Cretaceous Dawn

The ceratopsia, the parrot-beaked dinosaurs, diversified in the Cretaceous. The coincidence of their rise with the rise of flowering plants suggests that they evolved specifically as the dominant eaters of angiosperms. However, by the end of the Maastrichtian, all except a very few species had died out. The massive Triceratops, for example, was a late survivor, probably traveling in large migratory herds.

In the physics lab, Earles stared at the two scientists. Physicists taking observations of beetles and twigs, beetles disappearing, physicists and dogs disappearing; she would have laughed if there wasn’t a dead body to show it was quite serious.

Earles wasn’t ready to let it go, however. “You said before there was a decrease in pressure inside the vault. What if some of the contents of the vault disappeared? Wouldn’t that cause the vacuum?”

“No,” Earles said, before the physicists could answer. “But a few hours ago we thought they’d been burned to nothing; cremated. That would be a large amount of mass disappearing. What if they disappeared some other way?”

But Ridzgy shook her head. “Sorry, that doesn’t work. Cremation, as you put it, isn’t a negating of mass; it’s a change in state. The water and carbon in the body simply become gas: carbon dioxide, hydrogen. The mass is still there. Furthermore, according to the notes and programs, these people were pulling small things into the vault from elsewhere . . . and then watching them disappear later, outside the vault.”

“We’re not here to solve the mystery for you,” Bowman added, seeing the doubtful look on Earles’ face. “We’re physicists—we can try to re-create their experimental run, but there’s no information here on people chopped in half or gone missing.”

But Earles was not convinced. She was staring at the vault, seeing in her mind’s eye the human body sliced through the middle; not burned, but sliced . . . cleanly, and the rest gone as if never present, blood and all.

Hilda lay partly on her chest, her head stretched out on the ground and one front paw curled under her body. Her lips were drawn back as if they had stiffened in a snarl, or perhaps a yelp. By now Julian had seen many dead animals, limp furry bodies with the warmth gone from them; but this death wasn’t the same kind. There was a stillness about it that struck him like a blow in the stomach. This animal, their companion, so full of life and health and intelligence, this personality he’d lived with for so long on a tiny raft, this ever-curious and alert being who put the humans’ adaptive abilities to shame; the physical proof that this spirit was suddenly gone, leaving only the final stillness of any empty body, a meaningless shell, made Julian lose all hope of his own survival. First Frank, now Hilda: the two who were best equipped to survive had been killed first.

She must have been badly injured, and crawled into the bush to die. As they stared at her it came over Julian that this was the natural end of every wild animal, including themselves. They were looking at their own future, probably not too distant, and the vision they had of reaching their vague goal was mere idealistic prattle.

Dr. Shanker pushed Julian aside. Then he gently disentangled Hilda’s body and laid her in the open, as if, even in death, she might be more happy in a comfortable position. He squatted and palpated her body to see how she had been injured. The blood came from her mouth, and was coagulated in the fur of her muzzle and on her chest. It looked as if she’d been struck hard on the head or across the jaw. One side of her face was badly swollen and the flesh around the eye had puffed up and forced the lid closed.

Julian worked his fingers into the fur and immediately realized that she was warm and her body was not stiff. He could feel a faint pulse, and when he stared hard at her abdomen he saw a flutter, a hint of a breath, irregular and infrequent. She was just barely alive. “Yes,” he whispered. “I feel it.”

“Not to mention us,” Julian said. “I could do with some water myself.” It was amazing how life suddenly mattered again, and thirst could drive him to action. “There’s more likely to be food near the water too.”

Dr. Shanker handed his spear and bow to Yariko and then gently gathered Hilda in his arms and lifted her. They walked back toward the river, single file again, slowly so as not to jostle her over the uneven ground. But after only a few minutes he stopped and said in a low voice, “There’s something ahead.” He lowered Hilda to the ground, and Yariko handed him his spear. “Do you see it?” he asked.

Julian looked hard, trying to estimate distances. Something gray showed far away between the tree trunks. It must have been huge, although his eyes were constantly tricked about depth and size in the gargantuan forest.

