"If I were you, I'd try for a dicynodont. I think you'll find them on the higher ground."
"What's a dicynodont like?"
"Just imagine a hairless, saber-toothed sheep and you'll come close."
Since it was too late in the day to start out, we stayed in camp. The service personnel had set up one big tent for themselves and four small ones for the rest of us. I put Ngata and Alvarado in one tent, Carlyle and Smith in another, and gave one to Inez Alvarado. The Raja and I took the remaining tent, since we should have to consult on managing our party. Also, since we went watch-and-watch, there was no use waking up one of our lambs every time we changed watch.
If the Alvarados had been a normal married pair, I should have given them a tent to themselves. But I didn't know if they were currently on a balling basis— excuse me, Ms. Brownlee—and it's not the sort of thing one cares to ask people right out.
Sleeping proved not so easy as one might think. Besides the big cockroaches, whom the smell of food brought swarming into the camp, the insects included a huge cricket whose crurp sounds like a burglar alarm going off.
Next morning we set out on our routine meat hunt. We went uphill, pushing through vast fem beds; there didn't seem to be any game trails. A heavy growth of ferns can give you a real workout to wade through, so we were soon filthy and drowning in sweat. Besides, the ground is so broken by nullahs that every walk is an up-and-down scramble.
We saw a pair of coelophysids—slender, long-tailed, bipedal flesh-eating therapsids weighing about as much as a small man—ah—person. They were prowling through a fern brake, looking for smaller creatures to snap up in those narrow, toothy jaws. As soon as they saw us, they took off and vanished. Carlyle, our one really dedicated hunter, sent a shot after them but missed.
When we got to higher ground, the ferns thinned out. All the while, Smith clicked his camera this way and that. Ngata dashed excitedly about, banging away with his little 28-gage shotgun. Now and then he came back holding up some little lizardy fellow before popping it into his collecting bag. Once I said:
"There's a little one!"
I pointed to a stubby lizardlike animal, no bigger than a rat. Ngata brought up his shotgun; then said:
"No, better not. It looks like an ictidosaur, and I might shoot one of my own ancestors!"
"At which point, I suppose you'd vanish like a blown-out match flame?"
"Or all of us might," he said.
"More likely, we should all be snatched back to our own times and torn to pieces in the process," I said, "to prevent a paradox. That's what actually happened to one client of mine, who tried to occupy the same time slot twice."
After a couple of hours' hiking, the Alvarados complained of sore feet. So I split up the parry, bringing Carlyle and Ngata, as the ones most hardened to such stress, along with me, and leaving the others to take a spell with the Raja.
As we climbed, the landscape opened out, with more bare spaces between clumps of trees, mosdy looking much like ginkgos, and conifers resembling the modern monkey-puzzle pine. People who expect a Mesozoic landscape to be colorful are apt to be disappointed, since all the plant life is pretty much the same dark, somber green, without flowers. Through one of the gaps in the forest we could see, beyond the next few rises, the big conical shape of a volcano, with a plume of smoke and vapor coming out the top.
Soon after leaving the others, I heard noises of animal life. Ngata began to burble and would have dashed ahead if I had not caught his arm.
"Easy, easy!" I said. "We want to see what we're getting into first."
"But there aren't any allosaurs or tyrannosaurs in this period ..."
"I know," I said, "but from what I've read, some of the carnivores are still big enough to kill you."
So I led the way, peering ahead through the shrubbery and holding my rifle ready. The Raja and I were using .375 magnums. We had left our six-nought-noughts, our real dinosaur killers, back home, figuring that nothing we were likely to meet required such heavy artillery, which is fair cow to drag through the bush.
At last we arrived at a little glade in which four dicynodonts were feeding. I crept up, keeping a clump of cycads between me and the animals, until I got a good view through the gaps. Carlyle had lagged behind us, and for some minutes I didn't notice his absence.
There was one male, distinguished by his tusks, and three females. I can't say they reminded me of hairless sheep. Hairless they were, but stoutly built, about the size and shape of your American black bear, with potbellied bodies tapering aft to thick reptilian tails. Their heads began with horny beaks like those of turtles, plus those saber tusks on the male.
All four were chomping away at leaves and fronds. Bloody ugly things, I should call them; but then I suppose we should seem equally so to them. When I got ready to shoot, Ngata touched my arm.
"Wait a bit," he said. "Want to observe them first."
So we stood watching, though seeing an animal simply eat, eat, eat soon loses its entertainment value. I was again getting ready to shoot, when Ngata whispered:
"Hold it, Reggie; something's coming!"
The something turned out to be another male dicynodont. The resident male looked up from its eating and uttered a warning grunt.
The newcomer grunted, even louder. For most of a minute these two beggars stood glowering at each other, if anything so expressionless can be said to glower, and grunting.
Then the newcomer yawned, exposing his tusks. The resident male then yawned, too; and all the while they continued to grunt. During this time, Carlyle caught up with us, mumbling something about having to re-tie his bootlace.
The newcomer moved closer, yawning and grunting. The two circled each other until I was no longer sure which was the newcomer. At last one of the two, whichever it was, made a shambling slash at the other's shoulder; and the other backed off, still yawning and grunting. When the wounded one had put enough distance between them, he turned and waddled away. That was all there was to this clash of the titans, if you want to call it that. All the while, the three females kept on munching vegetation as if this duel were no business of theirs.
"Can't leave all three ladies husbandless," I said, and to Carlyle: "Your shot. Take the one on the left."
He fired at the nearest female, and down she went. The remaining three looked around in a vague sort of way but showed no disposition to flee.
"They've never developed a flight reaction to gunfire," said Ngata. "I fear we shall have to chase them away."
He picked up a cycad frond and advanced on the dicynodonts, yelling and waving the frond. Carlyle and I came with him, shouting and waving; and soon the three survivors turned and shambled off in no great hurry.
By the time we reached the carcass, Ngata fell to measuring and writing notes. While he was so engaged, the Raja called from the bush, and presently he appeared with the rest of our party. Young Smith was shooting pictures.
The Raja and I got out our knives to clean the animal, to lighten it for carrying back to camp. I had a folding magnesium carrying pole in my pack. But when I started to cut out the guts, Ngata cried:
"I say, Reggie! You're not going to leave all those lovely intestines here?"
"Certainly," I said. "What's the point of lugging an extra thirty kilos of inedible stuff back to the camp?"
"But I need to study all those organs! Don't you realize that nobody has ever described the internal anatomy of a dicynodont before? All we've had to work with were bones! It's as if we had stepped out on another planet!"
"Well, if you want to shovel that pile of guts into your specimen bag—"
"I can't do that! The bag's full already!"
"I'm sorry, but we do what we can. What we can't, just doesn't get done. And you'll have other chances. Come on, give me a hand with tying this bugger's feet to the pole!"