Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (10 page)

They were forced to finish moving and resetting the nearest of the traps by lamplight after all. When the door mechanism was cocked and the trigger baited with nuts and fruit, Vickers made his own preparations. His rifle was an Ml Garand, modified by a Marine armorer to accept twenty-round BAR magazines. He rested it on a sand-filled pair of his own trousers, its sights aligned on a point just above the center of the trap. The variable-aperture spotlight was set for a pencil beam and also aimed at the trap. The light should freeze the trap robber long enough for Vickers to put a soft-nosed .30-’06 bullet through its chest.

Around two am the alarm rang. It was a hyrax which had blundered into the trap in search of the nuts. The Hyracoidea had been driven to holes and the night by the more efficient grazing animals who followed their family’s Oligocene peak. The little creature in the trap wiggled its whiskers against the electric glare. Vickers switched off the spotlight, hoping the live bait would bring the robber shortly. But to his own surprise, he managed to fall asleep and it was dawn rather than the intrusion alarm that awakened him the second time.

Vickers’ neck was stiff and his feet were cold. A sheen of dew overlay his nylon parka and the fluorocarbon finish of his rifle’s metal surfaces. The fire was dead. Hot coffee was the only reason to kindle another fire: the Sun would be comfortably warm in an hour, a hammer in three. But hot coffee was a good enough reason, God knew, and a fire would be the second priority.

The flap of the tent which Linda Weil shared with Nilson opened while Vickers was still wiping the Garand with an oily rag. It was a habit ingrained in the hunter before steel could be protected by space-age polymers. Caring for the rifle which kept him alive was still useful as a ritual even if it were no longer a practical necessity.

“No luck?” asked Weil as she pulled on her jacket in the open air.

“Well, there’s a hyrax,” Vickers replied. “I guess that’s to the good. I was about to put on a pot of—”

The intrusion alarm pinged. The hunter looked by training at the display panel, even though most of the sensor locations encircling the camp were in plain sight in the daytime. The light indicating the trap sensor was pulsing. When Vickers flicked his eyes downhill toward the trap, the paleontologist’s breath had already drawn in.

The guide rolled silently into a prone position, laying his rifle back across the makeshift sandbag. He looked over but not through the Garand’s sights, and his index finger was not on the trigger. Weil was too unfamiliar with guns to appreciate the niceties which differentiate preparations from imminent slaughter. She snatched at Vickers’ shoulder and hissed, “Don’t shoot!”

The guide half-turned and touched Weil’s lips with the fingertips of his left hand. “Are they chimps?” he mouthed, exaggerated lip movements making up for the near soundlessness of his question. “They don’t look quite right.”

“They’re not chimps,” Weil replied as quietly. “My God, they’re not.”

The tent passed Holgar Nilson with a muted rustle and no other sign. When the intrusion alarm rang, the Norwegian had wasted no time on dressing. Neither of the others looked around. They had set the trap where neither trees nor outcropping rocks interfered with the vantage, and where most of the mesh box itself was clear of the grass. The blade tips brushed the calves of the three beasts around the trap now. They were hairy enough for chimpanzees, and they were only slightly taller than chimps standing on their hind legs; but these creatures stood as a matter of course, and they walked erect instead of knuckling about on their long forearms like apes.

Vickers uncapped his binoculars and focused them. The slight breeze was from the trap toward the humans up the slope. The beasts did not seem to be aware they were being watched. Their attention was directed toward the trap and its contents.

The hyrax was squealing in high-pitched terror now. The top of the trap was hinged and pegged closed so that it could be baited and emptied without reaching through the heavily sprung endgate. The traps that had been raided the day before had simply been torn apart. This one—

The tallest of the—hominids, it didn’t mean human, the word was already in all their minds—the tallest of the hominids was a trifle under five feet. His scalp was marked by a streak of blond, almost white, fur that set him apart from his solidly dark companions. He was fumbling at the latch. Without speaking, Vickers handed the binoculars to Linda Weil.

“My God,” she whispered. “He’s learned to open it.”

The hyrax leaped as the lid swung up, but the hominid on that side was too quick. A hand caught the little beast in mid-air and snatched it upward. The hominid’s teeth were long and startlingly white against the black lips. They snapped on the hyrax’s neck, ending the squeals with a click.