“All right, then,” Yariko said, getting her bow ready. She pointed to a tree halfway there and said, “Not beyond that point. I won’t let you. Frankly, this whole forest scares me. We don’t belong here—and every animal will know that.”

As they approached, they made out a gigantic gray object lying at the top of a gentle slope. They were within fifty feet of it and were crouching behind the tree, when Yariko suddenly said, in a disgusted voice, “Julian, it’s the same one!”

“It’s not possible,” Dr. Shanker said as he joined them, gently laying Hilda on the ground again. “How did we lose ourselves? We walked straight north toward the river, didn’t we?”

Julian looked wildly around at the woods, trying to see his crude axe marks on the trees, or some indication of the river’s direction. Massive trunks rose everywhere, and deceptive lanes between the trees seemed to open up and then fade out farther along. Every direction looked the same.

They set out again, but more than an hour later still had not come to the river. The sky was hazy and it was impossible to tell where the sun lay. A diffuse greenish light filtered down through the treetops.

Julian knew they’d never reach the river before sundown, and it would be foolish to continue at night, in the pitchy blackness of the forest. They settled down at the base of one of the enormous Metasequoia. There was no possibility of climbing the tree, and no undergrowth to hide in; they would have to spend the night exposed on the forest floor.

They laid Hilda gently on a bed of needles. Her breathing had become more regular, and her foot twitched once in her sleep, a sign that the blow to her head had not paralyzed her.

Julian had been pondering that. “My guess is she was chasing a group of herbivores, perhaps hadrosaurs,” he said. “Like a dog chasing cows, or sheep: she was probably nipping at their heels and one of them kicked back. If she doesn’t wake in the next twelve hours. . . .”

As the darkness closed in they fell silent. Julian began to doze, now and then waking up with a start to the same quiet forest, now invisible. Tiny sounds became more apparent, as did the scents: pungent needles of trees, resin, dry leaves, decay. Once he thought he heard a footstep, and he started awake and listened intently. He had just decided it was part of a dream when it repeated itself: a tiny thump. Both Yariko and Dr. Shanker remained asleep, their heads lolling back against the shaggy bark.

Again, the thump. It did not sound like a very large animal. Julian was reminded of a deer stepping slowly through the forest, barely audible, browsing on patches of ground cover. There was a long silence, several minutes, and then the sound again, much closer, directly behind the tree. He thought he heard the soft tearing of plants being pulled up from the forest floor.

He was bursting with curiosity as well as apprehension. It was clearly not T. rex, and didn’t sound like any other dangerous predator; but a herbivore did not mean there was no danger: Hilda was proof of that. After all, many modern man-killing creatures were strict vegetarians: bulls, rhinoceroses, hippos. However, if his companions continued motionless and nonthreatening, they would probably be safer than suddenly jumping up and running off, or doing anything else that would startle the creatures.

Finally the animal came into view: not one, but a small herd, eleven of them, ambling one by one from behind the tree. They were bipeds, small ones only about the size of a human, or of a large deer, and Julian supposed they served very much the same function that deer might: nibbling on bark, bending down to tear up ferns and herbs, eating the leafy vines that clung to the tree trunks. They were comical animals, stocky, bull necked, and stout bodied, with heavy tails that jutted out stiffly behind and allowed them to balance on their two legs.

One peculiarity was so distinct that he knew the type of dinosaur instantly. The tops of their heads were expanded into large rounded domes, mostly bone, giving them the look of sage old men who had gone bald. Pachycephalosaurs.

They wandered into view peacefully, chewing bits of fern that dangled from their mouths. One of them pulled up the low herbs with its hands and then transferred them to its mouth.

Yariko stretched, and gave a little laugh. “I’m glad we looked for Hilda,” she said, her voice soft but startlingly close. “Now we’re all together again we can find the river, and go on. You know, I think I’m getting used to this life. I can hardly remember living any other way. It seems so . . . normal.”

Later in the night Julian heard the same thumping of feet. Another group of pachycephalosaurs must have passed close by, but he could not see them in the absolute blackness under the trees, and in any case he was more interested in what was sleeping in his arms.

When Julian woke next there was a dim light around him. Yariko’s head was still on his shoulder, and his arm was around her; her knees had tilted over onto his lap. He hated to disturb her; but after a while a cramp in his leg demanded that he move. Yariko woke with a start, drawing quickly away from him. Then she smiled and leaned against him again.

Julian longed to kiss her on each of her puffy eyes, and on her very chapped lips; he wondered if she was wondering why he never initiated anything. He had always been so shy with her, but they needed each other now. Everything had changed between them. But even as he had the thought Dr. Shanker sat up beside them and stretched.

Seeing her master move Hilda lifted her head and wagged her tail. They were ecstatic. They crowded around, petting her and talking to her, and she seemed to like the attention. But when she tried to stand up she wobbled and then sat down suddenly and whined.

There was no water for Hilda, and no breakfast. They set off as quickly as they could toward the river, Dr. Shanker carrying her again. Her head lolled against his shoulder, and her wide brown eyes gazed back at Julian, sad and confused.

An hour later they still hadn’t come to the river, or seen any of their notched trees. Julian silently cursed himself for losing them. It had seemed such an obvious marker at the time, but had turned out to be too subtle to keep track of easily.

Hilda began to struggle and complain about being carried, and when Dr. Shanker set her on the ground she puttered along at a maddeningly slow pace. The forest began to seem like an evil force keeping them from knowing their direction. Although nobody said anything, they were all thinking of the few weeks remaining before the close of the time window.

The first thing they brought down was nothing more glorious than a toad. Dr. Shanker got it with his spear. He fed it to Hilda and looked the other way as she devoured it raw. A little food in the stomach seemed to perk her up, and she was better able to trot along after that. But she seemed chastened, a little frightened by the forest, and showed no interest at all in wandering off.

It was a group of pachycephalosaurs; perhaps even the same herd they’d met during the night. One of the animals stood off on its own, separated from the others by a few yards, its head down, grazing on a patch of leafy trailers. Julian didn’t dare whisper, but with signs pointed it out to Yariko. They split up, Yariko moving to the left, Julian to the right.

The pachys had chosen a patch of forest that was grown up with leafy, evergreen bushes, which fortunately gave cover for stalking them. Julian was able to get within about twenty feet of the lone animal without detection; there was no breeze in the still forest, and the animal was clearly not expecting an attack. He extracted an arrow from the bundle, silently, and fitted it to the bow. Then he peered out between the leaves.

The animal was turned away from him, and he waited for it to expose more flank, having no illusions about his marksmanship. The pachy took a step and bent down again to tear up a mouthful of leaves. But it must have heard something; suddenly it paused and stared over its shoulder directly at the spot where Yariko was hiding.

Julian crashed out of the bushes to follow but they disappeared as if they had never been there at all. “I know we hurt it,” he said, after a moment. “We should be able to track it.”

But Hilda wasn’t much help when they brought her to the spot. When Dr. Shanker put her nose to a spatter of blood on the ground she licked at it and then glanced up with a wag of her tail, as if waiting for more.

In the end they simply followed the drops of blood. In one spot the needles and ferns were smeared with blood, as if the animal had stumbled and gotten up again. The fall may have driven the arrow deeper, since they found the pachy about twenty yards farther, dead.

Hungry as he was, Julian was sickened by the process. Their diet for weeks had been small mammals, fish, and roots; they had not eaten dinosaur flesh since the very beginning. As Julian received the thick, bloody chunks that Dr. Shanker carved from the thigh, the smell and consistency revolted him. The meat was a dark, almost purple red, with an unexpected yielding quality, as if it would squash to gel in his hands. The thick nobbled skin, mottled green and brown with yellow streaks here and there, reminded him of poisonous lizards he’d seen in zoos. Just under the skin was a whitish membrane layer that slipped and glistened and proved difficult to slice. The meat looked, felt, and smelled utterly foreign.

As they finished it began to rain heavily, as if to purposefully contradict Dr. Shanker. Long strings of water cascaded from the treetops and drummed on the ground, washing away the needles, churning the forest floor into mud. They tilted back their heads and drank, and cupped their hands for Hilda to drink. The fire was flattened into soggy charcoal and the blood washed from the carcass.

It was a shame to leave the rest of the animal when they’d hardly taken any meat off, but not even Dr. Shanker was willing to carry raw flesh through the forest. They each saved a well-cooked piece that they wrapped in a leaf and carried on a stick. Dr. Shanker picked through the small mound of viscera he’d thrown to the side and cut the bladder free. He washed it out in the rain, filled it with water, and tied off the top. Julian grinned, watching him: little did Shanker know it was of immense scientific interest that a pachycephalosaur even had a bladder.

The afternoon was sunnier, and Julian was able to figure out the points of the compass. However, although they walked roughly northwest, the river obstinately refused to appear. It must have taken a meander, looping farther north. There was nothing to do but keep going, and hope.

Finally they struck a dry streambed worn into the soil, snaking between the trees. That caused excitement; surely it would lead to the main river eventually. Julian could not resist picking up stones and splitting open the shelves of sedimentary rock, looking for fossils. Stream beds were excellent places to look for fossils, with the types found dependant on the layers of rock exposed.

In the twentieth century, the geographic region of the Hell Creek Formation was particularly rich in Late Cretaceous fossils; but now in the Late Cretaceous itself, the stream bed was filled with fossils from a much earlier date. Julian found impressions of half-inch shells, sometimes mingled and crammed together in tessellated patterns as if hundreds of the mollusks had died and settled on top of each other.

These fossils dated from the Cambrian, several hundred million years earlier, living and dying in such a distant past that by comparison dinosaurs were modern animals, indistinguishable from humans. If he and the others had been thrown back to that era in time, the earth would have been utterly alien, unrecognizable, although probably much safer.

The terrain began to change again. The giant Metasequoia thinned and the gaps were filled more and more with smaller conifers. The undergrowth became tangled again and difficult to walk through, and the ground was softer. They were nearing the river at last.

Hilda had completely recovered her good humor and the swelling around her eye had gone down. At the same time she regained her enthusiasm for chasing after animals, and several times came near to being kicked again by frightened pachys. Julian wondered how many trials it would take before she learned, and if she would survive until she did.

Once, she dashed off through the bushes, snarling, stopping not far away to bark at some unfortunate animal that she must have cornered. They crashed through the bushes after her, partly to rescue her if she needed it, and partly to see the animal. Dr. Shanker was hoping it would make a good meal, if Hilda brought it down.

They struggled out of the bushes, scratched and itching, beating aside the bracken with their spears, and stepped into the clearing. Julian was scanning the nearest tree, looking for a small mammal, treed and hissing down at Hilda from a branch. But as soon as Yariko struggled free of the bushes she grabbed his arm to stop him and pointed across the clearing.

She was barking in a frenzy from just beyond its reach. Its bulk was partly screened by leaves and by the bare twigs of deciduous bushes. But from the back end of its shell to the front of its snout it must have been nearly thirty feet long, another example of the gigantish trend of the Late Cretaceous.

It had a blunt, triangular head, wide and flat, knobbled and plated on top, small in comparison to the body. It held its head near the ground as if in a defensive posture, or in threat, its beaked mouth gaping and showing a single row of small, foliated, plant-grinding teeth far back in the jaw. The body rose up behind the head, armored with rounded plates of bone, like a monstrous turtle. A few small birds fluttered above it. Its rump was raised but it had not yet turned around to present its club-tipped tail. In fact the creature did not seem very alarmed about the puny, noisy mammal that had disturbed it, and after silently threatening, it turned back to feed.

Julian stood amazed, watching. An enormous, bluish tongue reached out of the mouth and curled around a twig, pulling the leafy end into the animal’s beak. Such an organ had been suspected by paleontologists, because the skulls of ankylosauria had well-developed hyoid and entoglossal processes to anchor the tongue muscles. Another guess was that most of the digestion would have taken place inside an extensive gut, since the teeth were too small and weak to process the food effectively.

One symptom not much discussed in the journals was that the fermentation of leaves in the gut produced an incredible smell whenever the animal dropped feces, which it did at that moment, in huge wet quantities.

That was enough to make them all back away. Hilda, however, continued to pester it, darting dangerously close and snarling, but the animal snapped back in a halfhearted way, glancing at her without much concern.

