Nicolás drummed his fingers on his desktop. He’d waited 10 years for this event, and in a few months, it’d pass by for yet another 10. He sat for a few more moments and then leapt up, pulling the office stationary from a tray and scribbling furiously on one of the pages. He then handed it to Mateo.
The older man looked at it for a moment and his eyebrows rose. “You’re taking leave?” He slowly turned in his seat, his mouth hiked in one corner. “And surprise, surprise, right when the wettest season is going to be occurring in the Amazon.”
Nicolás nodded.
“You aren’t planning on doing anything stupid, are you?” Mateo lowered the form. “Curiosity killed the cat, my young friend. And down in the Amazon, curiosity killed and ate the cat.”
“I just want a closer look.” Nicolás grinned and shrugged. “And after all, everyone knows that cats have nine lives.”
CHAPTER 17
Andy paused to wipe his brow. He’d been climbing for many days and had many more to go.
Back in his own time, he’d been climbing in the Appalachian Mountains before when he was searching for fossil sites. Most paleontologists were curious about the ancient lifeforms up here, as there were large gaps in the primordial record due to the fact that most of Appalachia’s fossil-bearing formations were destroyed by the Pleistocene Ice Age.
But back then, or forward then from now, though the mountains were large, they were nothing like the formidable peaks they were here and now. In the Cretaceous, the mountain range traveled all the way down through Alabama and into the northern edge of the ocean that was the submerged state of Florida.
Where he was right now, he estimated he was only at about 4,000 feet elevation. But further north, they would be three times that and impassable to someone like himself. Over the next 100 million years, they would be weathered down to leave their granite cores and their slopes mostly covered in a gentle forest.
Andy looked out toward the west where there was a world of green as far as the eye could see. There was a steamy mist hanging over the treetops, and it was unbroken, primitive, and teeming with life. It was a green world, all except for right at the very edge of the horizon where something glinted like polished silver.
He was past the worst of his climb now, and he expected it would get easier as he descended. The atmosphere was pleasant here, cooler, but still with humid breezes wafting up through the valley’s conifer forests and fern-filled meadows that interspaced the mountains. Where he was, the trees were sparser and generally growing in stands like tall conifer oases, with strappy-leafed plants at their base and more exposed rock.
So far, he had encountered a variety of smaller dinosaurs and several carnivorous theropod species, but they were small enough to not be a bother to him. Most he recognized, but some were unidentifiable, sporting strange beaks, horned or crested heads, and one that was even covered in what looked to be long rudimentary hair. These were the species that were probably unique to this area and were scrubbed from the fossil record by erosion.
However, he had several encounters with nodosaurs, the large, herbivorous, armored dinosaurs resembling tank-sized armadillos. Interestingly, it was one of the few dinosaurs that he felt he’d already seen from his own time. That was because in 2011, a specimen was found deep in a mine so well preserved that its head and front half of its body were still intact, and even more amazing, not compressed, but in a 3D form.
The nodosaur fossil was so amazingly preserved that it was still showing some coloration — spots and coffee-brown patches surrounding the huge osteoderms, the huge spikes and plates, and the smaller coin-sized scales in between.
Andy had approached one of the great beasts, thinking they might be like armored cows. But he ended up having to run for his life when he was charged. Even though the nodosaur was a plant-eater, it was 18 feet long and easily a 3,000-pound behemoth that had two 20-inch-long spikes jutting out of its shoulders. Instead of being like a cow, it’s more like a bad-tempered mutant rhinoceros, Andy thought as he had scrambled into a stand of trees.
Luckily for him, they shared another rhino-like trait in that they had terrible eyesight, so once Andy stopped moving and hid, he probably vanished to the brute. In addition, a tiny brain meant it lost interest quickly.
A big body, and sparse food, meant it was rightly being territorial, he surmised. From then on, he had learned to give them a wide berth whenever he encountered them.
In the mountains, the opening of the landscape presented him with another challenge. Andy was used to scurrying between tree trunks, under palm fronds, and slithering through bracken to get where he needed to go. But up here, he had to cross areas of open slopes.
He had been crossing a fern meadow on one such slope, thinking how quiet it was, wishing he had his sister here to enjoy it with. But that daydreaming meant he had let his guard down. He became inwardly focused and stopped using his spatial awareness, just for an instant or two, and then from overhead the sunshine had been blotted out for a moment.
Andy was immediately on guard, but still instinctively cringed down and froze, just for a second, as a breeze wafted down on his long hair.
Something heavy landed behind him, and he didn’t even bother to turn; he didn’t need to. He knew enough about this place to know that if something was creeping up on you, it wasn’t because it wanted to make friends.
He began to sprint for the next stand of conifer trees and the terrifying scream from over his shoulder came from an enormous throat that told him he only had a short head start.
Andy was only 50 feet from the trees when he chanced a glance over his shoulder — and it was as bad as he expected. The monstrous pterosaur was around 70 feet tall from nose to tail and had a wingspan of over 50 feet.
He immediately knew what it was and cursed himself for not expecting it: a Quetzalcoatlus. It was a pterosaur species known from the Late Cretaceous of North America and probably the largest flying animal to have ever existed on the planet.
The worst thing for Andy was they had good locomotion on the ground using their folded wings as front legs, and with their giraffe-like long neck, they could lunge forward to spear their prey in a serrated beak that was itself around eight feet in length.
Andy pumped his arms and legs, and upon reaching the stand of trees, dived and crawled in among bushes and tangled roots. He scared a small creature from its hiding place that squealed and made a break for it — the four-legged, barrel-bodied thing could not have known that Andy wasn’t the real threat, and its fast-moving shape distracted the monstrous flying reptile that caught the fleeing creature with ease.
“Sorry, pal,” he whispered.
Andy flopped back, breathing hard. He stayed down, hoping the massive flying reptile wasn’t smart enough to be able to tell the difference between a small four-legged dinosaur and a weird, hairy, two-legged human.
Andy sucked in air and watched as the Quetzalcoatl shook the creature in its beak to break its neck, and then lowered its giant frame to then spring upward, spreading bat-like wings larger than an airplane. It immediately caught a thermal on the slopes and rose higher into the pale blue sky.
He watched it with open mouth and marveled at its magnificence. He’d been here 10 years and every now and then he saw something that made him think it was all a dream. It vanished behind the peak, and he relaxed a little.