Cretaceous Dawn

The dromaeosaurids, or raptors, were some of the smaller dinosaurs, but their brain size to body ratio was among the highest of all dinosaurs, indicating intelligence. These animals had a keen sense of smell and, like other predators, binocular vision allowed them to see in three dimensions, the better to hunt down their prey. It is thought that the dromaeosauridae hunted in packs, bringing down animals much larger than themselves. Velociraptor, found in Mongolia, is perhaps the best known of the group; but there were equivalent species living in North America. Certainly their prey would not have known or cared about the small differences in morphology.

Bowman stared at his colleague. He had felt at ease working with her this long day; for that matter, he’d always liked her when they’d met at conferences. She was a no-nonsense scientist and also, he’d often felt, quite attractive in a mature, near-fifty kind of way. Even when he was married, he couldn’t help noticing her; and now that he was single, he’d begun to have ideas. This happenstance that threw them together so intimately was just what he wanted.

Bowman watched the too-quiet kid, Mark or whatever his name was, slip out of the lab without looking at them. “I do? I only know you sent that woman off to get a useless piece of metal. You know perfectly well that a new piece won’t work. Even with the correct dimensions, there’ll be internal differences in mass and form. It can’t replicate the original bar, and without that we can’t replicate the settings.”

“Of course we can’t.” Ridzgy was clearly impatient. “But we can still do what Miyakara and Shanker were doing—translocate objects and bring them into the vault. Does it matter if our collections don’t come from the exact same place as their rocks and beetles?”

Ridzgy made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “She doesn’t know the difference. We’ll get this thing set up and running by morning, do the experiment using the settings they recorded, and see what happens. If we don’t bring the missing people back, who would blame us? It’d be a slim chance anyhow, even if that platinum standardizer hadn’t been melted. Who’s to say they’re even alive?”

Bowman sat down heavily, staring at his partner. “But they’ll come back, if they are alive,” he said, expressing a new thought. “What’s to stop them making it home eventually? Even if they’re in the middle of the Sahara or something—surely they’ll be found. Then they’ll claim their work.”

Ridzgy smiled. She had beautiful teeth; somehow the fluorescent lights brought them out. “They can try. But they’ll have to be fast.” She leaned closer to Bowman and lowered her voice. “What if we went somewhere? We could translocate ourselves, after collecting a few samples to see what kind of place we’ve locked on to. We take all the notebooks,” she swept her arm across the lab bench, “and copies of all their files; and we destroy the original files, except the program that runs the vault. Then we get ourselves back home and start writing. And building; we can duplicate this setup.”

“I admit it’s a clever way of walking out with all the information,” Bowman said. “But if we make a stir with our ‘findings’ it’ll be obvious what we did. Everyone’ll know.”

“Who? The Creekbend South Dakota police force? A small-town woman who thinks she’s Sherlock Holmes, and that idiot sidekick of hers with the cigarette breath?” Ridzgy laughed, and the sound wasn’t pleasant. “Once we disappear too the university and OSHA will descend on this lab and dismantle it. They’ll never let Miyakara and Shanker do this again, even if those two do eventually show up.”

“What ambitious young grad student wants to stay at the University of Creekbend, South Dakota? This place is a dump with no real funding. I’ll give him the fellowship he’s only dreamed about.”

When Bowman didn’t say anything, Ridzgy leaned closer again. “This is the chance of a lifetime. I’m offering you a full partnership.” She leaned back and crossed her arms. “You aren’t actually going to say no, are you?” Her voice took on the derisive tone that was particularly galling to Bowman.

“Then let’s get to work.” Ridzgy spun her chair around and opened a file. A large beetle, photographed in various poses, appeared on the screen. “The first thing to do is put in a disc and save this image for ourselves. Then, we delete it from the hard drive,” she said, carrying out the actions as she described them. “We do the same to every file. Once we’ve taken all their notebooks with the descriptions and measurements, there’ll be no clues where those people were translocated to. The University won’t be sending out any rescue party to the Sahara.”

Then, without the least sound, a wall appeared out of the fog in front of him. It was not the shifting, amorphous gray of fog, but a solid form. It filled his whole range of vision for an instant, and then it was gone. Julian felt a faint stirring of the air around him and smelled a rich, mulchy odor of dung.

