"What in Aljira's name?" I said.
"I am a barbarian at heart!" cried Standish. "I've always wanted to face the wilds as a true barbarian should!"
I could have pointed out that the eyeglasses and the futuristic bow rather spoiled the picture; but there was no point in quarreling with a cash customer. I only said:
"Okay, if you don't mind the bug bites and don't get badly sunburned."
So off we went. After a bit of a hike we came upon an agriochoerid browsing. It was about the size of a medium-large dog. Although it's a vegetarian, with a head not unlike that of one of our asses, it has feet like a dog's, with blunt claws.
Standish drew his arrow to the ear, in proper Agincourt style, released—and missed. The animal jerked its head up at the whistle of the arrow. While it was looking round, Hofmann gave it a bullet from his rifle.
He hit the beast all right. The trouble was that with a dinosaur-killer like the Bratislava, the impact spreads a small creature like an agriochoerid over the landscape.
"That's a funny combination," said Hofmann. "A land of hornless goat with dog's feet!"
Standish said: "I read an article once on the giant panda of China. It said it was once a meat-eater like wolves and cats but for some reason took to eating bamboo instead and developed teeth and a gullet to enable it to do so. Could this be the same sort of thing: an animal that started out to be a wolf and changed its mind?"
"I don't believe so," I said. "According to my scientific friends, nearly all mammals had feet like those back in the early Eocene, regardless of their diets.
This kind was a plant-eater all along but forgot to evolve its paws into hooves."
Looking at the spread-out remains, Huang uttered what I took to be Chinese curses. Then he said:
"What pity! I shall have difficulty in coming to definite conclusions from this mass of dispersed viscera. Mr. Rivers, is there not a smaller rifle for such game?"
"Yes, there is," I said. "But Frank wanted to bring his cannon in case we met something bigger."
Huang sighed. "At least, you will wish mainly the limbs and other muscular parts for aliment. I shall do what I can with the internal organs."
So, while Hoffman and Standish and I butchered and cut out the more edible parts of the agriochoerid, Huang squatted over the spilled guts, turning over this and that internal organ, popping some of them into his bag, and getting bloody all over. Standish obviously did not like this sort of job. He turned a little green but manfully stuck to his task, though so clumsy at it that Hofmann and I could, I am sure, have done the job faster without his help.
By the time the meat was ready to go, Huang looked up with a smile. "It is not so bad as I feared," he said. "I believe that I have identified a separate division of the digestive tract combining, in a primitive way, features of the rumen and the reticulum. One might say that this animal was well on the way to evolving into a full ruminant."
We went out for the next two days. We saw plenty of animals, but all were small, nondescript ancestors of modern horses, rhinos, camels, etcetera, the size of dogs of different breeds and all looking much alike. Hardly a horn amongst the lot, save the little Protoceras, a kind of ancestral pronghorn scarcely bigger than a jackrabbit. It has two pairs of hornlike bumps on the head of the male. But neither of my hunters wanted it for a trophy; too small, they said.
My clients got itchy over our endless walk through an outdoor zoo, stocked with a rather prosaic lot of smallish beasts. These animals all looked remarkably alike, despite the fact that their descendants varied enormously in size and appearance. So I told Beauregard to pack up to shift camp the following day. We should go westward to the river that, I had heard, ran south past the chamber site.
The trek took off before sunrise. Standish went in front in his cave-man outfit, muttering things like: "Yield thee, civilized degenerate weakling!"
The thought struck me that, if Standish got much more peculiar, we might have to tie him up. The Raja's better at handling disturbed minds than I, but he was not with us.
It was a bright, hot day when we stopped for lunch. Beauregard's crew had unsaddled the asses and staked them out to browse. We were munching our sandwiches when Standish made some remark about how much more sensibly he was dressed than we were; our khakis were all pretty sweat-soaked.
We were sitting in a circle, eating, when Hofmann muttered an exclamation. In one motion he gulped down his mouthful of sandwich, grabbed his gun, and bounced to his feet.
I looked behind me. Headed for the staked asses at a shambling run came the biggest predator of that time and place, a hyaenodon of the largest species, H. horridus. It was about the size of a tiger, with similar stripes but with a longer skull, more like that of an oversized wolf or hyena, and an impressive set of canine fangs. Despite the name, it's really no horrider than any other big predator, programmed by its teeth and its instincts to eat other animals.
I was rising with my gun when Hofmann fired. It was one of the best-executed shots I have seen in all my guiding. He nailed the hyaenodon between the eyes, and down it went.
Nobody argued that Hofmann had not won his trophy fair dinkum. But I asked:
"What are you going to take home, Frank? Just the head? If so, I'll help you cut if off. Or you may decide to make a fur rug out of it. That means skinning the whole animal and separating out the skull, so the taxidermist can stretch the skin of the head over it."
"I think I'd like the rug," said Hofmann. "But it would take us all afternoon to skin it."
"Then," said Standish, "we'd better carry the creature with us until the camp is pitched again."
"Sure," said Hofmann. "We'll sling it on the carrying pole, and Clint and I will each take one end."
"I don't know," I said. "Better think about what you're letting yourselves in for. The thing must weight well over a hundred kilos. Oh, Beauregard!"
"Yes, Mr. Rivers?"
"Could we use an ass or two to carry this animal?"
"I don't think so," said Black. "They is scared shitless now, and if we even moved that thing near them, they'd go real sure frantic. Besides, they're full-loaded now, and you gents would have to carry their loads."
We ended by eviscerating the carcass, roping it to the pole, and struggling over many kilometers with the thing on our shoulders. Hofmann and Standish, who had talked boldly of carrying it the whole way, were glad to have little Huang, who was no muscle man, and me spell them with the carrying.
Slowed by this load, we got to the river after sunset. Standish suffered from insect bites. At the new campsite, the mosquitos went to work on him. After much slapping and cursing, he was at last persuaded to put on a shirt and pants.
"While you're about it," I said, "better take a good look for ticks. With all those long grasses and herbs we've waded through, you should be hosting a few of them."
Sure enough, examination by electric torch showed a dozen or so on Standish's legs, busily drilling away. None had had time to suck much blood yet, and we got them out with a glowing cigarette in Hofmann's hands. We were lucky, since hardly anyone smokes nowadays. If you simply pull a tick out, the head often breaks off and remains in the skin to give you trouble.
Standish said: "Does this mean I'm liable to come down with spotted fever or something?"
"Don't know for sure, but I doubt it," I told him. "So far back, you'll find bloody few microorganisms that can live in a human bloodstream long enough to cause an illness."
Then he complained of sunburn. When he took off his shirt, his face, shoulders, and back were the color of a tropical sunset. As I swabbed him down with lotion, I said: