Andy stood just back from the very end of the spit and waited. He mentally calculated the timing he would need — dive in, stroke hard, try and intercept the log as it passed by. If he went too early, he might be carried away in the tidal surge. If he was too late, he might never catch up to it. He needed to time it so the trunk was right in front of him when he was out there. The absolute least time he spent in the water, the better chance he had of surviving.
He quickly crossed back to the rocky spit and picked up a piece of loose stone. He brought it back and flung it far out into the sea — nothing surged toward it, and other than the ripples from the moving water, there also seemed nothing else lurking. He counted down, flexing his hand and bending his knees that felt weak and trembling.
10, 9, 8, 7, 6—look left and right—3, 2, 1…
He dived. Even though the water was tropical warm, he felt a chill run right through his body. He swam hard, too hard, thrashing like a machine. Slow down! his mind screamed, but his primitive brain refused to listen, and he thrashed onward. He knew his flailing strokes would attract predators but he wanted to be out of the water more than anything else in his life.
Andy didn’t want to, but he opened his eyes. Down below him was a flick of movement, and it caused a little bit of piss to shoot from his groin.
Oh fuck, he thought. The mosasaur was down there. He lifted his head — just 15 more feet.
The long and straight trunk towered above him and he thought its size meant it might have been some sort of early species of Sequoia that had been around since the Jurassic. For something so colossally huge, it was moving fast, way too fast.
The jig was up and he had nothing to lose but his life. His fear shot adrenaline into his system and with it came a burst of energy. He threw his arms over and kicked hard. He was no champion swimmer, but he bet he would have left Michael Phelps in his wake.
On his back, his satchel, even though mostly closed, was acting like a water parachute and slowing him down. There came a surge from beneath him, and his stomach fluttered as it was exposed to the depths. Andy swam with his head up now, counting down—10 feet, 8, then 5.
He didn’t want to look down or back anymore, just willing himself to thrash toward the tangle of tree roots. In another few seconds, he was jammed in among them and kept going until he was in their very heart, just as something welled up, nudged the massive tree trunk, and covered him in spray.
“Ha!” he yelled and spun back. “Fuck you.” He turned around and hung onto some roots and puffed hard like a steam train. He felt ill and his stomach threatened to lose the precious little food it had in it. But he swallowed hard and willed it down, and also forced himself to breathe slower. He could do nothing about his heart rate that was still sprinting in his chest. He’d had close calls before, but there was something about dark water that scared the shit out of him.
In another few minutes, he had regained enough energy to clamber up onto the top of the log. It was wide, stable as he had hoped, and he flopped down to lean his back against a stout gnarly root. Andy lifted his face to the sun. It warmed him, and he thanked whatever gods were up there for looking after him.
“Oh no.” He suddenly jerked forward and dragged his bag around in front of him, quickly untying it and searching for his little friend. It was a wet jumble inside, and he remembered the bag filling and slowing him down. Anything could have been flushed out.
A tiny sneeze and a head shake. “Gluck.”
Andy let out a relieved chuckle.
The little pterosaur blinked up at him. “Thanks a lot.”
“Don’t ask, buddy; you don’t want to know.” He lifted the flying reptile from the bag and gently laid it on the trunk’s surface in front of him. Gluck hopped in a circle and then stared out over the tree trunk’s side at the water.
“Yep.” Andy did the same. “We’re on the bus.” He watched as the shoreline hurried past. He must have been traveling at a good 10 miles per hour by now, and he could see the landscape of late morning, with all its marvelous creatures hunting, killing, fleeing, or dying in their primitive and brutal world.
As the cliffs gave way to more open landscape, he saw a Triceratops with a huge bony crest and three horns, two massive ones up top each easily six feet long, and astoundingly, the colors were magnificent, in brown, brick red, and some green. One pawed at the ground like a bull and snorted, and must have weighed as much as a school bus.
Andy lifted his hands in a box shape and brought them to his eye. “Click.” He lowered his hands. “Just one photo, that’s all I want.” He sighed as he continued to watch the show.
There were also herds of hadrosaurs, with sail-crested heads. “Corythosaurus.” He said, and then: “No, bigger, maybe even Hypacrosaurus.”
He straightened when he spotted the box-like head peeking between some trees. “Look out,” he whispered and pointed. The carnosaur burst free, and the herd of hadrosaurs panicked. But the massive predator’s hugely muscled legs pounded down on the ground, going from 0 to 30 miles per hour in a blink, and then caught a medium-sized hadrosaur, holding it with a foot, and bringing its six-foot jaws down on a long neck. Even from where he sat, Andy could hear the vertebrae crack from the thousands of pounds per square inch bite pressure.
“Wow,” he mouthed. “That’s the photo I want.”
It all suddenly made him remember why he was here — he could be killed, horribly, any second. But this world at this time was magnificent in its ability to terrify, but it was also so beautiful that it made his heart leap in his chest.
“Ouch.” Something jabbed his leg. He lifted his bag and saw one of the sharp crab legs was protruding through his bag. His stomach rumbled, reminding him it had been many hours since he last ate.
He drew the bag between his legs and fished out the first of the crabs. They had a huge disc-like head, long spindly legs, and a whip-like tail that contained next to no meat.
“It’s not your lucky day.” He broke the legs off and the tail and placed the pieces on the log before him. It took him several more minutes to tease out the meat from the legs using the hard spiky tail like a spear, and he shared some with his ever-hungry small friend — the meat was raw, cold, salty from the ocean, and damned magnificent.
Finished with the legs, he began to bash the crab’s head on the hard wood, finally cracking it along the seam and opening it up like a lid. Inside were gill fans, mushy-looking gray organs, and some muscle-meat near the leg-joints. He teased that out first, and then ate most of everything, handing over the really unidentifiable stuff to Gluck.
Finished, he quickly tossed the remains of his meal over the side, as he knew what dead crustacean was like when it was left in the sun for while — it became so pungent it attracted predators from miles away.
Andy licked his fingers and tossed the last shell over the side. His hands were sticky and smelled already. He rose to a crouch.
“Wait there, buddy.”
He climbed down, staying within his tree root cage toward the water, and leaning down, dipped his hands in to rub them together. He was about to turn away when he chanced to look deeper and there, sure enough, was a long gray shape that dived below the log.
“Ah, not you again.”
It seemed his friend from before hadn’t quite given up and was following him down the coast. Andy was about five feet up from the water and his tree was quite stable. Barring hitting surf, he should stay high and dry and out of trouble.