He made a grab at the scruff of her neck and caught her after several tries. He slipped a rope over her head and began to haul her away while she strained against it, still barking and snapping fiercely, as though convinced she was larger than the monster.

But the animal seemed to think that Dr. Shanker was joining the attack. It began to turn away from him, lumbering on its ungainly, trunk-like legs, the back ones longer than the front. As it turned, snapping and bending the branches around it, Julian saw clearly the ring of spikes curving out from the edges of its armor. Any carnivore foolish enough to attack this animal or try to turn it over would have a bloody mouth for the trouble, and very possibly a fatal gash.

He thought it was maneuvering to lumber away into the woods; but as soon as its back was turned the tail lashed out with astonishing energy considering how sluggishly the animal had been moving. The tip of the tail was weighted with lumps of bone in the shape of a medieval mace. If Dr. Shanker hadn’t ducked in time his skull would have been smashed. He hurried back to Julian and Yariko.

The ankylosaur began to back toward them. Even Hilda decided it was not worth antagonizing further. They quickly scrambled away through the brush, Hilda in front dragging Dr. Shanker by the homemade leash. Fortunately the ankylosaur did not follow them very far; when Julian glanced back he saw it settling down to feed again.

Later the same day they reached Hell Creek. It could be heard plainly from a distance, crashing and rumbling, and when they finally emerged from the forest they stood on a rocky cliff, thirty feet high, looking down at a shallow, fast-flowing stream. The raft would never have made it through this stretch, had they continued on the river; clearly luck was with them still. A mist of droplets hung in the air, and the spray flew up into their faces. It was difficult to talk over the roaring water.

The opposite bank of the river was lower. Open lands stretched out beyond for miles, speckled with scrub and here and there a coniferous tree. The sun had almost set, spreading a dull red light over the sky and the plains. Jutting up against this redness, in silhouette along the western horizon, stood the first low slopes of the infant Rocky Mountains. They were nothing like the lofty peaks Julian had visited in his own time.

He followed their probable path with his eyes: it lay toward the very first of the slopes. But he could not help thinking the chances were still slim. The river now bent south so it would be no more use as a guide. Miles of broken, rocky ground lay before them. It was all too exposed; there were few trees to climb, and even less underbrush. The hills were likely cooler at night, and there’d be a scarcity of food and water. It all seemed impossible, especially within the remaining few weeks. Impossible—but they would keep trying. Julian was not discouraged. Instead, he felt strangely excited. Their goal was suddenly a reality. Finally, it was in sight.

Yariko touched his arm and pointed. One great swath of the plains, beginning near the river but stretching away at least a mile, looked darker than the rest. Julian thought it looked like turned-up earth, lumpy with mounds and boulders, as if some giant had begun to till the field and then found it too rocky to cultivate; but the distance was so great that the boulders must have been enormous up close.

Suddenly he realized that they were not rocks or clumps of earth at all, but animals, bulky Triceratops. Like the bison or the wildebeest they were gathered together in uncountable thousands, stretching beyond all imagination, sending up a haze of dust that caught the red light of the sunset.

They watched for a long time. Dr. Shanker put three fingers to his forehead and mimed a lumbering, rhinoceros kind of animal, and Julian nodded vigorously. Dr. Shanker grinned, his whole leathery face bunching up with pleasure. Yariko also grinned; she took Julian’s hand and held it tightly, hurting his fingers, but he did not complain. He squeezed back.

Finally they stepped away from the river and made camp under the eaves of the forest. Yariko started a fire and when Hilda suddenly appeared with a raccoon-sized mammal in her mouth, Dr. Shanker confiscated half of it for their dinner.

“Hopefully not lava flows, ash falls, or other unpleasantness,” Dr. Shanker put in, also in a loud voice to be heard over the river. He was clearly in a good mood, now that Hilda was back to normal and the river had been found again.

“I don’t know about other unpleasantness,” Julian said, “but I doubt we see any volcanoes in action, or not what most people call action. Most of the magma activity is below the surface here, and the geology takes place at appropriately geologic time scales.” He shifted his position and dug out a small rock, about two inches across, that was too sharp to sit on. He glanced at it before tossing it away. Granite: not the shale or other sedimentary rocks that had so far been common. No fossils in this rock; but it was interesting nonetheless.

