Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (11 page)

The clumps of grazing animals seemed to drift aside as the hominids straggled past, but the relative movement was no more evidently hostile than that of pedestrians on a crowded street. Still, when one of the hominids passed within a few yards of a group resting under a tree, up started a 400-pound antelope of a genus with which Vickers was not familiar. After a hundred yards, the antelope turned and lowered its short, thick-based horns before finally subsiding beneath another tree. A jackal might have aroused the same reaction.

The hominids had skewed their course twice and were now headed distinctly southward, though they still gave no evidence of purpose. “Reached the end of their range and going back,” Holgar Nilson said. He spoke in a tone of professional appraisal, normal under the circumstances, and not the edged breathiness with which he had earlier questioned the paleontologist. “Do we still follow them?”

Linda Weil nodded, subdued herself by embarrassment over her outbursts at the two guides. “Yes, but I want to see what they were doing at the base of this tree first,” she said, nodding toward the acacia ten yards away. She unlimbered her camera in anticipation.

Vickers stopped her by touching her elbow. “I think we can guess,” he said quietly, “and I think we’d better guess from here. Those bees look pretty peeved.”

“Ah,” Weil agreed. The dots flashing metallically as they circled in and out of the shade crystallized in her mind into a score or more of yellow-bodied insects. Fresh dirt of a pale reddish tinge had been turned between a pair of surface roots. The stick that had done the digging was still in the hole. Up and down it crawled more of the angry bees. “Surely they aren’t immune to bee stings, are they?” the woman asked.

Vickers shrugged, wincing at the pressure in his chest. “I’m not immune to thorn scratches,” he said. “But if I’m after an animal in heavy brush, that’s part of the cost of doing business.”

The hominids were almost out of sight again. “We’d best keep going,” said the paleontologist, acting as she spoke.

While they walked uphill again, Vickers swigged water and handed his bottle around. The water was already hot from the sun on his dun knapsack, and the halogens with which it had been cleared gave it an unpleasant tang. Neither of Vickers’ companions bothered to comment on the fact.

“This is where we got the horses two days ago,” Nilson said, gesturing toward the low ridge they were approaching.

Vickers thought back. “Right,” he said. “We got here due west from the bottom of the trap line. We’ve just closed the circuit in the other direction, is all.”

They heard the growling even before they crested the rise. Nilson unslung his Mauser. Vickers touched Linda Weil to halt her. He knelt to charge his Garand, using the slope of the ground to deflect the sound of the bolt slapping the breech as it chambered the first round of twenty. The paleontologist’s face was as tense as those of the guides. “All right,” Vickers whispered, “but we’ll keep low.”

In a swale a quarter mile from their present vantage point, Vickers had dropped a male hipparion. It was large for its genus; a good 400 pounds had remained to the carcass after the hunters had removed the head and two legs for identification. Hyenas are carnivores no less active than the cats with which they share their ranges, but virtually no carnivore will refuse what carrion comes its way. A pack of hyenas had found the dead horse. They were still there, wrangling over scraps of flesh and the uncracked bones, as the hominids approached the kill. The snarls that the intrusion team heard were the warning with which the hyenas greeted the newcomers.

“We’ve got to help them,” said Nilson.

Vickers glanced at the junior guide out of the corner of his eye. He was shocked to see that Nilson was watching over his electronic sight instead of through his binoculars. “Hey, put that down!” Vickers said. “Christ, shooting now’d screw up everything.”

“They’ll be killed!” the Norwegian retorted, as if that were an answer.

“They know what they’re doing a whole lot better than we do,” Vickers said, and at least on that the men could agree.

There were six of the shaggy carnivores. Two of them paced between the remains of the hipparion and the hominids who gingerly approached it. “I’d have thought they’d be denned up this time of day,” Vickers muttered. “When you don’t know the animal, its habits don’t surprise you . . . But those’d pass for spotted hyenas Topside without a word. Damned big ones, too. They ought to act like the hyenas we know.”

