To Slay A Dinosaur: Part IV

W H  E N Morning finally came, Jack had laid at the dead fire and tried to keep the scent of the ashes on his mind and not the scent of the black-heads. It was still there, thought they weren’t. They were nocturnal animals and they wouldn’t come back until tonight.

“Would they?” He asked himself. If nobody was around to hear him, he might as well talk to himself. It would either keep him sane, or drive him crazy. But these were both the least of his problems. “Were they thinking animals?” He asked nobody. “Because it seemed like it. Distracting, whooping…”

He was reading too much into it. Jurassic Park had been re-run too many times in his childhood. No, they were not giant super-intelligent ground-eagles, they were just giant ground-eagles. Still, not good, but not quite as bad as JP’s exaggerated problem-solvers.

Only as bad as very well-equipped lions, he decided.

He walked out into the Sunlight. In this totally foreign world, the sun was the only familiar friend he had. Yes, it was beating him to death with its stabbing rays. But still, he needed as many friends as possible in this strange, new world.

He looked around and a new herd of animals caught his eye.

There were the same crested animals – the same herd, in fact, with the Bull and his six mates – but now a new herd of black-green beasts were off in the distance.

They were of the same Family as the insane, red-and-black charger he’d been occupied with yesterday. They had, however, a single horn on the nose. Maybe three feet long. On their frills were eight other spikes, a little shorter. Some of them had yellow frills with white-and-black eyespots. The ones that did also had white bands on their limbs.

Males. All the male dinosaurs were flashy, show-offs, much like all the Alpha Males he’d known back as his Middle School.

The others were just black-green, with black heads and white bellies. Weirdest of all, though, were their quills. All of them had them, on their backs and tails, evenly spaced enough to have some measure of vulnerability but all still a formidable defense.

The females were digging furiously, tirelessly. Like their lives depended on it.

“Roots?” He asked, wondered if they only ate those. But no, the males were frolicking in the water, splashing about. Playing.

Strange, to think of such fantastic monsters as being playful.

Even sillier was when they got back up onto land. They rolled and tossed and turned in the dirt, making a sound that for all the world sounded like the stunted laughter of a disabled child with a particularly soft stuffed creature of some kind. He could swear he even saw their cheeks upturn a little bit when they made that faux-laughter.

“Well, somebody other than me sure as Hell is enjoying themselves.”

Some of the females stopped digging here and there, to eat. These ones seemed to be obligate herbivores. The other horned one, the alarming rammer, seemed to be more of an obligate destroy-every-goddamn-thing-in-the-immediate-vincinity-ivore.

Speaking of which, he thought to look around for it before he made his way back down to the river.

Of course, there it was. Maybe two hundred feet away from him, on the other side of the river. Still making that grating sound and tearing ass through the foliage, only this time in pursuit of something in particular.

He focused, trying to figure out what the other bulk was trying to fend it off. He saw, after a bit, it was the same alarming red color as the insane one, except without the black. It was desperately trying to keep itself between the rampager and…

A little one. A little one, of the same species. Which, it turns out, is what the defending one was. All three of them were one of the same, and the one that had nearly pulverized him yesterday was now locking horns with another one of its same species.

The stabbed at each other, kept locking horns and grazing beaks and the black-and-red one continue to make his ‘aw-awwww’-ing noise.

He put it together.

The red-and-black male was trying to kill her offspring to put her back into heat. Like with lions. The reason it was so completely enraged?

Musth.

“Great,” he said. “A horned dinosaur is bad enough without it being turbo-charged on hormones. Jesus.”

He tried not to be too resentful given the thing now had something else’s attention, and made his way down to the river.

The nine-horned ones, which he vaguely remembered from the only dinosaur textbook he’d ever owned, were a little bigger than the Rager. They were maybe eight feet high at the hip, a good twenty feet long. They seemed not to notice him, frolicking in the dirt and scratching up against trees like overgrown kittens.

He hoped they didn’t get territorial, or try to eat him. Even if they seemed more preoccupied with digging, he hoped whatever was driving them to do that didn’t get directed at him.

“Nests?” He said to himself, wondering if he’d gotten it right.

“Oh, well, no matter.” He said. “Time for water.”

The old cliché of beasts gathering peacefully at the water-hole seemed to hold up. He leapt only once, when he turned around and saw the Rager ramming the female, cutting each other with swift side-swipes after withdrawing and unlocking their horns.

He imagined the male would either kill her or the infant (or both) or die of exhaustion before she overpowered him. Or he got tired of fighting.

He suddenly realized, after seeing the other horned ones eating ferns, that he hadn’t eaten since the night he left his own time.

“Hm,” he spoke his thoughts. “Got to do something about that.”

He looked around. Same plants as before – horsetails, ferns, a few willows he hadn’t noticed before. Nothing spectacular, and in this case ‘spectacular’ was a synonym for ‘edible’.

