I tried to figure out exactly what he was and somehow or other, I began building an impression that he was not an actual creature — that he did not actually have a body, that he was not made of flesh and bone, although if that,was true, I was unable to figure out exactly what he was.
I found out something else. Up until now, I had regarded him simply as an alien, an inexplicable being that could not be understood. But now I began to think of him as a personality, as another person, as someone I knew and thought of, just possibly, as a friend. I wondered about those fifty thousand years that he’d been here and I tried to imagine what they may have been like for him. I tried to imagine how it would have been for me (if I could have existed for fifty thousand years, which was impossible, of course) and then I knew that this was a wrong way of thinking, that I could not equate myself with Catface, since we were two entirely different life forms. I brought to mind the things that he had done, the contacts that he’d made in the last few years — playing a senseless game of hunter and hunted with Ezra and Ranger, making time roads for Bowser to use (I wondered how many trips Bowser may have made into the past), talking occasionally with Hiram, or trying to talk with him, for Hiram had not understood what Catface had been saying and, in consequence, had not liked him. But all that was only now, in the last few years. Other people, apparently, had seen him (or he had shown himself to them) and they had been frightened. In ages past, I wondered, had he at times been in contact with the Indians and earlier than that, with the proto-Indians? Might he not have been considered a god or spirit by some of these wandering tribesmen?
Could he have been known to the mammoth, the mastodon and the ancient bison?
I had quit standing and had sat down at the foot of a tree. Catface had slithered lower down his tree so that we were opposite one another, face to face.
I heard Rila drive back up the ridge, coming home from Willow Bend. I got up and said to Catface, “I’ll visit you again in a day or two and we can talk some more.”
Rila brought word from the hospital, she said, that Hiram could not be released for a while. Ben had driven to Lancaster to see him a few days before and said he’d not found him looking well. He had asked after Bowser and the two of us and Catface; he’d asked how Stiffy was getting along. But other than that, he had done little talking.
Two more safaris arrived and went into the Cretaceous. The fourth arrived a few days later.
Stiffy came shambling up the hill to visit us. Rila fed him some lettuce and a few carrots she found in the refrigerator. He chomped down the carrots, but after sampling it, rejected the lettuce. I guided him back to the valley, with him grunting and mumbling at me all the way.
I went to see Catface again. Not finding him in Mastodonia, I ran him to earth in the orchard on the farm. We did little talking, for talking was difficult, but we did sit together, feeling friendly toward one another, and that seemed to satisfy Catface. Strangely, it satisfied me as well. Contact with him somehow made me feel good. I got the funny feeling that Catface was trying to talk with me. I don’t know what made me think this, but I did get the impression that he was trying to communicate.
I remembered how, as a boy, I used to go swimming in Trout Creek — which was a funny name for it, for it had no trout. Maybe in the pioneer days, when white men first came to the area, there might have been some trout. The creek flowed into the river just above Willow Bend, and it wasn’t much of a stream — in some places, just a trickle — but there was one place, just before it joined the river, where there was a pool.
When my pals and I were small, before we got big enough for our parents to let us go swimming in the river, we used the pool as a swimming hole. It wasn’t more than three feet deep and there was no current; a boy would have had to make a determined effort to drown in it. We used to have a lot of fun there in the lazy summer days, but the thing that I remembered best about it was that when I had got tired of horsing around in the deeper water, I would lie at the shallow edge of the pool, with my head resting on the gravel shore, the rest of me extending out into the water, but barely covered by it. It was good to lie there, for at times you could forget you had a body. The water was just deep enough to buoy up your body so that you became unaware of it. There were a lot of minnows in the pool, little fellows two or three inches long, and if you lay there long enough and were quiet enough, they would come up to you and nibble at your toes, just sort of lipping you with their tiny mouths. I suppose they found dried flakes of skin and maybe tiny scabs — most of us had scabs on our feet because we went barefoot and always had some cuts and bruises — and I suppose these little minnows found the flakes of dried skin and the tiny bloody scabs a very welcome fare. But anyhow, I’d lie there and feel them at my feet, and especially at my toes, bumping against me very gently and lipping at my flesh. Inside of me, there’d be a quiet and bubbling laughter, a bubbling happiness that I could be so intimate with minnows.
That was the way with Catface. I could feel his thoughts bumping in my brain, lipping at my brain. cells, exactly as those minnows in that time of long ago had bumped against my toes. It was a sort of eerie feeling, but it was not disquieting and I felt, much as I had with the minnows, a sense of bubbling laughter that Catface and I could be so close together.
Later on, I told myself that it must have been my imagination, but at the time, I seemed to feel those bumping thoughts quite clearly.
Once I left the orchard, I went to the office to see Ben. When I came in, he was just hanging up the phone. He turned to me with a broad smile on his face.
“That was Courtney,” he said. “There’s a movie outfit on the Coast that is getting serious. They want to make a film showing the history of the Earth, going back to the Precambrian and jumping up the ages.”
“That’s quite a project,” I said. “Do they realize how long it might take?”
“It seems they do,” said Ben. “They seem to be sold on the idea. They want to do a decent job. They’re prepared to take the time.”
“Do they realize that in the earlier periods they’d have to carry oxygen? There can’t have been much free oxygen in the atmosphere until the Silurian, some four hundred million years ago. Perhaps even later.”
“Yes, I think they do. They mentioned it to Courtney. It seems they’ve done their homework..”
“Does Courtney feel their interest is genuine? I would suppose that a movie outfit would have the tendency, at first, to make a cheap, run-of-the-mill movie using one of the prehistoric periods as a background. Not something as ambitious as this. It would cost billions, They’d have to have a scientific staff, people who could interpret what they put on film.”
Ben said, “You’re right about the cost. Courtney seems to think that we will be able to collect a good slice of the budget.”
This was good news, of course, and I was glad to hear it, for we had really made only one deal — Ac-one with Safari, Inc.
Four days later, safari number three, the first group to return, came out several days ahead of the scheduled time. They had had a good hunt: a half-dozen huge triceratops, three tyrannosaur heads, a gaggle of other trophies. They would have stayed out the allotted two weeks, but the hunter-client had become ill and wanted to return.