“Can the eggs be trusted?”
“I can make an omelet you could swear came from a chicken.”
“And can you take me to see some of the dinosaurs, later?”
“If you can wait until after lunch, sure.”
To my surprise and delight, Sondra came with us rather than accompanying Kevin on his hunting trip. I reminded her that we wouldn’t see any troodons unless we stayed out until nightfall—troodons were dusk feeders, with night vision that would do credit to a cat—but she didn’t even hesitate.
The three of us flew out to the floodplains near what would one day be Hell Creek, Montana, where Amy was able to pick out predators among the great herds of herbivores—a daspletosaurus waiting in ambush by the water, biding its time for something small and slow enough to take with one bite; a phobosuchus, a crocodile nearly fifteen meters long, sunning itself on a sandbar while small pterors picked parasites out from between its teeth (not a job I’d relish); a small pack of mottled dromaeosaurus, sickle claws hidden hy the undergrowth. A pair of ostrich-like dromiceiomimus sprinted away from us as we glided overhead; I clocked their speed at sixty-six klicks on the straight, and Sondra filmed one of them snapping up a drab butterfly without even breaking stride. A moment later, I realized they were running toward a small flock of birds. “Vultures,” said Amy. “Something’s dead.”
I steered the flier over to where the scavengers were gathering. The “something” turned out to be a nodosaurid, probably an Edmontia, but it was a little late to be sure; a dryptosaurus was using its can-opener claw to pry the armor plates from its back. It might have found it dead, or it might have killed it itself, or it might have intimidated the real killers away, as lions and tyrannosaurs do. A few stygivenators and smaller carnivorous dinosaurs kept their distance, waiting their turn.
We watched until the sun started to set, so that Amy could count and identify the scavengers, and then I headed back to the city despite Sondra’s protests. The flier was solar-powered and could stay up for most of the day, but its battery was limited. A few minutes later, Sondra screamed dangerously close to my ear. “Down there!”
I looked, and saw a small pack of troodon running toward a clump of swamp cypress. “What?”
“One of them had a spear!”
I turned to Amy, who shrugged. “I think it was carrying something,” she said.
“Where is it now?”
“It ran back into the trees. Are they scared of fliers?”
“If they’ve got any sense, yes; most hunting is done from fliers.” The other troodons disappeared between the trees. “Did you film it?”
“I hope so,” Sondra wailed; she pressed the playback button, looked into the viewfinder, and smiled weakly. “It looks like a spear,” she said.
Kevin was in a foul mood when we returned, muttering about cheap Chinese lasers and the embargo on bringing your own weapons through the machine, and I suddenly realized why his surname was familiar—his family had been making small arms for generations before I was born. He was even less impressed by Sondra’s snapshot than we’d been, and less successful at hiding it.
The major problem with the picture was that the spear—or length of bamboo—was on the far side of the troodon’s body, and you couldn’t see whether it was holding it, or whether the end was lifted clear of the ground. It didn’t help that it didn’t look much like a spear, either. “If dinos made spears, wouldn’t we have found one by now?” asked Kevin, a little sullenly.
“Not if they were just made of wood or bamboo,” Sondra insisted. “Wooden tools don’t survive like stone ones. It’s like ergaster in the tropics; they probably had wooden spears, clubs, carrying bags, maybe even canoes or rafts, boomerangs, bolas… how much would survive of a bola, or even a wooden bow strung with sinew, after sixty-six million years?”
Kevin thought about this. “Forget sixty-six million years. How long’ve tourists been coming here? Twenty years? How come nobody’s seen this before?”
“Seen, but not photographed,” I answered, before Sondra could speak: she shot me a look of what might have been gratitude.
Amy laughed softly. “There’s a story my grandfather told me about baboons, when I was a little girl,” she said. “He said they were intelligent, even knew how to speak our languages, but were careful not to let white men hear them in case they made them work.”
“Do you believe that?” asked Kevin.
“Not any more, but I can’t disprove it.”
Kevin turned to me for support. “You’ve been here for years, you know about dinosaurs; what do you think?”
I could’ve lied, but what would have been the point? “I don’t know. Why would troodons need spears? They have claws. Weapons are for weaklings.” Kevin glared, and turned white. “Sorry, I put that badly. Our ancestors needed to make weapons because their claws and teeth were too small to be effective for killing, and there were plenty of predators who could out-run and outclimb them. I suspect they weren’t much smarter than baboons or gorillas; all they had were good grasping hands and an upright gait. If they hadn’t picked up antelope horns and thighbones, instant daggers and clubs, we wouldn’t be here. Troodons have the hands and the bipedal walk, but they also have pretty nasty toe claws, so they don’t really need spears.”
“Extra reach,” Sondra suggested. “Enough to attack an ankylosaur without getting too close to the tail. Or maybe it’s a javelin.”
“Maybe, but that doesn’t look like much of a point—it’s not stone-tipped, or even fire-hardened. And look at Bruno.” The borogove looked up at the sound of his name, realized that no one was about to feed him, then curled up again. “Those shoulders aren’t built for a strong overarm throw, and you’d need a lot of force to put sharpened bamboo through the average dino’s hide—unless you’re dealing with dinos that are even smaller than the troodons, and the troodons can run most of those down without much trouble.”
Kevin stared at Bruno, and nodded. “I’m sorry, honey,” he said, magnanimously. “But I’ll tell you what; I’ll come with you tomorrow, take a rover back to the same place, go into the forest and see what we see.”
Amy rolled her eyes; ain’t we got fun? “Okay,” I said. “But it won’t be a hunting trip; I’ll carry the gun, and you don’t use it without my say-so. Understood?”
I saw Kevin the next morning while I was having my shower. He enthused about hunting while he combed his hair, and when he noticed that I was replying in monosyllables, tried changing the subject to women, then to football. “You don’t like me much, do you?” he finally asked, his expression slightly puzzled, his body language defensive, as though it was important to him that I like him. “Is it something I said, or just because I’m rich?”
“Nothing to do with that. I’m just prejudiced when it comes to hunters and guns,” I admitted. “I know what it feels like to have someone chasing me with a gun, hunting me. My sympathies lie with the prey, especially if it can’t fight back.”
His brow furrowed as he considered this for a moment. “I’d never hunt humans,” he said, “but these are just big animals, not even as smart as deer.”