“What is there to eat here?” He asked, hoping to god he wouldn’t have to bring down one of the bigger Dinosaurs. If he had to slay a Dinosaur, then it’d be over. He’d be mauled, mangled. Killed. Destroyed. He ran through all the synonyms of ‘dead’ he could in his head, then stood up as more animals arrived.

All of the ones that would be important to him in the coming months (and possibly the rest of his life) were coming to the river now.

He decided, crouching on a tall rock, to observe them. ‘Know your enemy’, they said. So it was now.

The crested, loud ones from before kept together. The females mingled a little with the nine-horns, and the battered Rager came to the water, panting and drooling and near exhausted to death.

The nine-horns, on the other side of the river, made noises to it. Trying to shoo it away.

Clearly, they weren’t friends.

Another crested one with more of a tendency to bask in the water had come up, too.

He remembered this one as ‘Parasaurolophus’, a name which he read in many books over the years and never, once, learned to pronounce. Every single documentary, teacher or dino-fan from his elementary school said it differently.

Its crest was long, tubular. Its sound was even more like a foghorn, when it wasn’t clacking its teeth or whistling.

When it moved, its head jerked forward, like a pigeon. Its blank, black eyes told him it wasn’t much brighter. Its coloration was like a gazelle – pale, orange-blue. Black stripes running from shoulder-to-tail. White belly. Black head, green crest. White, interlocking, vein-like pattern on the crest.

Its booming, ululating call echoed through the foggy morning.

“Male,” he said.

Another two animals emerged from the fog, both of them looking like Ostriches with tails and arms.

As they came into focus, he saw their bodies and tails were covered in iron-grey hairlike feathers. They were maybe seven feet tall. Six-foot, flexible tails. Their legs, arms and necks were all green. The male had a black head with a yellow throat. When he clacked – the only way Jack could describe the sound was as a spitting, hissing clack – it inflated. Like the throat on a frog.

The palms of their three-clawed hands faced each other. That seemed to be the modus operandi for all the meat-eaters, so he watched them to see if they ate meat.

As it turned out, they did. Their beaks were shaped more straight, wedge-shaped, and apparently covered in a thin layer of flesh unlike with birds.

He saw them snatch small lizards off the ground, as well as nibbling at ferns and cycads.

He thought maybe he could bring one down with a strong blow to the head. Maybe he could throw a rock. If he hurled it strong enough, it would drop, stunned, and he could cut it up before another predator got to it.

He picked up a rock, but another predator got to it.

In the shadows behind the ostrich-things, he saw something shifting.

It climbed down one of the conifers with cat-like speed. It was hugging the trucks with its palm-facing hands and propelling itself downward on nimble legs.

It leapt from fern-to-fern, crouching low.

It looked small, not as big or formidable as his late-evening visitors from before.

It swept its tail through the dirt, like a cat would.

Occasionally it lifted its head on an S-shaped neck, its yellow eyes glittering.

The two Ostrich-ones lifted their heads, water still dripping from their beaks.

They kept cocking their heads at every sound, trying to determine what was happening.

What actually did happen next, however, was so far from what Jack expected that he almost fell off the rock he was sitting on and into the water.

The male leapt into the air a full three feet and let out a jet of some kind of yellowish muck. Even from this distance, it stank so horribly that Jack’s eyes watered. He clasped his hands over his mouth, lost his balance, and skidded down over the rock.

When he opened his eyes again, his body caked with dirt and his knee and back scraped, he looked back to try and determine what the Hell had just happened.

The male was remaining close to the puddle of…whatever the Hell that was…and its tail was thrashing. It leapt about, the female behind it, and he saw foot-long talons on its feet.

Its attacker stood three feet tall at the hips and kept jumping back to avoid the thrashing feet. It was the same sort of animal as the blackheads: Sickleclaws and clawed wings.

But its size, its color and the extent of its coat was different. This one was bright-yellow and black-spotted, like a Cheetah. It possessed no tail fan, only hairlike feathers almost everywhere. Its legs, from the knee down, were onyx. As were its palms and the fingers hidden in the claws, and its throat.

He waited for the rest of them to emerge from the foliage, to overwhelm this animal like the other ones had tried to overwhelm him the previous night.

But this didn’t happen.

All by itself, the raptor kept circling. Coming in, falling back, making a sound halfway between a snake-hiss and a growl each time. Either the smell was driving it back each time or it was using some kind of tactic.

It was the latter.

Jack made a mental note that the females didn’t seem to possess the same sort of skunk-spray tactic as he watched the female panic. He made another about how to kill such a creature – the same way the raptor was now.

The male charged, and when the speedier predator had it at fair distance it jumped to a tree and leapt back at the male. It got both its hands around the ostrich-like neck and slashed twice in the same place with its foot-blades, leaping off in the process.

Gagging, kicking and bleeding out, the male fell to the ground. Its dying mind must have told it the raptor was still there, because it lashed its forearms and beak at the same place the raptor had been a split-second before.

It doubled over, still kicking and panting.

The female had long since run before Jack could gather the presence of mind to try cracking its skull.