The other black-furred hominid growled audibly and tried to grab the hyrax. The white-flashed leader in the middle struck him with an open hand. As the follower sprang back yelping, the leader turned on the one holding the hyrax. Instead of trying to seize the prey directly as the lesser hominid had done, the leader spread his arms wide and burst into angry chattering. His chest was fully expanded and he gained several inches of height by rising onto the balls of his feet.

The smaller hominid’s face was toward the watchers. They saw his teeth bare as he snarled back, but the defiance was momentary and itself accompanied by a cringing away from the leader. He dropped the hyrax as if he had forgotten it, turning sideways as he did so. As if there were something in the empty air, the follower began to snap and chitter while the leader picked up the hyrax. The mime continued until the white-flashed hominid gave a satisfied grunt and began stalking off northward, away from the human camp. The other hominids followed, a few yards to either side of the leader and perhaps a pace behind. The posture of all three was slightly stooped, but they walked without any suggestion of bow-leggedness and their forelimbs did not touch the ground. The leader held the hyrax by its neck. Not even the binoculars could detail the position of the hominid’s thumb to the paleontologist.

“That’s amazing,” said Holgar Nilson. He had dressed while watching the scene around the trap. Now he was lacing his boots. “They didn’t simply devour it.”

“Not so surprising,” Linda Weil said, the binoculars still at her eyes. “After all, there were more traps in the direction they came from. They’re probably full.” She lowered the glasses. “We’ve got to follow them.”

“Look at the way they quarreled over the coney,” Nilson protested. “They’re hungry. And it’s not natural for hungry animals not to eat a fresh kill.”

Vickers eyed the Sun and shrugged off his parka. If they were going to be moving, he could get along without the insulation for the present so as not to have to carry the warm bulk later in the day. “All right,” he said, “they seem to be foraging as they go. It shouldn’t be too hard to keep up, even without a vehicle.”

“They should have sent a Land Rover with us,” complained the Norwegian guide as he stood, slinging his Mauser. “We are bound to make some changes in the environment, are we not? So how can they worry that a Land Rover would be more of a risk to the—to Topside?”

“Well, we’ll manage for now,” Vickers said, stuffing a water bottle and several packets of dehydrated rations into his knapsack. Despite the bandage, it felt as though his chest was being ripped apart when he raised his arm to don the pack. He kept his face still, but beads of sweat glittered suddenly at the edge of his sandy hair. “I think it’s as well that we all go together,” Vickers added after a moment to catch his breath. “There’s nothing here that animals can hurt and we can’t replace, and I’m not sure what we may be getting into.”

The three hominids were out of sight beyond one of the hills before their pursuers left camp. Both men carried their rifles. The paleontologist had refused the auto-loading shotgun, saying that she didn’t know how to use it so it would only be in her way. Weil and the younger guide began pressing ahead at a near run through the rust and green grass. Vickers was more nervously aware than the others of the indigenous predators lurking in these wilds. Aloud he said, “Don’t be impatient. They’re not moving fast, and if we blunder into them over a rise, we’ll spook them sure.” Nilson nodded. Linda Weil grimaced, but she too moderated her pace when the guides hung back.

At the looted trap, the paleontologist herself paused. Vickers glanced around for sign, but the ground was too firm to show anything that could be called a footprint. Dark smudges on the otherwise dew-glittering grass led off in the direction the hominids had taken, but that track would stand less than an hour of the Sun’s growing weight.

Weil turned from the trap. “What’s this?” she demanded, pointing. “Did you bring this here when you set the trap?”

Nilson frowned. “It’s just a piece of branch,” he said.

“Holgar, there’s no tree within fifty yards,” said Vickers quietly. To the paleontologist he added, “It was pretty dark when we set up the trap. I probably wouldn’t have noticed it anyway. But I didn’t see any of the—others—carrying it either. For now, it’s just three feet of acacia branch, broken at both ends.”

Weil nodded curtly. She uncapped her neck-slung camera and took several exposures of the trap and the branch lying beside it. She did not touch either object. “Let’s go,” she said and began striding along the dim trail again at almost the pace she had set at the start.