At the distance and through the foreshortening of the binoculars, it was impossible to tell for certain how near the hominids had come to the kill. The foremost of the brindled hyenas was surely no more than twenty feet from the hominid leader. The carnivore turned face-on and growled, showing teeth that splintered bones and a neck swollen with muscles like a lion’s. Holgar Nilson gasped. His hand sought again the pistol grip of his slung rifle.

The white-flashed hominid jabbered shrilly. He squatted down. The hyrax was still clutched in his left hand, but with his right he began to sling handfuls of dirt and pebbles at the hyena. To either side, the other hominids were also chattering and leaping stiff-legged. One hominid held a rock in each hand and was clashing them together at the top of each jump.

The pelted hyena only snarled back. Its nearest companion retreated a few paces to the scattered carcass, its brushy tail lifted as if to make up for the weakness of the sloping hindquarters. The other four members of the pack were lying on their bellies in a loose arc behind the hipparion. One of them got to its feet nervously.

The empty-handed hominid suddenly darted toward the carcass. He almost touched the ribs, streaked white and dark red with the flesh still articulating them. The nearest hyena leaped up snapping. Its jaw thumped the air as if a book had been slammed. The hominid jumped sideways with a shriek to avoid the teeth, then cut to the other side as the foremost hyena rushed him from behind. Sprinting, the hominid retreated to his starting position with the snarling hyena behind him.

The hominid doubled in back of his leader, still squealing. The carnivore skidded to a halt. The white-flashed leader had dropped the hyrax at last. He hunched with his head thrown forward and his arms spread like a Sumo wrestler’s. Each hand was bunched around a heavy stone, held in a power grip between the palm and the four fingers. Unnoticed by the watching humans, the leader had prepared for this moment. The angle hid the hominid’s bared teeth from the watchers, but his hissing snarl carried back to them on the breeze.

Only the one hyena had followed through on its rush; now it faced the three hominids alone. Snarling again to show teeth as large as the first joint of a man’s thumb, the carnivore backed away. The white-furred hominid hurled a rock that thumped the hyena in the ribs. The beast snapped and snarled, but it would neither attack nor leave its position between the carcass and the hominids. Its powerful shoulders remained turned toward its opponents while its hind legs sidled back and forth nervously, displaying first one spotted flank and then the other to the watching humans. Making as much noise as a flock of starlings, the hominids also retreated. At a safe distance from the hipparion carcass and its protectors, they turned and resumed their leisurely meander southward. The hominid with the pair of stones continued to strike them together occasionally, though without the earlier savage insistence. Chips spilled from the dense quartz glinted like sparks in the air.

Holgar Nilson let out his breath slowly. Linda Weil lowered her binoculars and said, “Holgar, what’s gotten into you? I
know
why
I’m
so tense.”

The Norwegian scowled. Vickers glanced at him and then raised his glasses again. He did not know how personal the conversation was about to become. “I—” said the blond man. Then, “Hyenas are terrible killers. I’ve seen what they can do to children and even to a grown man who’d broken his leg in the bush.”

“Well, we’re here as observers, aren’t we?” said the paleontologist. “I don’t understand.”

Nilson turned away from her gaze and did not reply. The woman shrugged. “We need to be moving on,” she said. Her face, like that of the younger guide, was troubled.

The hyenas had disappeared back into shallow burrows they had dug around the site of the kill. The humans skirted them at a distance, knowing that another outburst might call the hominids back from the rise over which they had disappeared. “Sort of a shame not to bag one now when we know where they are,” Vickers said regretfully as he glanced toward the hipparion. The ribs stood up like a beacon. “I’d expected to be stuck with a night shot . . . and nobody’s as good in the dark, I don’t care what his equipment is.” Neither of the others made any response.

No unusual noise gave warning as the intrusion team neared the next crest, but Holgar Nilson halted them with a raised hand anyway. “They turned their direction to go where they knew carrion was, the horse carcass,” he said. The senior guide nodded, pleased to hear his partner use his flawless sense of direction. “But if they are making a large circle, so to speak, and they have been looting our traps west of the camp, then we must be close to where they started.”

