.

  Troy stepped in and said, “Whoever built this thing.”

  Lucy turned on him, hands on her hips. “You mean another dinosaur?”

  “I mean, whoever built this thing.”

  “Dinosaurs don’t build things,” Lucy said, exasperated. “Do I seriously need to remind everyone of that? They don’t smelt metal. They don’t forge belt buckles and stirrups. And they don’t make saddles. It’s obviously a hoax.”

  “It couldn’t be a hoax, Lucy.” Jonathan’s voice was quiet, but commanded attention. “It was buried in sedimentary rock. It’s not like you can just dig up the strata, lay a saddle down and cover it up again without leaving any trace.”

  Another brief silence fell on the group.

  “Maybe it wasn’t dinosaurs,” said Troy.

  “Then who?” said Lucy. “People?”

  “You got a better idea?”

  The two students glared at each other.

  “I might.”

  Everyone turned to see who had spoken. It was Jasper, sitting on the edge of the pit. He’d been deep in thought, half-listening to their arguments and coming up with his own theory. He looked to his mother, who gave a reassuring nod, as if to say, “Go on”.

  So Jasper went on. “The first thing that even resembled a saddle didn’t appear until, like, seven hundred BCE with the Assyrians. This fossil is a hundred million years old.” He let that sink in for a moment, then continued. “What if we’re not the first human civilisation to walk the earth?”

  Lucy rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on...”

  “Lucy,” said Jonathan, warning her. She went quiet.

  Jonathan nodded for Jasper to continue. The boy felt it fill him with confidence. It was strange how the simple act of a nod from his parents gave him such self-assurance. The simple act of them putting their faith in him at this incomprehensible moment in their lives.

  He rephrased the question. “What if there was another race of beings like us that lived alongside the dinosaurs? That managed to somehow domesticate them, to ride them.”

  Lucy and Troy exchanged a glance. Jonathan and Zoe exchanged a glance. None of them were convinced, but none of them argued. They didn’t have a better theory and so remained silent.

  “Whatever the saddle’s made of – dinosaur hide, probably...”

  “Dinosaur hide?” said Troy.

  “Yeah, it’s kind of scaly, I don’t know. Whatever it is, it might have been treated with some kind of super-resilient substance that allowed it to survive so long underground.”

  “And the metal?” said Lucy. “Even the strongest steel we have today wouldn’t last a hundred million years underground. It’d rust and dissolve into nothing. And that’s assuming there were people with at least Iron Age technology a hundred million years ago.”

  Jasper looked at the saddle, thinking. His eyes intense. The gears turning in his head.

  “All I can think of is that their technology was so advanced, they could produce metal of this quality. Think about it – if our whole species was suddenly wiped off the face of the earth, everything made of metal would collapse – bridges, buildings, cars. Paper would deteriorate. The same goes for computers, CDs, flash drives. Dams would burst, satellites would fall out of the sky, windmills would stop turning. Everything we build today is built to be maintained. In five thousand years, we still haven’t come up with anything more durable than a stone tablet with hieroglyphs chiselled into it. Most likely, the last man-made thing that would survive would be the Great Pyramid of Giza, and that was also one of
the first things.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “My point is...what if these people built whatever they built to last?”

  Lucy shook her head, unable to believe the argument she was having with a sixteen-year-old boy. “Then...where is it all? Surely we would have found something by now.”

  That, Jasper couldn’t answer.

  She went on, “If these people were so advanced...where are they?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t even know if what I’m saying is remotely close to the truth. But unless dinosaurs suddenly figured out how to smelt metal, or work leather, or ride even larger dinosaurs.... I think we just found some evidence that our species isn’t the first advanced civilisation to call this planet home.”

  The silence returned as everyone contemplated what he had said. The disbelief, the lack of alternate theories, the simple shock at what was right there in front of their eyes and what by all accounts shouldn’t have been – all of it manifested in silence.

