A Dawn of Mammals Collection Read online

  She made her way to Laina, who she saw was not drawing, but writing calculations in the ground. The girl’s focus was complete. “Laina,” she said.

  She scratched out a Greek letter and wrote a substitution over it. Then she scratched that out, smoothed the dirt with her finger and put something else in its spot.

  Hannah had no idea what it meant. She’d gone to pre-trig in high school, and college algebra had merely repeated what she’d learned in high school. So this must be advanced trig or calculus. “Laina,” she said a bit louder.

  The girl looked up, but Hannah could see her eyes weren’t really focused outward, at Hannah, but inward.

  “You ready to go?” Hannah worried that she was looking at the start of some mental health issue. She’d been through that with M.J. already. She wasn’t looking forward to another breakdown. “Laina?”

  The girl’s eyes cleared and she looked at Hannah. “What? Oh, yeah, I’m ready.”

  “What are you doing there?”

  “Just working through some ideas.”

  “You’re okay, though?”

  “Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?” She hopped up and dusted off her pants. “We’re going back to the camp?”

  Hannah nodded.

  “Great. I wish we had some food. Clams again?”

  “No,” Hannah said. “We caught some fish. And turtles, and an eel.”

  “Great. Sounds good,” Laina said. “Is there something I should carry?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s see.”

  Hannah made a mental note to keep an eye on Laina. Maybe she was comforting herself by doing mathematics. Maybe it was nothing. But it was odd she hadn’t even noticed the two hauls of the net, and it bore watching.

  Chapter 15

  Back at the camp, they gathered fuel for the fire. Rex went right back to work on the net, unweaving part of it, and when he asked for volunteers, three others stepped forward immediately. They all liked to eat, and they all understood how important the net would be to securing more food.

  Nari rested, and Dixie sat with her, chattering to her. Hannah thought it was as valuable a job as any for Dixie right now.

  Ted asked if he could explore. “I want to look for other food sources. Rodents, or other animals. Maybe see if I can bean one of those horses in the head with a rock.”

  “Don’t go far,” she said. “And definitely don’t go alone.”

  Garreth and Claire said they’d like to go too.

  Laina lay back apart from the others with her arms folded under her head, staring at the tree tops.

  That left Bob and Hannah at the fire, which was good. She liked talking to him alone every day, catching up, bouncing ideas off each other without the kids listening in.

  “Is Nari going to really be okay?” Bob asked. “She seems fine, but....”

  “But what?”

  “I haven’t kept pet turtles in the classroom for a long time because of salmonella.”

  Hannah fed more fuel into the coals of the fire. They didn’t let it go out now. With the jungle as wet as it was, and with a wide cleared area around the fire ring, she wasn’t worried about a forest fire. Building another fire from scratch in the wet world was much more of a worry than that. “I was thinking about that last time—I mean back, or up, in the Oligocene. I have a hunch that viruses or Salmonella or whatever are of recent origin.”

  “That could be. They mutate fairly rapidly. So if they exist now, they might not be harmful.”

  “I vaguely remember something from a college biology class about how something—could have even been salmonella—was innocuous for a long while, and only recently became a problem to humans. Whatever it was, it was becoming more and more of a problem, continuing to mutate even today. Or then, up in the 21st century.”

  “Hmm,” he said. “Could be, since we didn’t evolve alongside any of the animal diseases here—I mean, not in the same timeframe—that we aren’t susceptible to anything the turtle had.”

  “Or it could be that we have no defenses at all to the diseases of this epoch.” She shook her head. “My leg looks a little too red, and so did Jodi’s arm from the saber tooth claws. The antibiotic cream I have seems to be working on it. But it won’t last forever.”

  He lowered his voice further. “What’s this mean about Nari?”

  “Nothing bad, I’m pretty sure. I still have the cream. I’ll use it on her. But eventually it will run out. And eventually, one of us may catch a virus from an animal bite, or dung, and it’ll spread fast among us, and some of us might not make it.”

  “We might not for other reasons too. M.J. didn’t.”

  “And that terror crane is one scary-looking critter,” she said.

  “Are we doing everything we can to keep the kids safe?” he asked.

  “I hope so.” Hannah fed bigger logs into the fire.

  Bob brushed his hand at insects being drawn to the dead fish. “I need to cover these with palm fronds or ferns, I guess.”

  “Thanks, yeah.”

  When Bob had done his best to protect their dinner and breakfast from being fed on by insects, he sat down.

  Hannah lowered her voice even more and said, “I’m a little worried about Laina.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Saw her obsessing on doing some calculus or whatever. She seemed mentally far away.”

  “That’s probably just Laina being herself. I’ve had a moment or two in class where I felt like snapping my fingers in front of her face.”

  “It’s less safe to drift off here, in these circumstances.”

  “True,” he said. “One could end up with something a little worse than a ticked-off teacher.”

  “I have a hard time imagining you ever got ticked off at them.”

  “I hid it well. ‘Exasperated’ is a better word, maybe. But with this group, even that is pretty rare.”

  “They’re smart, that’s for sure.”

  “You’re no slouch yourself.”

