Since the lion was semi-tame and had never learned either to attack or to fear a human being, it just lay or stood quietly while the joker walked up and shot the poor beast. A pretty poor idea of sportsmanship, if you ask me. But then, I suspected Carlyle of being a skite with a lot of fictitious adventures he liked to trot out to impress the women.
Then my attention was drawn to Sir Edred Ngata. He was squatting in front of a cloth on which he had laid out a score of specimens he had brought down with birdshot. Except for one primitive tortoise, they were all lizardlike, looking pretty similar to my unscientific eye. The astonishing thing, though, was that tears were running down Ngata’s big brown face.
“Edred!” I said. “What’s the matter, mate?”
He looked up, choked back a sob, and took a swallow of his drink. “You wouldn’t understand, Reggie. I’m suffering from information overload.”
“So what? I never heard that too much news was anything to cry over.”
“No; it’s just that there’s such a damned colossal job here to be done, and only one man—me—to do it. I can’t even scratch the surface. It’s as if you were, say, a historian, and were sent back in time with a copying machine to the Library of Alexandria in the days of the Ptolemys and told you could photocopy all the lost manuscripts you could do in one hour. You’d know you couldn’t copy more than a fraction of one percent in the time allowed; and how could you choose among them? I’m in a similar fix.”
“Well, hadn’t you better get those specimens into the alcohol jars before they begin to stink?”
“Good-o,” he said, wiping away the tears.
The party was tired enough from the day’s hike so there was no argument over turning in early. In our headquarters tent, the Raja and I talked. It was unlikely there were any very spectacular sights to see within the radius of one-day excursions, such as a huge waterfall like your Niagara. There was that volcano we had seen from where we bagged the dicynodunt; but I think volcanoes, like the larger carnosaurs, are best admired from a respectful distance.
So we decided simply to box the compass, taking our lambs out in a different direction until we had covered them all in the two weeks allowed. Then the Raja said:
“Reggie, I have an uneasy feeling about our female time traveler.”
“Afraid she’ll collapse on the trail?” I said.
“No; she’s in good physical shape, even if she got sore feet the first day out. But it’s the sexual thing, The way she was trading long, speculative glances with some of the men—well, it gave me qualms. We had better keep an eye on her.”
Understand, Ms. Brownlee, I’m no wowser. Got nothing against sex. Marvelous institution and all that, but not when it interferes with the smooth operation of Rivers and Aiyar. So I said:
“Right-o, Raja!”
You see, the Raja’s one of these intuitive chaps. I’ve learned that, when he warns of problems building up in the human sphere, I’d better listen.
As I said, I had given Inez Alvarado a tent of her own. So I was surprised next morning, when I was making rounds just before dawn at the end of my watch, to see that great, hulking Maori, Sir Edred Ngata, coming out of the tent I had assigned to Mrs. Alvarado.
“What the hell?” I said, giving him a sharp look. “I thought you were in with Tom.”
He gave a kind of giggle, like a child caught out, and held the tent flap back to show the tent was empty. He finally said, between giggles:
“Well—ah—Inez begged me to change places with her. And—ah—what gentleman could refuse a lady such a simple request?”
“You knew they were an ex-couple?”
“Yes, I heard that. But some religions say, once married, always married. So I figured—ah . . .”
“Oh, cut it out, mate,” I said. “I have enough problems bringing my lambs through these safaris alive without trying to manage their sex lives as well.”
So I went about my business. When Inez came out of Alvarado’s tent, I just looked through her as if she weren’t there.
The Raja and I decided our lambs were bushed enough from the previous hike, so we went nowhere that day. Ngata spent it happily examining his specimens, dissecting those of which he had duplicates and getting blood up to his elbows, and explaining to anyone who would listen that this one was probably a rhynocephalian, while that one was more likely an eosuchian, like those ancestral to the dinosaurs.
“Aren’t there any real dinosaurs in this period?” asked Inez Alvarado.
“That depends,” said Ngata. “In one sense, it’s a matter of where you draw the line between the dinosaurs and their thecodont ancestors. Most of my colleagues put the coelophysids, which we saw yesterday, in with the dinosaurs. In other words, it’s a question of definitions.
“From another point of view, I could say no, there weren’t, on the ground that there really are no such things as dinosaurs.”
“What?” said Inez, startled. “But what about all those big skeletons in the museums? I know there’s that preacher who goes around arguing that all those fossil bones are just a hoax by Satan to destroy men’s faith. . . .”
“What I mean,” said Ngata, “is that the first paleontologists to dig them up, in the nineteenth century, assumed that all those giant reptiles belonged to the same order, which they called Dinosauria. Now we know that they fall into two long-separated orders: the Saurischia and the Ornithischia, no more closely related than, say, we are to bats. The difference lies in the shape of the pelvis. That difference goes way back, to some thecodont common ancestor in a period earlier than this one. My job is to try to straighten out these obscure family trees.
“You’ve seen an example of an early saurischian in those little coelophysids, which aren’t big enough to bother you. We call that bipedal, flesh-eating stem of the saurischians the theropods, the coelophysids, being one branch and the carnosaurs, like the famous Tyrannosaurus, the other. The other saurischian stem is made up of plant eaters ancestral to the sauropods, which became the biggest land animals ever. Those from this period look a little like long-necked versions of those cow dicynodonts we saw yesterday. All the rest of the so-called dinosaurs are herbivorous ornithischians.
“True, in the later Triassic beds one finds fragments of carnosaurs, such as the European Teratosaurus, large enough to be dangerous. But I don’t know that such organisms existed at the time we are now in; and even if they did, whether they ever got to these lands before Pangaea broke up.”
As we sat around, talking and examining equipment and listening to Sir Edred lecture, I began to sense a restlessness among the sahibs. After a number of these safaris—an Arab client on one of them said the correct plural was safarim —one comes to recognize the symptoms. Carlyle in particular seemed out of sorts, prowling about, cleaning and recleaning his gun, and generally acting like a caged animal. I heard him mutter:
“I’ve got to kill something!”
The Raja and I decided to lead the party next day northwest. We had gone pretty much due north on the meat hunt; so by going round the compass we could cover the territory within a radius of twenty or twenty-five kilometers from our base camp.
That night went off peacefully enough, if you don’t count the shrieks of those giant crickets advertising for a mate and the other rustles, grunts, and hisses of a Mesozoic night.