Be that as it may, this cat took one look, gave a kind of spitting yowl, and bounded away, dragging a piece of its half-eaten prey with it.
"What pity!" murmured Huang, looking at the remains of the prey animal. "It is one of the oreodonts, or merycoidodontids if one must be technically precise. My main purpose in coming to this period is to study their digestive systems, but this one has been too badly torn up to furnish much information."
"What about their digestive systems?" I asked.
"One of the debates among my fellow paleontologists is which of the many lines of Cenozoic artiodactyls—" Excuse me, Miss Bergstrom, but that's how Doctor Huang talked, like a textbook. He meant split-hooved animals, like sheep, cows, and deer. "—of Cenozoic artiodactyls developed the multiple stomachs of ruminants and which did not. The oreodonts are thought by some to have developed this feature, and by others not. One scientist called them 'ruminating hogs.' The question cannot be settled by fossils, since the soft tissues are almost never preserved."
The day after we arrived, I told my sahibs we were going out on our regular meat hunt. When we were assembled, Hofmann had on his regular khaki safari rig, including one of those canvas vests with enough pockets to carry supplies for a month in the field. He toted his Bratislava.
Huang carried a big collecting bag and had an assortment of knives and other dissecting utensils stuck through loops in his belt. He explained that he was no gunman but would rely on Hofmann and me to protect him.
Clifton Standish showed up carrying his futuristic bow, but he wasn't wearing a bloody thing else except an athletic support—I believe the Yank term is "jock"—made of some fur, which looked like bear. He also wore sandals and had his quiver slung over his back.
"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 kind 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 caveman 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 it 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."