Clifford D. Simak
Mastodonia
From back of dust jacket:
"Out of the rose clump, a face stared fixedly at me — a cat face. The whishers. The owel eyes. The grin. Entranced and frightened, I moved forward slowly, the gun at ready. I was close now. Colser, something told me, than I should be. But I took another step, and on that step I stumbled. Recovering from the stumble, I noticed the rose bush was no longer there and neither was the henhouse. I stood on a little slope that was covered with short grass. It was the longer night. The sun was shining, but with little warmth. The cat face was gone. Then suddenly from behind me I heard a shuffling, thumpin sound and I pivoted around. The thumping shurffling thing stood ten feet tall. It had gleaming tusks and a long trunk. A mastadon, I told myself. A mastadon! Aind it was coming straight toward me…"
ONE
A dog’s high kiyoodling brought me up in bed, still half asleep, barely functional. The first light of dawn lay within the room, showing in its ghostliness the worn carpeting, the battered highboy, the open closet door with its array of hanging clothes.
“What is it, Asa?”
I turned my head and saw Rila sitting there beside me and I asked myself, for the love of Christ, how come — that after all these years Rila should be here.
Then I remembered, in a sort of blur, how come she was here.
The dog cried out again, closer this time, a cry of anguish and of fright.
I began scrambling out of bed, grabbing for a pair of trousers, feet scuffing to find the slippers on the floor. “It’s Bowser,” I told Rila. “The damn fool never came home last night. I thought he had a woodchuck.”
Bowser was hell on woodchucks. Once he started on one, he never would give up. He’d dig halfway to China to get one out. Ordinarily, to put an end to all his foolishness, I’d go out to get him. But last night, when Rila had shown up, I’d not gone hunting Bowser.
When I reached the kitchen, I could hear, Bowser whining on the stoop. I opened the door and there he stood, with a wooden shaft dragging behind him.
I stooped and put my arm around him and hauled him to one side so I could see what was going on. Once I’d done that, I saw that the shaft of wood was a lance and that the stone blade attached to it was em-bedded in Bowser’s back leg, high up. Bowser whined piteously at me.
“What’s the matter, Asa?” Rila asked, standing in the door.
“Someone speared him,” I said. “He’s got a spear in him.”
She came swiftly out on the stoop, moving around the two of us, and went down the steps to the sidewalk.
“The blade is only halfway in,” she said. “It’s only hanging there.”
Her hand reached out and grasped the shaft, then gave a twitch and pulled it free.
Bowser yipped, then whined. He was shivering. I picked him up and carried him into the kitchen.
“There’s a blanket on the davenport in the living room,” I told Rila. “If you would get it, please, we can make a bed for him over in the corner.”
Then I turned to Bowser. “It’s all right. You’re home now and it’s all right. We’ll take care of you.”
“Asa!”
“Yes, what is it, Rila?”
“This is a Folsom point.” She held up the spear so that I could see. “Who would use a Folsom point to spear a dog?”
“Some kid,” I said. “They are little monsters.”
She shook her head. “No kid would know how to mount the point on the shaft — not the way this one is mounted.”
“The blanket, please,” I said.
She laid the lance on the table and went into the living room to get the blanket. Back with it, she folded it and knelt to put it in one corner of the kitchen.
I lowered Bowser onto it. “Take it easy, boy, we’ll fix you up. I don’t think the cut’s too deep.”
“But, Asa, you don’t understand. Or didn’t hear what I said.”
“I heard,” I said. “A Folsom point. Ten thousand years ago. Used by paleo-Indians. Found associated with the bones of prehistoric bison.”
“Not only that,” she went on, “but mounted on a shaft shaped by scraping — that’s the earmark of prehistoric technology.”
“Yes, I know,” I said. “I hadn’t meant to tell you right away, but I might as well. Bowser, it seems, is a time-traveling dog. Once he brought home some dinosaur bones…”
“Why should a dog want dinosaur bones?”
“You miss the point. Not old bones. Not fossilized.
Not weathered. Green bones, with shreds of flesh still hanging onto them. Not the bones of a big dinosaur.
Small one. From an animal the size of a dog or maybe just a little larger.”
Rila did not seem curious. “You get scissors and trim off the hair around that wound. I’ll get some warm water to wash it out. And where’s the medicine cabinet?”
“In the bathroom. To the right of the mirror.” As she turned to leave, I called, “Rila.”
“Yes,” she said.
“I’m glad you’re here,” I said.
TWO
She had come out of the past — at least twenty years out of the past — only the evening before.
I had been sitting in front of the house, in a lawn chair under the big maple tree, when the car turned off the highway and came up the access road. It was a big, black car, and I wondered, just a little idly, who it might be. To tell the truth, I wasn’t particularly happy at the prospect of seeing anyone at all, for, in the last few months, I had gotten to the point where I appreciated being left alone and felt some mild resentment at any intrusion.
The car drew up to the gate and stopped, and she got out of it. I rose from my chair and started walking across the yard. She came through the gate and walked toward me. She was well up the path before I recognized her, saw in this svelte, well-dressed woman the girl of twenty years before. Even then, I could not be sure that it was she; the long years of remembering might have made me susceptible to seeing in any beautiful woman that girl of twenty years before.
I stopped when she was still some distance off.
“Rila?” I called, making it a question. “Are you Rila Elliot?”
She stopped as well and looked at me across the dozen feet that separated us, as if she, as well, could not be absolutely sure that I was Asa Steele.
“Asa,” she finally said, “it is really you. I can see it’s really you. I’d heard that you were here. I was talking with a friend just the other day and he told me you were here. I had thought you were still at that funny little college somewhere in the West. I had thought so often of you …”
She kept up her talk so that she would not have to do anything else, letting the talk cover whatever uncertainty she might still feel.
I crossed the space between us and we stood close together.
“Asa,” she said, “it’s been so damn long.”
Then she was in my arms and it seemed strange that she should be there: this woman who had stepped out of a long, black car in this Wisconsin evening across two decades of time. How hard it was to equate her with the gaily laughing girl of that Mideastern dig, where we had slaved together to uncover the secrets of an ancient tumulus that, finally, turned out to be of slight importance — I digging and sifting and uncovering, while she labeled and tried to somehow identify the shards and other prehistoric junk laid out on long tables. That hot and dusty season had been far too short. Laboring together during the day, we slept together on those nights when we could elude the notice of the others, although, toward the end, I remembered, we had ceased being careful of the others, who had not really seemed to care or to take notice of us.