  “Nah, I’m not really smart. Just curious, and with more years of experience under my belt than the kids. So I know more. That’s not smart.”

  “That’s the difference between intelligence and knowledge. See, only smart people understand there is a difference.”

  She chuckled. “Well, thanks. I guess it depends on who you compare me to. I suspect I have a few more IQ points than that eel did, for instance.”

  “That’s true. I mean, of course that’s true about you and the eel, but it brings up an interesting point. I’m fairly sure that nothing in this time period had much of a brain. The saber tooth, the camels, even the oreodonts in the last place—they had much bigger brains than these little ur-horses. Or than your ‘crocogator,’” he said, making the quote marks in the air.

  “So we have a distinct advantage.”

  He waggled his hand: maybe yes, maybe no. “Not in strength or speed, though. There comes a moment, when you’re standing in the middle of the highway, and the bus is speeding right toward you, where your brains really don’t help much. Either you’re fast, or you’re pancaked.”

  True. She kept building up the fire until she was satisfied it would burn on its own. “Let me think of what else we need to do. Tomorrow, we go to the spring and work at either increasing the flow, or if that’s not possible, we need to build a reservoir of rocks to catch it, so we have a pool to dip water from.”

  “I wonder if animals will find it soon enough.”

  “Maybe.” She slapped at a stinging insect. “Or the bugs.”

  “Bees love water.”

  “Bees make honey. Did they exist back now?”

  He smiled at that. “There’s no good way to talk about time any more, is there? And I honestly don’t know about honey bees. They wouldn’t fossilize well, would they? So it might have been a mystery to science.”

  “If they exist, it’s worth following them back to their home if they find the pool. We could use a source of high carbs, like honey.”

  “
I wonder if any of the kids is allergic to bees,” he said.

  “I wonder if any human could be allergic to bee stings from ancient bees. If they even exist. Maybe they exist and have no stingers.”

  Bob shrugged. “There’s a lot we don’t know.”

  “And some of it is unlearnable. Other pieces of it, the only way to learn it is for someone to die, or get horribly injured or sick. Or stung and swollen. So I’d just as soon not know, if that’s the cost.”

  They spent a few minutes dragging rocks over to heat next to the fire, so they’d have a hot surface to fry the fish.

  The voices inside the circle of trees were getting louder—a disagreement about the net. Both Hannah and Bob looked in that direction for two minutes, but then the voices seemed to calm down.

  “Hormones,” said Bob.

  “Hmm,” she said. “Speaking of which.” She was thinking of Dixie’s shutting down Garreth earlier.

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” She didn’t want to add to Garreth’s humiliation by gossiping about it.

  “You worried about them being sexually active?”

  “Good God. I hadn’t even thought of it. Are they?”

  Chapter 16

  “I’d like to say there’s not enough privacy. But where there’s a will, as they say. And there’s plenty of will.”

  “Oh, boy.” She tried to wrap her head around that. “Maybe we should give a lecture.”

  “Sure, right after you tell the sun not to rise in the east.”

  She couldn’t help but laugh. “Seriously, though, they need to understand how deadly that could be. Delivering a baby in these conditions?” She shook her head. “No way.”

  “Indeed.”

  She thought it over. “So maybe a lecture about holding it to oral sex?”

  “If we ever get back, making that suggestion would entail a guaranteed firing for cause for me. So no thanks.”

  “So you won’t say it. I will.”

  “I don’t think that’s a distinction the school board is likely to appreciate.”

  “Stupid. They’d rather have someone die in childbirth?”

  “Oh, you have no idea.” He smiled wryly. “I miss my wife. I miss my kids. I miss summer vacation. I do not miss school politics.”

  “Silver linings,” she said. She had her own, as well.

  Ted, Claire, and Garreth came back a minute later. Ted’s shirt was off, and he was carrying something in it.

  “You get us something more for dinner?” she asked him.

  “No. But something else got dinner. I wanted to show you.”

  He dumped the content of his shirt on the ground. It was the remains of an animal, possibly one of the little horse creatures. It was nothing but bones now. A skull, a rib cage, femurs, even toe bones.

  Claire said, “It was actually all together when we found it. I mean, it was like an exhibit in your museum or something, everything in the right place, just lying there.”

  Ted said, “Yeah, it got jumbled when I carried it. Sorry.”

  Bob was studying one of the leg bones closely, turning it this way and that. “Huh. Picked clean. No teeth marks. Everybody pick up a bone and look for any.”

  They all grabbed a bone and looked carefully, but no one saw anything they thought was a bite mark.

  Garreth said, “Mine doesn’t even have a scratch.”

  “Interesting,” Bob said. “I wonder what ate the flesh.”

  “A scavenger?” Claire said.

  “You said the bones weren’t scattered, so no. And they’d be chewed, obviously chewed.”

  Hannah said, “I heard an owl the other night, but owls will eat bones and all, usually, and then you find the indigestible parts as pellets, stuff all clumped together after they regurgitate them.”

  Ted said, “This was too big for an owl to eat.”

  “Maybe not a Paleocene owl,” she said. “Or the terror crane. But it’s not a pellet.”

