"Hell with that!" said Ligonier. "Gimme!"
He snatched the end of the rope and splashed out. When he got to the Cayuse, hip-deep, he crouched down and tied a loop, under water, around the steering post. Then he waved to the rest of us to pull. He had proved that there was nothing wrong with his courage, and I suspect that the same thought occurred to him.
We pulled, and the vehicle came up. When it got into ankle-deep water, Joe Voth waded out, heaved it upright, and wheeled it ashore by pushing. I don't think any of the rest of us could have done that alone; Joe was a bloody strong bloke.
After him came Rex Ligonier and Chandra Aiyar, with one of the Raja's arms around Ligonier's neck to help him to walk. Luckily his leg wasn't broken, although he had a bruise the size of your hand and limped the rest of this safari.
While the rest of us clustered round the Raja, asking how he felt and was anything broken, Joe Voth just looked up from the machine with a reproachful expression. He said:
"You hadn't oughta done that, Mr. Raja. Ain't no way to treat a good piece of machinery."
We agreed that there had been enough excitement for one day. Voth spent the rest of the afternoon and half the night meticulously taking the Cayuse apart, cleaning and drying each part and lubricating it where that was called for.
The next day we started out just looking at things: a couple of sauropods downstream, around the mouth of the Narbada, where it loses itself in the swamp. The prevailing genus of sauropod at this time and place is the Alamosaurus. It's only medium-sized as sauropods go, most adults being under twenty meters; though we occasionally find one up to thirty, which is bloody big. While they like the swamp margins because of the unlimited supplies of greenery, it's not true that they are confined to watery places. They walk perfectly well on dry land and often do, when their never-ending hunt for fodder takes them away from rivers and swamps.
We didn't see any theropods for Redmond's trophy, nor anything to furnish Ligonier with his conversation piece. There was one of those super-crocodiles, Phobosuchus, lying on a sand bar with its mouth open so little birds could pick its teeth, and a few small pterosaurs circling round after insects. And speaking of which, the insects harassed and bit our sahibs, despite the repellant they had smeared on themselves, until they were glad to call off the nature watch.
After lunch, I noticed that Redmond and the Raja had their heads together, while Redmond lectured on the fine points of the Cayuse. At last they straightened up, and Redmond said:
"Watch how I do it, Raja!"
He climbed into the front seat and started the engine; there's no mistaking that popping Diesel sound. He engaged the clutch slowly, so that the Cayuse started off as gently as a baby's kiss. He ran it along the stretch of beach that parallels the water, on much the same route that the Raja had followed earlier in his cowboy act, but more slowly and cautiously.
All went smoothly until he got to the end and started to turn around. He'd gone father than the Raja had, where the beach narrowed down till he could not make the turn all at once. He had to back and fill.
While he was doing this, we all jumped as that terrific moo or hoot or honk or bellow—whatever you want to call it—of Parasaurolophus drilled through our skulls. The big hadrosaurid stepped out of the trees and bore down on Redmond and his Cayuse with two-meter strides.
Redmond took one appalled look and saw the creature looming over him, not only with its big forepaws reaching out but also its great hook-shaped male organ, as long as a man is tall, extruding and getting longer by the second.
I don't know whether Redmond thought the hadrosaurid was going to bugger him; but he did the only thing he could. He opened the throttle to full.
At that precise instant, the hadrosaurid grabbed at Redmond with one big four-fingered paw. It's not really a hand, since it has no thumb and can't move its fingers separately, as we can. But it can curl the paw into a hook, and it caught the collar of Redmond's bush jacket. As the dinosaur hoisted Redmond out of his seat, the engine roared and the Cayuse took off like a scared wallaby. It's too bad nobody had his camera ready, though I doubt if a picture of Redmond dangling from the dinosaur's paw would have sold many Cayuses.
The hadrosaurid glanced at Redmond, evidently decided that he would be no good eating, and tossed him aside. Then it trotted after the Cayuse. The unguided vehicle plowed into the river and kept going until, a dozen meters or so from shore, it dropped out of sight. The engine gave a sputter and stopped.
The hadrosaurid waded out to where the Cayuse had disappeared. It put its head down under water, so that all we could see of it was that long spine in back. After a few seconds it raised up again and gave another long toot. It may have been my imagination, but to me the cry had a mournful note.
It stood there, alternately ducking its head and rearing up to honk, for a couple of minutes. Then it looked about in a wary sort of way. The reason soon came to light. Out from the trees appeared a theropod, a gorgosaur. This is much like the famous Tyrannosaurus, but is smaller, more lightly built, faster, and if anything, more dangerous.
The gorgosaur was moving fast, bobbing its head with each long stride. It bore down on the hadrosaurid, standing half submerged in the river. The hadrosaurid turned to flee, but too late. The gorgosaur's jaws snapped on one of the hadrosaurid s hind legs, bringing it down with a tremendous splash. As the victim tried to struggle back on its feet, the gorgosaur put a clawed hind foot on its body and shifted its grip to the hadrosaurid's belly.
The battle sent up so much splash that it was hard to see just what went on. Presently the gorgosaur straightened up with a rending sound and a huge mass of the other s guts in its jaws. Holding the hadrosaurid down with one hind foot, the gorgosaur reared up and spent several minutes gulping that mouthful down. Like snakes, their skulls stretch this way and that so they can engulf an astonishing mass ail at once. It stood there, going gulp, and a few centimeters of mouthful would disappear; gulp, and in would go a little more, until it was all gone. We could see the throat distended until it looked ready to burst as that huge gobbet went down. Rex Ligonier excused himself and went off into the bush to be sick.
The gorgosaur started to reach down for another gulp, when Redmond's rifle banged near me. He had picked himself up, covered with sand and mud, and fetched his gun. The Raja had got his and my guns from our tent and was just handing mine to me.
Down went the gorgosaur with a great splash. Redmond said: "There are our trophy heads. When we get 'em ashore, I'll take the theropod's, and Rex can have the other."
The trouble was that, being reptiles, they took forever to die, although Redmond had again made an expert brain shot. It was almost sundown before those two dinosaurs stopped thrashing and twitching. I waded out and saw what had happened to the Cayuse. I got a rope around the gorgosaur's leg, and we started to haul it ashore. When not even all the men—the Raja with his crook leg and I, the sahibs, and the helpers— could fetch it, Beauregard hitched up the asses as well. With their help we got the animal up on the beach.
Then we started to do the same with the hadrosaurid. We were coming along great when Ligonier yelled:
"Hey, we've got more company!"
So we had. One of those giant Cretaceous crocodiles, alerted by the blood washed down the river to the swamp, had swum upstream and grabbed the hadrosaurid's other leg, the one we didn't have the rope belayed to. That halted the salvage operation. We pulled on the rope, men and beasts, while the croc backed water with its tail. Neither party could gain more than a centimeter on the other. I couldn't see much of the croc in that muddy, bloody water; but I should guess it was about a fifteen-meter specimen, big enough to swallow a man whole.