"And please," said Willow, "may I have something to eat? Otherwise I'll pass out from starvation."
"Serve you right!" growled Jim Swayzey. But he made no objection when the Raja got Ming to whip up some extra tiffin.
Although the skies cleared that afternoon, by the time we had finished all the yabber and the shifting of accommodations, it was too late to start on a hunt. I gave Willow a clean toothbrush that I had packed as a spare, but otherwise she made do with just the clothes she wore. In my experience, women are much more bothered by lack of changes of clothes and other items of personal baggage than most men; but Willow took these minor hardships very well indeed.
Next morning we set off on our deferred meat hunt. Besides the Raja and me and the Swayzeys, Plautus Fuller elected to come, too; although his only arm was a one-shot small-gage shotgun, meant for birds and small mammals. Then Willow showed up with her umbrella. Larry Swayzey asked:
"What do you want to lug that along for, Willow? It's a fine day."
"It came in mighty handy when I was out in the bush in the downpour," she said. "So I'll keep it, thank you."
We hiked in leisurely fashion off to westward, getting occasional glimpses of wild animals of the smaller kinds, such as squirrels and gophers, and vast numbers of birds. The sky was a brilliant blue in that clear, pre-gasoline air, in which puffy little cumulus clouds of blazing white began to form as the day wore on. Wildflowers bloomed here and there in scarlets and golds and blues. I find I miss them in the Mesozoic and earlier periods.
We hadn't seen any impressive animals until we topped a rise and found ourselves overlooking a streamlet flowing through the dingle on the far side. Trees—willows and cottonwoods—grew along the stream, so we did not get much of a look at it, merely a patch of silvery reflection here and there. Jim Swayzey said in a hushed voice:
"Hey, something's moving on the far side of the creek! Let's stalk 'em!"
He started off, slinking as close to the ground as such a big bloke could get, with a predatory gleam in his eyes. The rest of us followed in single file.
When we reached the little gallery forest along the creek, Jim Swayzey glided through those trees like a bloody ghost. He was a man who had really studied and practiced hunting. When we got to a clearer view of the stream, I saw that a small herd, perhaps eight or ten, of small equids—early horses—were drinking on the far side of the stream. They were slender little creatures standing about waist-high, with stripes like a zebra's on their forequarters. While some had their heads down guzzling, others would have theirs up, looking around for danger. Then the drinkers and the lookers would exchange roles.
"Hey, Reggie!" whispered Jim Swayzey. "Are those the three-toed kind?"
I took a good look through my glasses. "I think so,"
I said. "I think the side toes don't come all the way to the ground, unless the animal walks over soft soil, so the main hoof sinks in. In this period the only equids with three toes were some browsers, who were dying out. For those ancestral to the modern horse, you'd have to go farther west, to the prairies, and hunt up the one-toed grazers."
"I want one of them three-toes," he whispered back. "I'll have Plautus mount the whole animal ..."
I heard the tiny click as he thumbed the safety catch on his rifle. Before he could shoot, however, Willow pushed past him. He muttered:
"Hey! What the hell—"
Then Willow was through the trees on this side, between us and the equids. She snapped open her umbrella, dug a whistle out of her jacket, and started blowing with all her might.
You can be bloody sure the equids weren't slow in reacting. In a second, the whole herd was racing away. They vanished over the nearest ridge.
Jim Swayzey gave a hoarse shout, between a roar and a scream. "You little son of a bitch!" he yelled, getting his genders mixed in his passion. "You promised you wouldn't spoil our hunts, or I wouldn't have let you come along!" He actually had tears in his eyes.
Willow had turned back towards us and was furling her umbrella. As she turned, I saw that on its convex surface, the umbrella bore a fierce painted animal face, with scowling eyes and a mouthful of fangs. She had a triumphant expression, which she tried with little success to modify to look apologetic. She said:
"I'm sorry, Mr. Swayzey. I had to obey a higher law."
He swung up his rifle and pointed it at her. "I'll higher-law you, God damn it! If I loll you here and now, nobody can do a goddam thing to me for it! By God, I think I will...."
He brought the rifle to his shoulder. Then several things happened at once. Plautus Fuller yelped: "Hey! Mr. Swayzey!"
The Raja said: "You can't! No gentleman—"
"Hell!" shouted Swayzey. "I ain't no fucking gentleman! I'm just a lucky oil-field roughneck...."
Larry Swayzey, who had walked past us towards Willow, sprang in front of her, holding his arms out as if he were practicing up for a crucifixion.
I put the muzzle of my own rifle against Jim Swayzey's back at about kidney level and said: "If you shoot, Jim, I'll shoot you! Put that rifle on safety and drop it!"
After a couple of seconds' hesitation, he dropped the gun, which the Raja pounced upon and snatched up. Larry Swayzey had meanwhile turned to face Willow. He wrenched away her umbrella.
"We can't have this kind of thing," he said. "The next such stunt you pull, we'll tie you up and leave you in camp while we hunt!"
It was a bloody sober, silent party that hiked back to our first camp. We had one piece of luck. Plautus Fuller, of all people, fired a load of buckshot from his little .410 into an ancestral peccary that wandered into our path. So we did have fresh meat after all, at least for one meal. The peccary, no larger than the modern kind, was pretty well demolished by the ten meat-eating human beings in the camp that night; Willow passed up her share because of her vegetarian principles.
I can't say I looked forward to the rest of this safari; but what were the choices? We couldn't simply cancel out and go back to Present until the chamber came to fetch us. Meanwhile we could either go through with our trek as planned, in which case Willow Lamar would have to come with us on her own feet; or cancel it and stay where we were. In the latter ease we could tie up Willow and leave her bound in the camp while we went out hunting. If we did that, I wouldn't put it past her to persuade one of the crew to turn her loose in our absence, as I suspect she did in getting Prochaska's night watchman to let her hide herself in the chamber. Then Aljira only knew what might happen.
The Raja and I talked the matter over that night in our tent and decided to go through as planned, hoping the threat of being bound and gagged if she misbehaved would keep Willow in order.
Breakfast next morning was as uncomfortable as the previous dinner had been. Jim Swayzey and Willow Lamar had developed a full-fledged mutual hatred that you could bloody well feel whenever one of them looked at the other. They refused to speak to each other; thus Jim Swayzey would say to me:
"Reggie, ask Miss Lamar to pass the jam, wouldja?"
While we ate, the crew were striking the tents and packing up the gear to load on the asses. By mid-morning we were on our way.
We headed west towards the big river shown on the Geological Survey maps for this period. The Survey people had made their own time safaris, shooting their little rocket-powered camera up half a kilometer, where it opened a parachute and snapped pictures on the way down. The big river—you might call it the pseudo-Mississippi—was a few kilometers west of our site.
We came across a sizable stream flowing westward, not shown on the Survey map. I guessed that the creek where we had seen the equids was a tributary of this stream, which in turn flowed into the pseudo-Mississippi.