He began walking, slowly, trying to make as little sound as possible on the pebbly ground. He felt a kind of shuddering beneath his feet, barely perceptible at first. There was something, a blur, a sense of motion, caught out of the tail of his eye. But by the time he turned to look, there was nothing but empty fog.

Then began an endless nightmare of huge gray shapes appearing and fading away all around him, a trembling of the ground, blindness, and an overwhelming sense of insignificance—his own insignificance. A herd of immense creatures was on the move, and he was in the middle of its path.

Julian knew it must be Triceratops; few other animals moved in such large herds, or were so large themselves. He wondered if he’d be trampled or gored to death, or both; but either he was lucky or the creatures could see well enough in the fog to avoid him. They passed to either side, and he caught glimpses of their great, reddish frills and hooked beaks.

What direction they were traveling he had no idea; but he tried to orient himself with them and keep moving, so as not to stumble into anyone’s direct path. It was the only thing he could do. Sometimes the herd swerved a little one way; other times they and their human flotsam drifted in the other direction. It was not long before Julian lost his bearings completely, and with it the last dregs of confidence. He trailed along, terrified, shivering, arms huddled together under his poncho.

He continued slowly up a gradual rise, to what must have been a ridge or mound, and stopped when he felt the ground level under foot. He wondered if any predators might be trailing the herd; if so, they’d find him an easy target.

At last the fog began to thin. A cold breeze found its way up into the poncho, but he thought it was welcome if it blew the fog away. He stood for a long time, shivering, and finally sat down on the ground. There was nothing to be done but wait for Carl to find him, or for the fog to lift so that he could find his own way.

As the fog thinned to a gray sky a stony, tumbled slope spread out at Julian’s feet. The daylight was almost gone. The sun, pale and smeary, was squeezed into a thin strip of relatively clear sky between the clouds and the western horizon. Soon it would disappear behind the low hills.

Julian turned to look back the way he’d come. The fog still sat in the river valley, although here and there a dark smudge of trees rose up into view. He was surprised at how far and how high he had climbed.

Julian looked out over the rocky plain below him, misty but visible. The ground was a patchy greenish brown, the color of earth and bushes, but meandering through it was the wide, black, trampled path of the herd. Here and there great beasts had paused to rest. The bulk of the heard lay far ahead, visible only as a gray smudge. Not for the last time, Julian wished for a good pair of binoculars.

Then he caught a sudden motion among the stragglers. A young animal, only the size of a small rhinoceros, had wandered to the edge of a patch of trees and was now running back to the safety of the adults, its short legs pumping madly. As the uncertain breeze shifted Julian heard a high, piercing squeal. It sounded like a distress cry. Julian realized he’d just learned more in that instant than any paleontologist had ever known; for dinosaur vocalization is one thing that cannot be fossilized.

He was so engrossed watching the baby Triceratops that he nearly overlooked the tiny, insignificant thing that now emerged from the trees. It was laughably puny, shorter than a human and no bigger in body than Hilda. The head was birdlike with large, forward-facing eyes. The forelimbs were held well off the ground, and the long, curving claws were curled back toward the chest. The hind limbs propelled it forward with immense, graceful strides, the feet only rarely touching the ground. The run was much like that of an ostrich, and with each powerful thrust the animal seemed about to take to the air. It was a raptor; and had he been in Mongolia instead of North America, Julian would have said it was one of the Velociraptor. Of the North Amercian species, it was too big for Saurornitholestes, too small for Dromaeosaurus; but without a look at the skeleton, he would never know for sure.

He wondered how it could try to bring down something as large and well-equipped as Triceratops. Surely even a young one, if attacked head-on, would merely step on the little intruder and squash it. But the carnivore streaked past its prey and, wheeling, headed the young animal toward the trees again.

Julian now saw that three more were hunting with it. The attack was beautifully coordinated. Before any adult Triceratops could reach the scene, the animal was steered straight into the claws of the other three hunters. One leaped gracefully onto the youngster’s back. Perched up there it looked ludicrously small; but where its claws were buried, streaks of bright crimson ran down the smooth hide. The youngster leapt and twisted, and a thin shrieking sound came up on the breeze.

Four of the adult Triceratops thundered to the scene; the attackers left their prey and vanished into the trees. But the damage had been done. The injured animal followed the adults for perhaps two hundred yards before it staggered, sank to the ground, and finally tumbled onto its side. The adults circled it a few times, grunting, and then lumbered off to join the herd.

