“It’s perfect,” said Ben. “We have protection. None of the big stuff can get at us easily, here among the trees.”
“Maybe we’re overestimating the ferocity of the carnosaurs,” I told him. “Maybe they don’t go for you on sight. We’ll seem strange to them, not like their usual prey. They might shy off from us. And another thing — there may not be many of them about.”
“Even so,” insisted Ben, “we won’t take any chances. We all stick together. No one goes wandering off. And we don’t take a thing for granted. When we get the camp set up, we’ll test-fire the guns.”
We quickly got the camp set up (a simple camp, with two small tents pitched underneath the trees), a fire pit dug, dead wood chopped, brought in and stacked, and our kits unpacked.
“You and I will take turns standing guard tonight,” Ben said to me. “We don’t want something blundering in on us.”
With the camp all tidy, Ben and I test-fired the guns.
“The thing to do,” said Ben, “is to hang in there easy. Don’t get tense, don’t stiffen up. Hold the butt to your shoulder, but don’t hug it too tight. There has to be a little play, but you have to have control of it so the butt doesn’t bounce off your shoulder and clip you on the chin. And lean into it. Not too far, but lean into it.”
Ben had no trouble. He’d fired big-caliber before, but none as big as the ones we carried. With me, it was a bit different. I’d never fired anything bigger than a .22, but I remembered what Ben had told me, and it didn’t go too badly. The first shot almost took my shoulder off and drove me back a step or two, but it didn’t knock me over. The second shot was better.
The third seemed quite natural. The fourth and last shot, I didn’t even notice the recoil. The big lone birch tree we had used as a target was chewed up by the impact of the bullets.
“That’s good,” said Ben approvingly. “You can’t let it hurt you too much. If you let it wallop you too hard, if you don’t stand up to it, you become afraid of it and you flinch each time you fire it. When that happens, you might just as well throw it at whatever’s coming at you. Flinching, you can’t hit the broad side of a barn at thirty paces.”
“Asa,” Rila said softly, off to one side.
I turned and saw that she was sitting cross-legged on the ground, her elbows resting on her knees to hold the binoculars steady. “Come take a look,” she said.
“There’s a lot of stuff out there. Small groups and loners, but they blend into the background and are hard to see. Look over there, just to the left of the little group of four trees on the ridge running back from the river.”
She handed me the binoculars, but they were so heavy that standing, I couldn’t hold them steady. I had to sit down and use my knees to support my elbows, as she had been doing.
It took a while to pinpoint what she wanted me to see, but finally I caught the thing in the field and fiddled with the adjustment wheels to bring it more sharply into focus. It was in a squatting position, resting, reared back with its knees flexed so that its great tail gave it support. The huge body was almost upright and the ugly head kept swinging from side to side as if keeping watch of the countryside.
“What do you think?” asked Rila. “A tyrannosaur?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t be sure.”
The trouble, of course, was that no one could be sure. All we had ever seen of any of the dinosaurs were their bones, plus, in a few instances, fossil mum-mies with part of the skin intact. Our visual impressions of them came from artists’ conceptions, which were fine, so far as they went, but couldn’t even pretend to be sure of many details.
“Not rex,” I said. “The forelegs are too big. Maybe a trionychid. Maybe another kind of tyrannosaur we’ve never found a fossil of; we can’t be sure we’ve found the fossils of all the different kinds of tyrannosaurs. But whatever he is, he’s a big brute. Sitting up there resting, taking it easy, looking around for something that’s worth his while to gobble up.”
I kept on watching the brute. Except for his swinging head, he did not stir.
“The forelegs are too well developed,” said Rila.
“That’s what puzzled me. If we were a few million years farther back, I’d be tempted to say it’s an allosaur. But up here there aren’t supposed to be any allosaurs. They died out long ago.”
“Maybe not,” I told her. “We’re acting as if we knew the entire history of the dinosaurs from the fossils we have found. If we find one dinosaur in an old stratum and find him in none after that, we’re inclined to say he became extinct. What could happen is that we simply failed to look in the right place to find him in the younger strata. Allosaurs could have existed up to the very end.”
I handed the glasses to Ben, pointing out the clump of trees, “Over to the left of them,” I said.
“Asa,” said Rila, “I want some film of him. He’s the first big thing I’ve seen.”
“Use the telephoto lens,” I said. “That will catch him.”
“I have,” she answered, “but it comes up awfully fuzzy. At least, what I can see does. I suppose on the film as well. To convince the safari people, to get them all fired up, I have to have something sharp and close.”
“We can try to get closer,” I said. “He’s a long way from here, but we can have a try.”
“The beggar’s moving off,” said Ben. “Going up the ridge. He is moving fast. Maybe he spotted something he’s after.”
“Damn it,” said Rila bitterly. “It was you guys and your test-firing. It made him uneasy.”
“He didn’t look uneasy to me,” I said. “He was just sitting there. From this distance, the firing would not have been very loud.”
“But I’ve got to get some big stuff,” said Rila.
“We’ll find it,” I said, trying to comfort her.
“There is a lot of little stuff out there,” she said.
“Ostrich dinosaurs and small herds of little fellows, turkey size or so. A few ankylosaurs. A few small horned varieties. All sorts of lizards. Some big turtles down by the river, but who cares for big turtles? Some flying reptiles. Pterosaurs, I suppose. Some birds. But nothing spectacular.”
“It would be senseless to go chasing after that big fellow,” Ben said. “He was traveling fast. Like he knew where he was going. By the time we get out there, he’ll be clear out of the country, the rate that he was going. We can take a small stroll, if that is what you want. Maybe we can stir up something. But we shouldn’t go too far. It’s getting well into the afternoon and we should be back here well before night sets in.”
“We’ll likely be safer after dark than at any other time,” I told him. “I doubt that any of the reptiles would move around too much once the sun has set.
They get lethargic then, or are supposed to. They’re cold-blooded. Their temperature tolerance is narrow.
They take shelter at noon when the sun gets hot, and don’t move around much when the temperature falls at night.”
“You are probably right,” said Ben. “Undoubtedly, you are. You know about such things. But me, I’ll feel more comfortable at night in camp with a good fire going.”
“We can’t be absolutely sure about dinosaurs not moving around at night,” said Rila. “For one thing, we can’t be sure that even with the sun gone the temperature will fall a great deal. And another thing, there is some evidence that dinosaurs may not be cold-blooded. There is a fairly persuasive opinion among some paleontologists that they were, in fact, warm-blooded.”
She was right, of course — there was some evidence of warm bloodedness. I had read some of the argument and had not been impressed with it. I didn’t say so, though. Apparently Rila did accept it and this was no place to get into an academic argument.