When they crested the next rise, even Vickers felt a momentary concern that they might have lost their quarry. Then he caught the flash of sun on blond fur a quarter-mile away and pointed. They watched through their binoculars as two, then all three hominids moved about the trunk of a large tree.

“They’re trying to dig something out of a hole at the root of the tree,” Vickers said, “and I’ll swear they’re using a stick to do it.” Then he added, “Of course, a chimpanzee might do the same thing.

“Linda,” said Holgar Nilson, “what are these creatures?” He rubbed his forehead with the back of the hand holding his binoculars. His right thumb tensioned the sling of his rifle.

Linda Weil at first gave no sign that she had heard the question. The blond guide’s eyes remained fixed on her. At last she lowered her glasses and said, “I suppose that depends on when we are. If we’re as far back as preliminary indications suggest we are, those are ramapithecines. Primates ancestral to a number of other primate lines, including our own.” She would not meet Nilson’s stare.

“They’re men, aren’t they?” the younger guide demanded.

“ ‘Men’ isn’t a technical term!” snapped the paleontologist, raising her chin. “If you mean, ‘They belong to the genus Homo,’ I’d have to say no, I don’t believe they do. Not yet. But we don’t have any data.” She spun to glare at Vickers. “Do you see?” she went on. “What a, what a laughingstock I’ll be if I go back from my first time intrusion and say, ‘Well, I’ve found the earliest men for you, here’s a smudgy picture from a mile away’? They drove Dubois into
seclusion
for finding Java Man without an engraved pedigree!”

Vickers shrugged. “Well,” he said, “it isn’t anything that we need to jump the gun about.”

Licking their fingers—the leader still carried the hyrax—the hominids wandered away from the trees again. Weil snapped several photographs, but her camera had only a lens selected for close-ups of animals too large to carry back whole.

The landscape itself was beyond any camera, and the profusion of life awakening with the dawn was incredible. Vickers had been raised on stories of the great days of African hunting, but not even Africa before the advent of nitro powders and jacketed bullets could equal the animate mass that now covered what someday would be Israel. Standing belly-deep in the grass they cropped were several species of hipparion, three-toed horses whose heads looked big for their stocky bodies. The smallest of them bore black-and-white stripes horizontally on their haunches. When the stripes caught sunlight at the correct angle, the beasts stood out as candid blazes. The horses were clumped in bodies of twenty to forty, each body separated from the others by a few hundred yards. These agglomerations could not be called herds in the normal sense, for they mixed hipparions of distinctly different sizes and coloration.

Indeed, antelopes of many varieties were blended promiscuously among the hipparions as well. Vickers had vaguely expected to see bovids with multiple, fanciful horns during the intrusion. Linda Weil had disabused him with a snort. She followed the snort with a brief disquisition on the Eurasian Cenozoic and the ways it could be expected to differ from the North American habitat which the popularizers were fonder of describing.

Oryx had proven to be the most common genus of antelope in the immediate area, though the region was better-watered than those Topside which the curved-horned antelopes frequented. There were other unexpected antelopes also. On the first day of the intrusion, Nilson had shot a tragelaphine which seemed to Vickers to differ from the rare inyala of Mozambique only in its habits: the lyre-horned buck had stared at the rifle in bland indifference instead of flashing away as if stung.

The hominids were moving on; the human trio followed. Weil was leading as before but Holgar Nilson had begun to hang back. Vickers glanced at the younger man but did not speak. In the near distance, a buffalo bellowed. The guides had scouted the reed-choked bottom a mile away, beyond another range of undulations, but they had not actively hunted it yet. Earlier, the dark-haired paleontologist had commented that a sampling of bovine skulls and horn-cores might be helpful in calibrating their intrusion. Vickers nodded toward the sound. “On our way back,” he suggested, “if it’s late enough that the buffs have come back out of the reeds after their siesta, we might try to nail you some specimens.”

“For God’s sake, let’s not worry about that now!” snapped Weil. She stumbled on a lump of exposed quartz which her eyes, focused on the meandering hominids, had missed. Vickers had guided tourist hunters for too many years to think that he had to respond.