“They’ll come back for the meal,” Julian said, thinking out loud. Then he added, “But it’s a good thing they’ve already made their kill. I suppose we’ll be passing right through their territory.”

He stayed close to Carl, not wanting to lose him again. But as they walked, his thoughts turned back to Yariko. She and Shanker had passed through a violent storm without shelter, and were now exposed to hungry predators. The image of the raptor skimming over the ground toward the young Triceratops replayed itself over and over in Julian’s mind. Those small predators did not have the majesty of Corla; but because of the eerie, almost unearthly grace of their movements, they were more frightening, more the stuff of nightmares.

In a small depression of mud and trampled leaves were the four-toed prints of a large mammal: a dog, in fact. They were smudged and blurred, probably by the fierce rain, but still clear enough; Hilda must have walked through a puddle, and the prints remained after the water dried up.

“It’s a dog,” he explained. “A large mammal—a carnivore. A pet.” When Carl only stared at him, clearly not understanding the word “pet,” Julian added, “Like Corla. An animal to feed who will then protect you.”

“Yes. They’d be together.” Julian looked out over the darkening plain, and then back the way they’d come. “It’s amazing that we found these prints. In all this area, we walked right up to a low spot that still had some mud.” He looked at Carl, wondering if it wasn’t chance.

Carl smiled, or at least gave his version of a smile, very small and humorless although comforting. It reminded Julian of a particular look of Yariko’s when she was preoccupied and not quite attentive to him, but still trying to be gentle and reassuring.

Carl turned away and began walking again with his long stride. “It was not chance,” he said after a moment. “I tracked the man nearly to here and marked his heading against the trees.” He raised his arm and pointed to a distant smudge of darkness, another clump of stunted trees. “I was looking for prints in low places,” he added, as if that should have been perfectly obvious. “That is why we have been moving slowly.”

Julian hadn’t noticed the decrease in pace; obviously his idea of “slowly” was not shared by Carl. With renewed spirits, and renewed faith in his guide, he looked happily around at his surroundings.

A group of the Triceratops could be seen fairly close by, and in the last of the evening light Julian saw them engage in a strange behavior. One adult began it by flopping over on its side and then, unbelievably, rolling onto its back in the dust, legs waving in the air. A faint snorting sound came from it. Others soon joined in, grunting and sending up clouds of reddish dust. After a while they rolled back onto their bellies all at once, shaking their immense heads so that their long ears flapped audibly.

“Are they playing?” he asked, incredulous. “How can they do that?” Big animals just couldn’t roll like that without injuring themselves; elephants were the perfect example. But he didn’t mention them.

Hilda’s prints had lifted his heart; but now he began to wonder if Yariko was with her. So far there’d been no signs of her, and Carl had only tracked one person, probably Shanker, the day before.

The light breeze brought Julian the scent of mud, rotting leaves, a heavy animal smell wafting up from the trampled path of the herd; and, very faintly, ashes. There was no mistaking it, now that it was pointed out to him.

They sat down on the stony ground between the knobby trunks of bushes and took out strips of dried meat from Carl’s sack. The meat was tasteless and leathery, but Julian was happy enough to put something in his stomach after such a long day. He had not eaten since breakfast, and neither, it seemed, had Carl. The water in the skins tasted terrible; he could hardly choke it down. After the meal, he propped his back against a tree and dozed off.

A soft scuffling noise startled him out of his sleep. Opening his eyes he looked down at a tiny lizard-like, or maybe bird-like creature, surely one of the smallest of dinosaurs. He sat as still as he could while it rooted around in the soil, perhaps looking for grubs, until at Carl’s approach it darted away through the dead leaves.

They held the rapid pace until the clouds broke and the moon showed. By its position Julian estimated that the night was half done. Carl seemed especially watchful. He did not look about but rather seemed always to be listening. They continued even after the moon disappeared beneath the horizon. Julian thought Carl would stop to light a fire in the chill before dawn; but instead he paused only to drink from a cold stream and hand Julian a scrap of dried meat, and then, later, when the worn strap on his shoulder bag broke and had to be retied.

