“More likely, we should all be snatched back to our own times and torn to pieces in the process,” I said, “to prevent a paradox. That’s what actually happened to one client of mine, who tried to occupy the same time slot twice.”
After a couple of hours’ hiking, the Alvarados complained of sore feet. So I split up the party, bringing Carlyle and Ngata, as the ones most hardened to such stress, along with me, and leaving the others to take a spell with the Raja.
As we climbed, the landscape opened out, with more bare spaces between clumps of trees, mostly looking much like ginkgos, and conifers resembling the modern monkey-puzzle pine. People who expect a Mesozoic landscape to be colorful are apt to be disappointed, since all the plant life is pretty much the same dark, somber green, without flowers. Through one of the gaps in the forest we could see, beyond the next few rises, the big conical shape of a volcano, with a plume of smoke and vapor coming out the top.
Soon after leaving the others, I heard noises of animal life. Ngata began to burble and would have dashed ahead if I had not caught his arm.
“Easy, easy!” I said. “We want to see what we’re getting into first.”
“But there aren’t any Allosauri or Tyrannosauri in this period. . . .”
“I know,” I said, “but from what I’ve read, some of the carnivores are still big enough to kill you.”
So I led the way, peering ahead through the shrubbery and holding my rifle ready. The Raja and I were using .375 magnums. We had left our six-nought-noughts, our real dinosaur killers, back home, figuring that nothing we were likely to meet required such heavy artillery, which is a cow to drag through the bush.
At last we arrived at a little glade in which four dicynodonts were feeding. I crept up, keeping a clump of cycads between me and the animals, until I got a good view through the gaps. Carlyle had lagged behind us, and for some minutes I didn’t notice his absence.
There was one male, distinguished by his tusks, and three females. I can’t say they reminded me of hairless sheep. Hairless they were, but stoutly built, about the size and shape of your American black bear, with potbellied bodies tapering aft to thick reptilian tails. Their heads began with horny beaks like those of turtles, plus those saber tusks on the male.
All four were chomping away at leaves and fronds. Bloody ugly things, I should call them; but then I suppose we should seem equally so to them. When I got ready to shoot, Ngata touched my arm.
“Wait a bit,” he said. “I want to observe them first.”
So we stood watching, though seeing an animal simply eat, eat, eat soon loses its entertainment value. I was again getting ready to shoot, when Ngata whispered:
“Hold it, Reggie; something’s comingl”
The something turned out to be another male dicynodont. The resident male looked up from its eating and uttered a warning grunt.
The newcomer grunted, even louder. For most of a minute these two beggars stood glowering at each other, if anything so expressionless can be said to glower, and grunting.
Then the newcomer yawned, exposing his tusks. The resident male then yawned, too; and all the while they continued to grunt. During this time, Carlyle caught up with us, mumbling something about having to retie his bootlace.
The newcomer moved closer, yawning and grunting. The two circled each other until I was no longer sure which was the newcomer. At last one of the two, whichever it was, made a shambling dash at the other and slashed with his tusks. He laid open a gash in the other’s shoulder; and the other backed off, still yawning and grunting. When the wounded one had put enough distance between them, he turned and waddled away. That was all there was to this clash of the titans, if you want to call it that. All the while, the three females kept on munching vegetation as if this duel were no business of theirs.
“Can’t leave all three ladies husbandless,” I said, and to Carlyle: “Your shot. Take the one on the left.”
He fired at the nearest female, and down she went. The remaining three looked around in a vague sort of way but showed no disposition to flee.
“They’ve never developed a flight reaction to gunfire,” said Ngata. “I fear we shall have to chase them away.”
He picked up a cycad frond and advanced on the dicynodonts, yelling and waving the frond. Carlyle and I came with him, shouting and waving; and soon the three survivors turned and shambled off in no great hurry.
By the time we reached the carcass, Ngata fell to measuring and writing notes. While he was so engaged, the Raja called from the bush, and presently he appeared with the rest of our party. Young Smith was shooting pictures.
The Raja and I got out our knives to clean the animal, to lighten it for carrying back to camp. I had a folding magnesium carrying pole in my pack. But when I started to cut out the guts, Ngata cried:
“I say, Reggie! You’re not going to leave all those lovely intestines here?”
“Certainly,” I said. “What’s the point of lugging an extra thirty kilos of inedible stuff back to the camp?”
“I need to study all those organs! Don’t you realize that nobody has ever described the internal anatomy of a therapsid before? All we’ve had to work with were bonesl It’s as if we had stepped out on another planet!”
“Well, if you want to shovel that pile of guts into your specimen bag—”
“I can’t do that! The bag’s full alreadyl”
“I’m sorry, but we do what we can. What we can’t, just doesn’t get done. And you’ll have other chances. Come on, give me a hand with tying this bugger’s feet to the pole!”
By coaxing and bullying, the Raja and I got Sir Edred calmed down enough to lash our beast’s feet together so we could carry it suspended from the pole. Since Ngata and I were the biggest men of the party, it fell to us to bear the pole. The Raja carried my rifle as well as his.
Halfway back, I asked Willard Smith to take my end of the pole, he being the youngest and almost my size, and I not so young as I once had been. I had forgotten about his being what he called a “klutz.” But we hadn’t gone another fifty meters when Smith tripped over his own feet and fell at on the trail. Since Ngata remained upright, the dicynodont slid down the pole on top of Smith, who got pretty bloody.
So I took back the pole for the rest of the hike. We got back in time for billy, with enough time left over to clean up before a dinner of dicynodont steaks. Our cook, Ming, has learned never to be surprised by the creatures we bring into camp and tell him to cook for us.
While our tucker was cooking, we sat around the fire, telling stories and enjoying a lot of whiskey, while Mrs. Alvarado sat with her feet in a bucket of warm water. Alvarado and Carlyle and Smith also wanted to soak their feet; but there was only one bucket, so I gave Inez the first crack at it.
As for the whiskey, I had served out pretty potent portions; but then Desmond Carlyle demanded seconds.
“No, sorry,” I said. “I told you, that one’s it for tonight.”
“Liquor flows like glue here,” he grumped. “I could put away half a liter and not feel it.”
“Sorry about that;’ I said. “Our supply is calculated to last the fortnight. I don’t want to run short before the chamber returns.”
Actually I was more concerned with what might happen if one of my lambs got too disinhibited from liquor. I’d seen that happen on other safaris, where the imbiber did something silly like picking a fight. You never can tell how a person will react to liquor. Some get talkative, some amorous, some despondent, and some belligerent. The only way to find out is to get them drunk, and the risks were too great in these surroundings, a couple of hundred million years from help.
Carlyle’s drink was strong enough, however, to get him talking. He told a fanciful tale of hunting a lion in Africa. From what I know of Africa, it wasn’t much of a hunt; there isn’t any more of that, really, there. Somebody ran a lion farm and then, when a would-be hero with enough money showed up, he would turn one lion loose in a big private preserve and send the man in with a gun.