  And it was right at that moment that the dinosaur came to life.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ...Into The Present

  A sudden breeze ruffled their clothes, their hair. The ground beneath their feet began to swirl with dust, and within seconds, a gale-force wind had picked up, created out of nothing.

  Zoe and the students quickly clambered up the earthen steps or over the walls as pieces of rock and debris began flying about. Everyone scrambled desperately away as the sandstorm threatened to consume them.

  Jonathan hustled Zoe and Jasper to the shelter of the marquee. Troy, in his haste, tried to haul himself up the side of the pit, but couldn’t seem to muster the strength. He was panicking now, his feet trying to find a purchase in the sheer, crumbling wall, his hands trying to find one in the loose sand. Every second, he was losing ground, slipping backwards into the pit.

  Jasper saw this and broke away from his father, rushing to Troy’s side.

  Jonathan shouted something, but Jasper could barely hear him over the deafening roar of the wind. He slid to a stop in the dirt before Troy and grabbed the back of his shirt. Jasper hauled with all his might, Troy with his, until finally he came wriggling over onto the surface, panting and terrified.

  Together, they hurried to where the others had gathered a safe distance away. Before they were even halfway there, Jasper noticed that the wind had died away completely. Only the howling remained.

  Once they reached Jonathan and Zoe, Jasper turned to identify the cause of this strange phenomenon and saw that the world beyond the pit was totally calm. Scarcely a breath from any direction. Everything as it was a moment ago, only now a raging tornado billowed up out of the pit, contained entirely within it. A single, churning column of sand and wind.

  They all stood there, watching this impossible event – so catastrophic, yet so confined. All of them at a loss to comprehend or explain. Able only to bear witness.

  Jasper’s hat had been blown from his head, as had Jonathan’s, but neither seemed too concerned about it for the time being. One of the younger students, Nick, had caught a rock hammer in the cheekbone and gone down. He’d been dragged back to a safe distance with the others and now Lucy was knelt behind him, propping him up. Another student, the new girl whose name Jasper did not know, was crouched beside Nick, trying to get a response, but he gave none. His eyelids fluttered as he hovered on the verge of consciousness, bleeding from the open cut beneath his eye.

  The others were oblivious to Nick’s injury, eyes fixed on the prisoned storm until, as quickly as it began, it stopped. The tornado subsided in a heartbeat and the dust slowly settled back to earth.

  No one moved. No one breathed.

  No one knowing what horror was about to emerge from the pit...

  *

  Outside, the dinosaur continued its bloody rampage, but within the marquee, Zoe held Jasper close and sobbed quietly. Jonathan looked at the shovel in his hand, knowing there was nothing he could do to save his wife and child. He glanced at Troy, but the student was borderline catatonic and no help at all. The four of them just standing there and listening to the students being hunted down and torn to pieces right outside. None of them able to do anything. None of them willing.

  Then something snapped inside Jonathan and he made a decision, conscious or unconscious, to overturn the table and begin digging in the middle of the tent.

  Jasper and Zoe looked up at the sound of the table tipping, the shovel blade being thrust into the earth. They watched him dig and said nothing, worried that in these last few moments of his life, he had gone mad with fear.

  “Jonathan...” Zoe said, unable to keep the tremors from her voice. “What are you doing?”

  He didn’t answer, kept digging. He made the hole wider, deeper, until it resembled a shallow grave. All the while, the carnage carried on outside.

  The shadow of a mounted rider appeared on the far wall and only this brought pause to Jonathan’s frantic excavation. They all stopped, their breath caught, their eyes glued to the shadow as it stalked past at a measured pace, searching out its next victim. Jasper could see the fangs, the dripping mouth and claws silhouetted against the thin plastic wall which was all that stood between them.

  Sand trickled down from Jonathan’s shovel where he had frozen mid-way to casting it aside.

  The place had gone quiet now, everyone either hiding or dead, and it was only when a pebble was accidentally kicked that the beast lurched forward.

  A scream.

  The crunch of jaws.

  The screams of others as they fled from their hiding place and the hunt began again.