Nilson’s logic was good; all three made the obvious response. Both men tautened their rifle and binocular straps and got down on their hands and knees. Since the grass was thick and over a foot high, there was no need to go into a true low crawl with their weapons laid across crooked elbows. The paleontologist looked dubious, but she followed suit. Her camera finally had to be tucked into the waistband of her trousers. The ground, prickly with grass spikes and flakes of stone, slowed their progress more than did concern over security.

The hominid camp was in a clump of acacias less than 200 yards down the next slope.

“Oh, the Lord have mercy,” whispered Nilson in Norwegian as his eyes adjusted to the pool of shade on which he focused his binoculars. It was hard to tell how many of the hominids were present; anything from a dozen to twenty was possible. Clumps of grass, shadows, and the emerald globes of young acacias interfered with visibility. The three hominids which the intrusion team had been following were standing. The white-flashed leader himself was the center of a clamoring mass of females and infants. Vickers noted that although many hands were stretched out toward the leader and the prey he carried, neither was actually touched by the suppliants.

Much of the confusion died down after a few minutes. The small hominids made way or were elbowed aside by additional males. Their external genitalia were obvious, though the flat dugs of the females were hidden by their fur. Most of the males were empty-handed, but one of them was dragging forward what could only be the femur of a sivatherium. The bone was too massive even for the molars of the great hyenas; in time it would have been gnawed away by rodents, but nothing of a size to matter would have disputed its possession with the hominids. Vickers frowned, trying to imagine what the latter with the relatively small jaws expected to do with a bone which was beyond the range of hyenas and the big cats.

But the troop’s first order of business was the hyrax. It provided a demonstration that the jaws and limbs of the hominids were by no means despicable themselves. The leader gripped the little animal with his teeth and systematically plucked it apart with his hands. One of the males reached in for a piece. The leader cuffed him away and dropped the hyrax long enough to jabber a stream of obvious abuse at the usurper. With something approaching ceremony, the leader then handed the fleshy hind legs to two males. Despite the confusion, Vickers was sure that at least one of them had been a companion of the leader during the morning’s circuit.

Dignity satisfied, the white-flashed hominid continued parceling out the hyrax. The leader’s motions were precise; each twist or slash of nails that still resembled claws stripped away another fragment. As each hominid received a portion, he or she—a foreleg had gone early to a dun-furred nursing mother—stepped back out of the ruck. There was some squabbling as members of the troop bolted their allotments, but Vickers did not notice anyone’s share actually hijacked.

“Nineteen with him,” Linda Weil counted aloud as the leader stood alone in the widened circle of his juniors. Every member of the troop—Vickers found he had an uneasy tendency to think ‘tribe’—every member of the troop had been given a portion of the hyrax. The leader held only the head and a bloody tendril of hide still clinging to it. With a croak of triumph the leader bent and picked up the lump of quartz he had carried since the encounter with the hyenas. He rotated the hyrax head awkwardly with his thumb, then brought his two hands together with a resounding
smack.
Dropping the stone again, the leader began to slurp the brains greedily.

“Goddamn it, you know they’re men,” Holgar Nilson whispered hoarsely.

“It’s nothing more than sea otters do,” the paleontologist replied, but she kept the glasses to her eyes and would not face her lover.

Vickers looked from the one to the other, Weil tense, Nilson angry. “I don’t think otters share out meat like that,” Vickers said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen animals share out meat that well. Maybe wolves do.” He paused before adding, “That doesn’t mean they’re not animals.”

The hyrax was a memory, though a memory that had provided each hominid with a good four ounces of flesh in addition to whatever protein individuals might have scavenged for themselves during the morning. Now the females were bringing out the results of their own gathering: roots and probably locust pods, though it was hard to be sure through the binoculars. Females appeared to be approaching males one on one, though the distinguishing marks of most hominids were too subtle for immediate certainty. The dun-colored mother and an adolescent female whose pelt was a similar shade stood to either side of the leader, cooing and attempting to groom his fur as they offered tubers of some kind.

But the males had not completed their own program as yet. The leader barked something which must have been more in the line of permission than a command. Two of the males responded almost before the syllable was complete, squatting down and chopping furiously with rocks gripped in either fist.