Since this tributary flowed the way we were going anyway, we followed it downstream for a couple of kilometers. From time to time we glimpsed a few animals, but all were too far off to tempt our hunters. There were, for example, a herd of what could be called either humpless camels or giant llamas, on a distant rise. Then we startled what I took to be an ancestral tapir in the woods along the tributary. It took one look at us and bolted into thicker brush.
At one point, the stream opened out into the good-sized pool or lake. When we found a place free enough of trees to give us a view, Jim Swayzey pointed and said:
"Hey! What's that in the water?"
Through my glasses I picked out a dark blob. I saw a pair of ears, a pair of eyes, and a snout with a small horn on it, just clearing the surface.
"Looks like a hippo," said Swayzey, peering through his own glasses. "Seen em in Africa."
"Close," I said. "I'm pretty sure it's a kind of rhino, called Teleoceras. It's built like a hippo, with the same short legs; but it has a little rhinoceros horn on its nose."
"I want its head," growled Swayzey. "How can we get it to come ashore so I can shoot it?"
"We should have to camp here overnight," I said. "If its habits are like those of the hippopotamus, it comes ashore at night to feed and then goes back in the water to float around all day digesting its meal. But we're not going to stop here. That would cost us an extra day, and we may need the time to get back for the chamber to pick us up."
Jim grumped a bit but didn't argue the toss, and we continued downstream. I noticed that Larry Swayzey was walking beside Willow Lamar, and those two were having a livery conversation in low tones. I once saw Jim Swayzey, up front, turn round to send them a glare that would have melted a hole in a plate-glass window if a plate-glass window had been between him and them. Then he faced forward and continued to march, always peering this way and that for game.
As we approached the pseudo-Mississippi, the country flattened out and became swampy. We had to detour farther south to avoid getting stuck in the mud. Here the vegetation grew more thickly, with lots of swamp cypress. The day was nearing its end, so we were happy to stop on a little knoll, from which we could see the pseudo-Mississippi through the trees in the middle distance, and pitch our camp.
The knoll was at least drier than the ground on all sides about us. It was not, however, above mosquitoes' cruising altitude. The little buggers were all over us, and there was a run on mosquito-repellant. Some bugs seemed so determined that they bit us through the smears of repellant. When Willow swatted one on her arm, I clucked:
"Tsk, tsk! I thought abuse was abuse regardless of the species!"
"We allow reasonable self-defense, you idiot!" she said.
They tell me the Native Americans, in the days when they went around naked in hot weather, used to smear themselves all over with animal fat to ward off the mosquitoes. Of course it made them stink, and I didn't think such a plan was practical for us. For these safaris you need lots of pockets, as in those vests we wear; so complete nudism isn't very practical.
While the crew were pitching the camp, Larry Swayzey came up to me. "Reggie," he said, "the big river's only a five-minute walk from here. Willow and I would like to go for a swim. Is there anything dangerous in the river?"
"Not knowing, can't say," I told him. "Maybe alligators ranged this far north at this period, the climate being a degree or two warmer than it would be in Present. Without anyone to hunt them, alligators can grow up to four or five meters long. I doubt if there are any, but it's a possibility."
"Well, in any case we need someone to sit ashore with a gun to watch over us. Will you do it?"
"I promised your old man a lesson in Miocene paleontology," I said. "But I'll ask the Raja." I have since thought that this was a bad judgment call on my part, and mat we were luckier than we deserved to be.
Presently Larry, Willow, and the Raja with his gun set off westward towards that gleam of muddy water. A big red sun was descending but wouldn't set for another hour. The elder Swayzey and young Fuller and I broke out our ration of whiskey and sat round the fire, while I tried to pass on what I thought I knew about the evolution of North American life during the Miocene. I'm sure any professor of the subject could have done it better.
I couldn't get much information across anyway, because Jim Swayzey was not the sort of bloke to sit quietly while someone else lectured him. He soon kidnapped the conversation and dragged it off to his own favorite subjects, guns and hunting. I understood him to own a fabulous gun collection.
Jim also told dull stories of his pursuit of the American whitetail deer, the main quarry of North American hunters, and a species whose numbers are carefully controlled to give the hunters a beast to shoot indefinitely.
Then he went off on guns, about details of calibers, muzzle energy, magazine capacity, and so on. Of course this was all old hat to me. Finally he got on the villainy of those who tried to limit gun ownership, roaring that any real man had a God-given right, sanctified by the Constitution, to buy and use any God-damned kind of gun he liked, and anyone who disagreed was an agent of some sinister foreign power seeking to disarm the American people in preparation for either invasion or revolution.
He went on and on, until I could think of no way to turn him off short of hitting him with a stick of firewood. The sun was just setting when the missing trio returned. Larry Swayzey and Willow were laughing and chattering, a sight that cut short Jim's harangue on the virtues of the new Mannlicher-Schönauer seven-point-five millimeter and brought a ferocious scowl to his face.
I saw that my partner has a glum, discomfortable expression, as if he had sat down on something wet. When I had poured him his tot of whiskey—practically the Raja's only concession to the pleasures of sin—he said:
"Reggie, step aside for a minute, will you old chap?"
"Yes?" I said. "What went wrong?"
"That depends on how one looks at it," he said. "When you suggested this little jaunt, I didn't stop to think about the lack of suitable garb. When we got to the shore, where there's a nice little stretch of beach, those two simply peeled off every last stitch and walked into the water. I was jolly well embarrassed, I can tell you."
I couldn't help laughing. "D'you mean they lay down on the sand for a quick screw?" Excuse the expression, Ms. Pierce.
"Good lord, no! Though I shan't say the idea might not have crossed their minds but for the mosquitoes. Anyway, I saw no sign of alligators.
"But when they came out of the water, they danced around trying to get dry. Then they came up to me and stood no further than I am from you, with drops still dripping off their bare hides and everything showing, and asked me about our safari experiences. I didn't know where to look!"
I laughed some more. "That's just your Hindu puritanism, old sport! They tell me that sort of thing is now common in America. Then what?"
"The mosquitoes descended upon them in bally clouds, so they dressed in a hurry."
"Did you see any animals that might interest our clients?"
"Yes, matter of fact I did," he said. "I meant to tell you the first thing, but this—ah—experience left me a bit shaken and rather blasted it out of my mind. A little way north, at the edges of that big swamp where the tributary meets this river, there's a herd of shovel-tuskers feeding."
"Ah!" said I. "I shall ask Jim Swayzey if he wants a head. It's bloody big, but I think we could haul at least the skin and skull back to base."
Jim Swayzey was enthusiastic about hunting shovel-tuskers. They are a kind of mastodon common in this period, where swamplands furnished a lot of soft plants for food. They were smaller than a modern elephant, less than two meters high at the shoulder. In the upper jaw they carried a pair of tusks, in most species rather small ones. Then in the lower jaw they had another pair of tusks, expanded into a huge scoop, over which their short, thick trunks fitted. They were animated excavating dredges, which could make short work of a bed of reeds, cattails, or any other swamp plant.