She turned it in the firelight and the crystals gleamed faintly. “Texture,” she said, thoughtfully. “Well, it’s not smooth and flat like the fossil rocks you keep breaking open. It’s more grainy. I can see big grains in it, different colors.”

Julian nodded. “It was formed in the slow cooling of a magma intrusion deep underground, where temperature and pressure are high. If you want to get technical, volcanism is an extrusive or surface process, and plutonism is the intrusive, or below the surface, equivalent. But they both involve magma.”

“No, I doubt it. Those are still too far away. This little piece probably comes from a much smaller formation closer to the surface. But it’s a sign we’re entering the right kind of terrain.”

Dr. Shanker tossed away the stone along with his meat-toasting stick. “I suppose we’ll find plenty more, as we go on,” he said. “It seems a hopeful sign. Lecture us more later. Tomorrow. I say we sleep now; we could all use a rest.” He yawned noisily, and Hilda yawned too, with an almost exact imitation of his facial expression. Julian and Yariko both grinned.

The trees by the river were short and none of them were good for climbing. Dr. Shanker curled up on the ground with Hilda, and by habit, although there was no reason, Yariko and Julian found a spot about thirty feet away and out of sight. They crawled under a bush, into a soft pile of leaves.

The pounding of the rapids deadened all sounds from the forest; even Dr. Shanker’s snoring went unheard. The background rumble gave Julian a sense of seclusion and security that he hadn’t felt in a long time.

“It seems hopeful, doesn’t it?” Yariko said out of the darkness beside him, her voice so close that he could feel her breath on his cheek and detect, faintly, the sweet smell of the berries they’d eaten as a desert. “Reaching our goal, I mean. We might really make it, even in the few weeks left. Tonight was the first time I felt confident.”

“Yes . . . we do seem to have made remarkable progress,” Julian answered slowly. He too felt more hope, even certainty of their chances, than ever before. But he felt something else too. With the new hope a sense of dread had begun to creep in: not dread that they’d be stuck in the Cretaceous forever, but dread that they would leave it. “We haven’t talked much about how we’ll live if we don’t get back,” he went on. “Back to our original time, I mean. After all, even if we make it a thousand miles, we have only a vague idea of the right spot; and we can’t know if the lab will be functioning.”

Julian caught a slight hesitation before her last two words. “You said you were getting used to living like this, in this time.” He had been thinking about that since she’d said it, in fact. “Maybe I’m getting used to it here too, or the daily requirements have made life more present, more immediate, or something. It’s been easy to forget any other world ever existed. Not always, of course, but more and more often I forget, for long stretches at a time.”

“Yes . . . it’s hard to think about our past lives when we’re so busy in this life. I know our goal is to revert back to the lab, but sometimes it seems like that’s not what we’re focused on.”

Yariko was silent for so long that Julian wondered if she’d dropped off to sleep. When she spoke it was in an even softer voice than before, and he had to strain to hear her. “And in a sense it’s a better way to live. No external pressure, everything depends on us, on our own strength and skill and, well, there’s no one from outside of ourselves expecting us to live a certain way or meet certain goals. Certain impossible goals. So many goals that have no hold on my real self, but only on the self I think I have to be. . . .”

“You mean, is this life better in some ways?” Julian shifted his position and put his arm over Yariko. “Well, I miss things, of course, like my lab and all the work I was doing, and some people, and, well, indoor bathrooms with hot water, to be honest.” Yariko snorted, and he went on. “But I like it here too. Because how can a fossil compare to the real thing? And because . . . because of present company.” He stopped in embarrassment.

Julian was quiet a moment. “Sometimes you joke about starting a village,” he began, and then paused, changing what he was going to say. “The fact is, I would be happy in the Maastrichtian with you. I would be happy at the University with you. Wherever. It doesn’t matter.”

Then suddenly her head was on his shoulder, heavy and comfortable, and she gave a little laugh. “No one’s ever said that to me before: ‘I’d be happy in the Maastrichtian with you.’ No one’s ever felt that way about me.”

