After several minutes of this tug-of-war, the croc tried another stunt. Since they're unable to chew their meat, they swallow it whole. This means they have to separate their prey into pieces of manageable size. This one did a fast barrel roll, turning over and over, until most of the leg came off with a rending sound, then it swam back downstream with this limb in its jaws, which allowed us to finish hauling the remains ashore.
"All right," I said, "if you blokes want the heads, you'll have to start cutting them off, now. We're moving camp tonight."
"Good God!" said Redmond. "You crazy, Reggie?"
"Not so crook in the head as I should be if we stayed here. Those two carcasses will attract more theropods, and probably more crocs as well. We should find ourselves in the middle of a battle royal over the carrion, and a carnivore who gets ranked out of his share will go after the asses or us. If we tried to fight them off at night, we should probably end up shooting one another."
They grumbled a bit, but I made it plain that was how things were bloody well going to be.
"But my Cayuse!" said Redmond.
"Seems to have fallen into a pothole," I said. "It's two or three meters down. We should need a cove with diving gear, who didn't mind the chance of being seized by a croc, to get a rope on it."
Ligonier said: "I'm a good swimmer. Bet I could dive down there for long enough to slip a noose in place."
"I don't doubt it," I said. "So could the Raja, or so could I in a pinch. But at night, with the reptilian guests due any minute, it would be too bloody dangerous. We can't afford to lose our clients; bad for business. I'm afraid we shall just have to charge that buggy to experience."
We had a hectic time striking the camp that night and feeling our way away from the river by electric torchlight. There's not much more to tell about this safari. Loads had to be redistributed to let the Raja ride an ass, since his leg was still painful to walk on. We pitched two more camps, watched more Cretaceous fauna at work and play, and returned to the original site for Cohen to pick us up. We got our clients home safe with their trophies.
But you can see, Mr. Ahmadi, why we're not partial to motor vehicles on time safaris. It's a crook enough job, keeping the local carnivores—carnosaurs, creodonts, or saber-tooths, as the case may be—from eating either us, or the asses, or both. But having a dinosaur fall in love with your transport is one bloody thing too much!
III
Crocamander Quest
Please, Ms. Brownlee! I assure you I have nothing against women. I've been married to one—the same one—for twenty-odd years, and we get along fine.
Even if I'm not a male chauvinist, though, I bloody well won't change my rule against taking ladies on time safaris, at least along with men. Not that women can't rough it in the outback as well as men. But when you mix the sexes in a small, close group, you're asking for trouble. When people are thrown together so intimately, they either form close attachments or come to hate one another. Adding the sexual factor merely makes a difficult situation impossible. I'll tell you how we once tried such a mixed party and what came of it.
If your women's-rights organization would like to get up an all-women time safari, we'll consider it. Of course I should have to see how my wife would take it. When she heard I had signed up five clients, including a woman, to the Triassic, she said:
"Reginald Rivers, what on earth are you thinking of? Having a quick go in the cycads with this twist? You're asking for problems."
I assured her I had nothing of the sort in mind, but in the end she could have said: "I told you so!" Not that the dear girl ever said it aloud; but I knew she was thinking it.
About the time Aiyar and I launched this mixed safari ... That's Chandra Aiyar in the photo on the wall, the dark chap with the dead dinosaur. I call him "Raja" because he's the hereditary ruler of some little place in India named Janpur. Of course that's purely honorary nowadays, like the title of that Frenchman, the Comte de Lautrec, who had his head taken off by a flick of the tail of a sauropod he annoyed.
I'd been getting some flak about our men-only policy; so the Raja and I thought we'd try a mixed safari once to see how it worked. There was a couple named Alvarado, Tomas and Inez, who wanted to go back to the Age of Reptiles. Tom Alvarado was a stout Spaniard who made his living singing in operas. He must have been stone-ginger good at it, to be able to afford a time safari. They weren't much interested in hunting or trophy collecting; but they were bonzer travelers, who had covered all the continents and most of the countries of the present-day Earth and were looking for something new. They weren't even going to take a gun; but I persuaded them to rent a nine-millimeter Mannlicher. Otherwise the party would have been a little too lightly armed for safety.
It jarred me a bit when Tom introduced Mrs. Alvarado as "my former wife, Inez." (He pronounced it to rhyme with "Macbeth.") When I asked him about this later, he said:
"Oh, yes, Inez and I have been divorced for years. We could not stand living together; but then we found we liked each other better than anyone else around. So we do what americanos call going steady.' "
Well, I don't consider his private arrangements, no matter how bizarre, any of my business. Inez was a Yank of, I believe, Mexican antecedents; quite a stunner in a black-haired Latin way.
The Raja and I decided we wouldn't send them to the Jurassic or Cretaceous, when one finds the most spectacular dinosaurs, because of the risk. We also had a prospect who was keen to get to the Triassic but couldn't afford to do it solo, because his grant from the Auckland Museum of Natural History wouldn't cover the fees. We have to charge high to include the costs to Professor Prochaska's laboratory, since the time machine uses fantastic amounts of electric power.
This third sahib was a New Zealander, Professor Doctor Sir Edred Ngata, a paleontologist. He was a picturesque cove, two meters tall, built like a locomotive, with a leather-brown skin and bushy black hair just beginning to gray. He must have been at least three-quarters Maori. I was glad to have a Kiwi along, who wouldn't poke fun at my Aussie accent.
The reason Ngata was keen for the Triassic, where the wild life is less spectacular than it becomes later, is that he wanted to study all the little lizardy creatures to find out which were the ancestors of the reptiles and mammals of later times. He told me:
"Also, Mr. Rivers, I want to study the distribution of the later rachitomes—"
"Excuse me," I said, "the racket wants?"
"Rachitomes, or their offshoot the stereospondyles. They're orders of amphibians, in decline in the Triassic but still abundant and including some large creatures like Paracyclotosaurus from your own Australia. Imagine a newt or salamander expanded to crocodile size, with a huge head for catching smaller fry, and you'll have the idea."
"Might call it a 'crocamander', eh? At least that's easier to say than the name you just gave it."
Ngata chuckled. "True; but the short, easy Latin names have been pretty well used up by now."
"I see," I said. "Trouble is, I no sooner get one of those jaw-breaking names memorized than you bods go and change them, or at least change the classification. But why particularly crocamanders?"
He explained: "They help to date the breakup of Pangaea."
"You mean that super-continent that, they say, once included them all?"
"Right-o. The breakup started in the Triassic. First the northern half, which we call Laurasia, separated from the southern, or Gondwanaland, when the Tethys Sea formed between them. So if we find one of your—ah—crocamanders in the land that became North America, very similar to one of ours in the southern continent, we can be fairly sure that the land connection between the two parts of Pangaea still existed."