Julian was exhausted and hungrier than he’d ever felt by the time the stars began to fade. It was a clear, cool morning, and very still. The ground was sloping upward. Sometimes they passed low cliffs. He leaned heavily on his spear, trailing behind, silently begging Carl to stop and rest; but he said nothing out loud.

He realized suddenly that they were walking in an old stream bed. It ran more or less east-west, directly out of the western hills. It was strewn with boulders but made easier footing than the scrubby ground to either side; and it gave a path to follow. He would have liked to stop and study the exposed rock layers; but he was more impatient to catch up with Yariko. Carl would not have understood the delay, anyway.

“They followed this stream bed,” Carl said, with his usual finality of expression. His next words were not so comforting. “But it flooded during the night. They could not have stayed in it long.”

In answer Carl held out his hand, palm up. Resting there was a wad of what looked like cloth. It was wet and dirty, and the color was hard to tell, but Julian guessed that it might be blue-jean material. It seemed to be knotted, and there were stains on it that could have been blood.

Julian took the scrap of cloth, wondering why it was knotted. Yariko wore jeans; perhaps she had been injured, and had torn off a strip for a bandage. “Maybe this was washed away when the streambed flooded,” he said, voicing one of his growing fears. “Maybe they were never even here.”

In the first gray light before dawn they passed a low cliff, no taller than a man. It caught Julian’s attention because it was not the granite he’d come to expect in this terrain. It was made of layers of sedimentary rock, and had clearly been uplifted and then tilted slightly, but in no way metamorphosed. He guessed that they were walking along an old fault scarp.

Peering at the exposed face in what light there was, Julian thought he could distinguish several layers of mud, some with impressions of shells, and one thin white layer. He scraped at this layer with a fingernail and tasted it. It was chalk: calcium carbonate.

Here in their billions were the calcium shells of tiny one-celled organisms, deposited over millions of years when the continental seaway had covered the area. On top of this thin layer of white lay a dark, compressed mud, perhaps indicating shallow water with salt marshes or sea-grass beds. Over the mud lay a thick deposit of what looked like volcanic ash.

There set out in successive layers was the history of the Niobrara Seaway. The slow transgression—the change from shallow to deeper water indicated by the chalk; and then in mirror image, the regression as the seaway shrank and left the region uncovered again. Volcanic ash could only have come from the west, from vast eruptions that sent their debris high into the atmosphere to rain down in a thick layer for many hundreds of miles around.

They continued up the broad path of the stream bed. Julian felt certain that Yariko and Dr. Shanker would have kept to this path; it was the only obvious feature in the landscape, and certainly the easiest trail to follow westward. But there were no more signs. They found a good place to stop, a niche with an overhanging boulder and walls made of thick, tangled bushes. It looked ideal for a camp; but although he searched the ground, Julian saw no hint that anybody had stayed there. However, he was happy to put down his sacks and settle gratefully into sleep.

They traveled along the stream bed for two days, sleeping only during the darkest part of the night when the moon was down. The pace was grueling, although Carl let Julian stop to rest every few hours. Julian would sink down on the ground or a convenient rock, feeling as weak as if he’d been swimming through molasses.

Carl usually stood by patiently or walked a short distance ahead to spy out the path. By the third morning Julian was beginning to adjust. His muscles were not so stiff, and he had the strange sensation that he could walk forever. He realized he was beginning to turn into another leathery, taciturn Carl.

Early in the third morning the stream bed wound down into a gully. The bottom of the gully held a few stagnant pools of water and was nearly choked up with bushes and low-growing succulents. Spiders and small brown snakes seemed to have colonized this little muddy oasis; they were everywhere.

For two days there had been no signs of Yariko, Shanker, or Hilda. Carl said nothing; Julian questioned him constantly, impatiently, and was almost beginning to lose faith in his guide. It seemed foolish to walk on and on at such a pace when it was no longer clear that his companions were ahead. But where else could they be? Why would they turn off this clear path leading straight into the west? Reason told Julian that scraps of cloth or other items were remarkable things to find, and that footprints couldn’t be seen in this dry, stony ground. There was simply nothing to track, and Carl must be going on assumption.

Julian heard something moving over the rocks. It made an uneven sound, not at all like a quadruped, but like a biped with a strange shuffling gait. There was a sound like labored breathing. Then something heavy fell to the ground, and, quite distinct in the still air, there came a string of curses.