Julian’s heart tightened and then seemed to expand with relief. “Takes a paleontologist, I guess,” he murmured, but he was already on to more serious things, his hand stroking her hair and then moving down her back to pull her in closer. When he found her lips her arms went around him and her whole body shaped itself against his, and it felt absolutely right.

In the morning they stood at the cliff again and looked across the river. The southeast side was thickly forested, but the north-western side was open, vast in the bright sun, brown with brush now losing its leaves, dotted with occasional trees. The Triceratops were gone but their trail was clear, a brown gash meandering across the plains. Julian wondered if they migrated south for the winter, mild though the seasons were. The trail, having fetched up against the river, turned toward the west and followed the bank for about a mile. There it disappeared from view. The creatures had probably found a shallow spot, crossed the river and then continued southward into the plains.

As clear as the trail was the smell. Julian had been close to herds of buffalo and was reminded of the sharp, musky odor that seemed to emanate from the massive bodies. But now the odor emanated from the empty air and trampled ground, and it was a hundred times stronger, stringent and overpowering.

The going looked easier on the opposite bank: more open, less steep and tangled. Julian suggested they cross and follow the Triceratops trail as long as it went west, it being a clear and easy path. The truth was he wanted to travel in the wake of those immense and wonderful animals.

Hilda shot down the rocky, uneven cliff face with no difficulty and stood waiting at the bottom, wagging her tail and laughing up at them. The humans followed more slowly, mainly because Julian helped Yariko rather more than was necessary; she would have done better alone but she accepted the hand he lent through the steepest parts. At the bottom, the two stood together on a slab of rock, his arm over her shoulders, and blinked and squinted in the frigid spray.

Dr. Shanker stood beside them with Hilda. He had a wide grin on his face as he looked at the water. Julian, happy himself on what seemed the loveliest morning he’d ever seen, didn’t wonder at the man’s delight.

“Come on, Whitney, don’t scowl. It’s about time, really. I didn’t think even you could be that shy, and I know Yorko isn’t. To think of all those days on the riverbank that I confined myself to the bottoms of trees, risking the predators. . . .” Hilda laughed up at him, wagging her tail as she caught the general mood of excitement, and Dr. Shanker reached down to ruffle her ears. “And I get stuck with the dog!”

Julian reluctantly looked away from her to study the river. The rapids were a daunting sight, pounding and tearing through jagged boulders. But the river was only thirty yards wide now and scattered with so many large rocks that it didn’t look too hard to cross, as long as they didn’t lose their footing. In fact, it almost looked as though a line of rocks had been placed by plan, stretching from one bank to the other.

“Well well, someone’s left a bridge for us,” Dr. Shanker said, indicating the path with his spear. Hilda leapt joyfully through the spray from stone to stone and was soon on the other side, where she shook herself dry and gave an excited bark.

Dr. Shanker followed, using his spear to balance as though he were in a circus on the high wire. He paused before the last leap, a six-foot gap between the last boulder and the shore. Then, gathering himself, he sprang across and landed squarely on the rocky bank. There he stood, leaning on his spear, smiling back as if pleased with himself for such a fine athletic display.

Yariko came next, and Julian brought up the rear. The stones were more slippery than he had expected. He tried to use the spear as a staff, prodding the point of it into the foamy water, searching for the bottom, but the current nearly yanked the pole out of his hand. The roar of the water was almost painful as it boomed off the rocky cliff. It was disorienting, and he felt dizzy. At each jump from one stone to the next he expected to slide into the freezing river and never come out again.

He had just reached the last stone and stood precariously on the uneven surface, measuring the distance to the bank, when he happened to glance up. Looming over the bushes, staring down at Dr. Shanker and Yariko, was the enormous slate-gray face of Triceratops horridus.

Julian froze, the back of his neck tingling. Hilda was oblivious, probably overwhelmed by the enormous stench of Triceratops all around. She wagged her tail and cocked her head at him. Yariko mouthed the word “Coward!” evidently thinking he was afraid to make the last jump.

At that moment the creature barked. It had a rasping tone, unpleasant and much higher pitched than expected given the animal’s size, but quite loud nonetheless. The sound, rising above the thundering of the river, had an instantaneous effect. Yariko, Dr. Shanker, and Hilda turned to look behind them; and Julian lost his footing and tumbled into the river.