“You stood more than your share of the watch.”
“I couldn’t sleep, anyway,” he said. “Too excited.
But I’m tired. Maybe I can now. If you don’t mind, I’ll use your bedroll. No sense in unrolling mine.”
He kicked off his boots and got into the bedroll, pulled the blanket over him. I walked over to the fire, which was burning briskly. Ben apparently had put a few sticks of wood on it just before he’d wakened me.
Some of the squeaking and rustling had died down and everything was quiet. It was still dark, but the feel of the air said that dawn was coming. Off somewhere out beyond the grove something began cheeping. I figured it was a bird — or birds, rather, for there seemed to be a lot of cheeping, more than one thing cheeping.
I tucked the rifle under my arm and walked out to the edge of the grove. The surrounding countryside was half lighted by a pale sickle Moon.
Nothing seemed to be moving and then, down in the narrow flatness of the river valley, something did move. I couldn’t make out what it was. The movement had stopped, but suddenly it moved again. In a moment, I told myself, when my eyes became adapted to the darkness, I would make out what it was.
Ten minutes or so later, it seemed to me that I could make out a number of dark lumps in the valley. I tried to concentrate to make out what they were. They remained dark lumps, but now there seemed to be fleeting reflections as well, the momentary reflection of the thin moonlight off something that was moving. All this time, the cheeping kept on, and it seemed to me that it came from the valley, that there was more and more of it, and that it was getting louder. It was a tricky sort of sound and hard to place. But I could almost have sworn that it was the lumps that were cheeping.
I squatted down and watched, but I couldn’t see much — just those lumps that seemed at times to be moving, although if they were moving, they weren’t getting anywhere.
I don’t know how long I squatted there, but it was a long time. Something held me there, watching whatever was moving in the valley. The eastern sky began to lighten, and behind me, in the grove, a bird twittered sleepily. I turned my head to look at the grove, and when I looked back at the valley again, it seemed to me that I could see those black lumps more distinctly than I had before. They were bigger than I had thought they were at first, and they were just ambling about, not all of them at once, but one or two of them moving and stopping, then another one or two moving.
They looked to me like cattle grazing, and thinking this, I knew that whatever might be down there were doing exactly that — grazing. A herd of grazing dinosaurs.
Whether it was thinking in this direction or because the light of the still hidden sun had imperceptibly intensified, I was able quite suddenly to make out what they were: triceratops, a herd of triceratops.
Now that I knew what they were, I could make out the flaring frills and the whiteness of the two horns that sprouted and thrust forward just above the eyes.
I rose slowly and cautiously — perhaps more cautiously than was necessary, for at my distance, there was little chance of spooking them — and went back to camp.
I knelt and shook Rila’s shoulder and she murmured sleepily, “What now?”
“Wake up,” I said. “Easy. No noise. We’ve a herd of triceratops.”
She came up out of the blanket, still only half awake.
“Triceratops,” she said. “Horns and everything?”
“A herd of them. Down in the valley. Like a herd of buffalo. I don’t know how many.”
Ben rose up, sitting on his bedroll, scrubbing at his eyes with doubled fists. “What the hell is going on?”
he asked.
“Triceratops,” said Rila. “Asa spotted them.”
“Those are the ones with the horns growing out of their face?”
“That is right,” I said.
“Big brutes,” said Ben. “They have a skeleton of one in the Science Museum at St. Paul. I saw it several years ago.”
He stumbled to his feet and picked up the gun.
“Well, let’s go get them,” he said.
“It’s too dark yet,” I said. “We have to wait for light. Let us have some breakfast first.”
“I don’t know,” said Rila. “I don’t want to miss them. A herd of them? You said a herd of them, didn’t you? Regular triceratops, not some of those little horned fellows we found yesterday?”
“Big,” I said. “I couldn’t make out how big, but they are good-sized. If you two want to go out and keep an eye on them, I’ll cook some eggs and bacon.
When it’s done, I’ll bring it out to you.”
“Be careful,” warned Rila. “Don’t make any noise.
Don’t go banging pots.”
The two of them left and I dug out the eggs and bacon, got the coffee started and settled down to cooking. When I took their plates and the coffee pot out to them, it was beginning to get light. The triceratops were still there, down in the river valley.
“Did you ever in your life,” asked Rila, “see anything so beautiful?”
For a fact, the herd was quite a sight. For a couple of miles up and down the river, the valley was simply covered by them. They were busy cropping at the grass and low-growing ground cover. There were some young ones, not much bigger than hogs, and others slightly larger that I took to be yearlings, but there were a lot of big ones. From where we sat, the big ones appeared to be five feet tall or more, and including their tails, perhaps twenty feet in length. The massive frills made their heads appear enormous. They kept up their contented cheeping.
“How do we get at them?” I asked.
“We walk toward them,” said Ben. “Walking slow.
Making no sudden motions and no sound. If some of them look up at us, we stop. When they look away again, we move. It will take a lot of patience.
Rila in the middle, with one of us on either side. If they should take a notion to come at us, Rila drops back, the two of us stand firm.”
We finished eating and left the plates and coffee pot there, not bothering to take them back to camp. Then we began our stalk, if it could be called a stalk.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said, “standing up like this in plain sight.”
Ben disagreed with me. “If we hunkered down and tried to sneak up on them, we’d panic them. This way they can look us over and probably we don’t look too dangerous.”
It was a slow business. We moved only a few steps at a time, stopping whenever some of the brutes lifted their heads from grazing to have a look at us. But it seemed that Ben was right. They didn’t appear to be too concerned with us.
We stopped a couple of times to let Rila expose some film, panning the camera up and down the valley. We got to within fifty yards or so of them before they took any serious notice of us. A couple of the big bulls stopped their grazing and swung around to face us, heads held high, their wicked horns aimed straight at us. They snapped their sharp, recurved beaks at us.
We stopped. To my left, I could hear the camera running, but I kept my eyes on the bulls, rifle lifted ‘to ready. One motion would put it on my shoulder. Funny thing about it — it had proved a heavy thing to pack, but now it seemed to have no weight at all.
The cheeping stopped. All the cheeping stopped Those farther back in the herd lifted their heads and stared at us. The entire herd, somehow, had been put on alert.
Ben spoke softly. “Start backing off. Slow. One step at a time. Be sure of your footing. Don’t stumble.”
We started backing off.
One of the big bulls rushed forward a few steps. I brought my gun to my shoulder. But after those few quick steps, he stopped. He shook his head at us savagely. We kept on backing off.
Another bull made a rush, stopped as had the other one.
“It’s bluff,” said Ben. “But let’s not push them. Keep on backing off.”