The raptor jumped on the dying animal, which still thrashed like a decapitated chicken. Using its wings for balance, it held the animal in place while it started to eat it. Jack hoped it couldn’t still feel anything.

It took him about a minute to connect the dots in his head.

The liquid was some kind of expulsion, something to keep the other animals away. It made sense; the claws wouldn’t have functioned well against the elephant-sized monstrosities that’d eaten his mother.

He swam over, grabbed a stick and, holding what remained of his shirt to his face, he stuck it in.

He had something to try.

He ran up to the Raptor, which was maybe eight feet long, and waved the stick around like a traffic director. He figured the old tactic of scaring a puma away by pretending to be bigger didn’t work, considering this animal evolved to take down creatures so much bigger than it was.

The combined stench of the predator, its kill and the slime all almost drove him to the ground.

Even after it did, he still kept waving the stick. Holding one eye open. Now would be a bad time to be overpowered by anything.

It spread its wings, trying to shoo it away. Maybe trying to make itself look bigger than it was, though it failed miserably. When it looked at him, it kept its eyes on the end of the stick. It seemed to think that was Jack’s attacking organ. Even if it was a bright creature, it still had no frame of reference for what was happening.

He jumped out and back, trying to drive the raptor away.

The raptor jumped out in turn, and seized the end of the stick in its mouth tearing it out of his hand.

It tried the same grip-and-slash tactic on the stick, bringing it to the ground and cutting Jack’s forearm in the process.

He fell back, clutching his wounded arm and hissing in pain, while he waited for the next strike.

But as it turned out, there was none.

The Raptor fled, the smell now invading its senses. He tracked it straight up the tree it came from, zipping right past the nine-horn females that groaned at it as it ran by.

So, lessons learned today: There are solitary raptors. The ostrich-ones expel Dinosaur repellent, of all kinds. And, most importantly, all these animals can – to some degree – be brought down or defeated.

He thought of how stupid he was not to fashion a knife, so he could hide this animal and eat it. Especially with his cave so close, he figured it would have been nice. Eventually this shirt would tear and he’d need new clothes. Plus, he needed meat.

And so did something else, as it happened.

He didn’t notice it, at first, as he looked around for something sharp to cut with. But he noticed it when it was about twenty feet away from him, at most.

When he saw it, he stared back at it and it stared at him. It swallowed, looking like a bird or lizard doing so. Its blank, red eyes like rubies from Satan’s Crown, lie under small hornlets. They were wrinkled beneath, as though the beast was weary.

It was Tyrannosaur-like, as were the ones that killed his parents, but not the same one. It had almost no feathering beyond the back of its head and neck. It was a dusky yellow save its head and legs. Its legs and stomach appeared pale white, while its long, narrow head was harsh red against its black crest of greasy, hairlike structures. Its little forearms twitched, as if testing the air. Its tail more slender and flexible than the other’s, its limbs more gracile and adapted for running than the ones that had slain his mother.

It bent down, licked one of its feet and scratched its drooling, long-fanged jaws with its forearm, blinking and hissing.

Over in the distance, he saw four others of the same kind but varying ages, feeding at a carcass. Some were only six feet high, others the same size as this one.

It distracted him long enough for the one before him to take a step.

Without thinking, he took a step back.

The animal took another step forward.

He took another step back, and felt his foot land in something slippery and wet.

The Stuff.....

Without thinking, he crouched down in the yellow filth the ostrich-thing had expelled, grabbed two handfuls of it, and turned to face his opposer. He didn’t even realize his eyes were tearing, his vision blurring and his nostrils burning from the awful, awful stench.

When the animal bent down, its mouth open and its head almost to him, he hurled.

Both handfuls of the reeking fluid landed in the monster’s mouth and eye, sending it stumbling backwards and letting out a guttural howl. Something between a wolf and a dying man.

He saw the beast almost fall over, shaking its head and making its sound and whipping its tail. It might’ve been the saurian equivalent of crying in pain. He saw it step back, its black tongue seeping from its mouth as if the animal was trying to rid it from its body.

The other four, across the clearing, raised all their heads at once to their brother’s direction.

Jack looked back at the dead ostrich-thing, back at the river, and back to the four giant dinosaurs staring at him and their wounded ally.

It took him maybe a tenth of a second to realize he needed to get across the river, and a fifth of a second to enact it.

He jumped in, paddled across, and hoped to god – if god was, in fact, not responsible for sending him here – that they wouldn’t or couldn’t swim.

He made it to the other side, gasping and frightened.

His small victory, which he would’ve liked to enjoy in a world where every day of survival counted as a victory, was short-lived.

As he looked over his shoulder, he saw the Tyrannosaur carrying away the ostrich-thing in his mouth, back to its family.

He shook his head, exhausted, and headed back to his cave.

That night, he killed three small mammals, cooked them over a fire and ate them.

It hurt to eat what would eventually give rise to man, but of course sacrifices had to be made.