  When Jonathan was sure the beast was far enough away and properly distracted, he plunged the shovel back into the earth and continued digging.

  Jasper had never worried about his father before – to him, Jonathan had always been the man who knew how to handle any situation. The man who drove the dark roads at night while he slept soundly in the back.

  But now that same man was digging in the sand for no apparent point or purpose while a dinosaur prowled around outside, and Jasper took a tentative step towards him.

  “Dad?”

  But Jonathan didn’t stop. His expression was wild, frenzied. Showing the naked desperation of a man with everything to lose. Finally, he stopped, his face red, pouring sweat. He looked at his son.

  “Get in.”

  “What?”

  “Get in.”

  Jasper looked to his mother, but she, too, was staring at her husband in utter confusion.

  “Jonathan...”

  “Just trust me, please,” he said, his voice strained, pleading. “Get in.”

  His eyes were welling with tears now and Zoe saw his plan. His only hope. She nudged Jasper forward.

  “Get in,” she said.

  Jasper looked from her, to his father, to Troy, but before he could make a move, he heard a low, guttural breathing from right outside the tent.

  The world was quiet again, but this time Jasper was sure no one remained to be hidden. No one but them.

  The dinosaur was on the other side of the tent now, closer to where they stood. So close Jasper could hear the breath quavering in its neck, the blood-wet jaws at work, chewing.

  Father, mother and son did not move. They didn’t breathe. They didn’t see Troy kneel to slowly unzip the door...

  It was only when he stood back upright, pushing the zip to its highest extent, did Jonathan notice him. He didn’t say anything. He couldn’t. But Jasper saw the look in his eyes and turned to see Troy near the door, gripped by the nauseating dread of a man who knew he was about to die. Not a man, even. A boy. Pale, trembling.

  Troy looked at Jasper and swallowed.

  “Get in,” he said, and then he was gone. Out the door and running. The dinosaur’s head snapped up with the sound and movement, and it quickly went after him. They listened to the footsteps fading, then no footsteps at all.

  No sound. No scream.

&nb
sp; Jonathan, Zoe and Jasper lingered a moment in pure shock, but only a moment, for then Jonathan came to his senses. He knew they didn’t have long. He grabbed Jasper by the scruff of his collar and threw him down into the crudely-dug grave.

  “Dad!” he said, but already Jonathan had grabbed one of the jerry cans by the generator and unscrewed the lid. He held it over Jasper and turned it upside down, showering his son in diesel fluid.

  “Dad! What are you...?”

  But Jonathan didn’t speak. Zoe didn’t either. All she could do was look down at her boy for what she knew was the last time. Jasper wasn’t sure if it was the diesel in his eyes, but he could swear the tears were streaming down her face. He went to wipe his eyes with the back of his fuel-soaked hands, but by the time he took them away again, Jonathan had grabbed the upturned table and placed it over the top of him, closing him in. There were still gaps on either side, so Jonathan and Zoe fell to their knees at left and right, pushing in the sand to form a complete seal around the edges. He could hear his mother crying as the darkness intensified.

  “Mum!” he called. “Dad!”

  “I love you, Jasper,” his mum kept saying. “I love you.”

  And then...darkness.

  The world turned to black, but he could still hear movement outside. Muted, but audible. His parents’ hands smoothing out the sand around the table to conceal his location. He heard them step back, breathing shakily. He imagined them holding one another, Jonathan kissing Zoe on the forehead, telling her everything was going to be alright when he knew it wouldn’t be.

  Jasper wanted to call out again, to hear their voices one last time, but he didn’t. The diesel fluid stung his eyes and the smell of it filled his nose and made his head swim.

  He felt a tremor in the earth, like something heavy dropped nearby. Then another one. Then another one. The footsteps of something large coming toward him, toward his parents.

  He heard his mother whimper softly, and then the tearing of plastic walls, the clanging of tent poles and the large sigh of air being exhaled from the marquee as it collapsed in on itself. Jasper squeezed his eyes shut and blocked his ears, dulling the sound even further, but not entirely.