  “So it has to be insects,” Bob said. “Or worms or other critters of that sort.”

  “Speaking of which,” said Ted, getting back into his shirt and buttoning it. “Until a minute ago, I was being bit half to death.”

  “Yeah,” said Hannah, “they do seem to bite more toward dusk, don’t they?”

  Claire said, “As far as I can tell, they bite all the time. While I was fishing, they were all over me.”

  Garreth said, “I’m lucky. Mosquitoes have always passed me by for sweeter blood or something.”

  “I’m not sure if these are mosquitoes or not. Either way, that could be a blood type thing saving you from the bites,” said Bob. “I’m not sure we know for sure, but you’re right, Garreth. Some people get bitten a lot more.”

  Claire said, “Trade blood with you, Garreth.”

  “I think I’ll keep it, thanks. Speaking of which,” he said, “how’s Nari?”

  “I haven’t checked on her. You can, though. I’m sure she’d appreciate it.” She saw him walk toward the trees but hesitate at the edge of the circle. She realized he was seeing Dixie talking to Nari, more than likely, and might not be anxious to suffer more of her sneering. But he squared his shoulders and walked forward, disappearing into their campsite.

  Claire said, “Anything I can do to help with dinner?”

  “Sure. Take over. When the rocks are hot enough, dig out the fillets from the ferns there and put them on to cook, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, and dropped to a seated position. “What about the bones we found?”

  “We should keep them,” Hannah said, “in case we think of a use for them.” She got up and stretched. “I’m going to check on the net, see what they’re doing with it.”

  Ted said, “Me too.”

  Bob said, “I’ll keep Claire company, then. Keep resting my old bones.”

  The rest of the evening passed without incident. The fish was sweet and good, but they could have eaten five times as much, easily. They set night watches again, but nothing but the changing of the watch disturbed their sleep.

  In the morning, her stomach was fine, so she declared the spring water safe to drink. She divided up the group into two. Most, she sent to the lake, to fish and filter water. She went back to the rock spring, and she picked Ted and Dixie to go with her.

  “Why them?” said Jodi. “I wouldn’t mind going again.”

  “Because I believe they’re the fastest runners. And the terror crane is out there.”

  “Oh.” Jodi’s eyes were wide.

  Chapter 17

  As they walked through the jungle, Hannah explained her thinking about the spring to these two.

  “What kind of rocks?” Ted said. “If we build a pool.”

  “Non-porous ones. I think what the plateau is made of must be okay. At least some of them are, or the water wouldn’t be running along horizontally and seeping out, you see?”

  Dixie said, “I get it. It’d just fall right through rocks that have holes.”

  “Right.”

  “Do you know what kind of rocks they are?” Ted asked. “The ones that won’t let water through?”

  “Not my expertise. Maybe one of you guys knows something about rocks.”

  Dixie said, “Not that I know of. Rex is into stars, not rocks.”

  Hannah said, “Laina math, Claire fishing and hunting. I’ve caught that much so far.”

  Ted said, “M.J. knew about rocks, didn’t he?”

  “He did, and a lot,” Hannah said, feeling sad again. “One of his degrees was in geology.”

  “I guess we live in a world without college degrees now,” Ted said. “I was up for an athletic scholarship. Maybe even two.”

  Dixie said, “My family couldn’t afford anything more than community college. I figured I’d work fulltime, go to school part-time, and save money and transfer after a few years. But I guess that’s not a worry anymore either.”

  Hannah said, “We’re coming to the edge of the trees. Let’s be quiet now, in case t
he terror crane is out there hunting.”

  They came to within sight of the clearing, and Hannah signaled them to a stop. She inched forward and looked around. Nothing out there except one soaring bird. It was big, but 21st century big, like a buzzard. She watched as it coasted over the vines and ferns.

  She waved the kids forward, and the three of them walked to the plateau, to the spot where they had found the spring yesterday. Chipping at the rock face with their rock hammers did nothing to increase the flow of the water.

  Hannah called a halt after a half-hour of work. “I think no matter what we do, it’s just pumping at a certain rate, and we won’t be able to get more than it’s willing to give.”

  “Might it stop flowing in the future?” Ted asked.

  “Sure, or after a rainy season it might increase, or six different trickles might pop up. Anyway, let’s get on with building the pool. You guys try to pick up any flat rocks that look like these here, under where the water is coming out.”

  Dixie said, “What are you going to do?”

  “Clear out these ferns. Unless you’d rather. I think it’s the harder job, but whichever you prefer.”

  “I’ll get rocks,” she said.

  Hannah bent to her task, pulling up the ferns that were being watered by the trickle of the spring. It struck her as she did that all these ferns and trees would end up buried. If left long enough, they’d turn into oil fields. She wondered if anything this young, just 60 million years old, was responsible for any oil of the 21st century, or if it’d have to stay untouched for hundreds of millions more years in order to turn into oil.

  She let her mind drift back to the world of cars honking, traffic lights changing, road crews pouring asphalt, busy people commuting to work while talking on their cell phones—and shaving or putting on makeup—at the same time. This life was so different than that. But it was the one people were meant to live, really. Simple repetitive tasks, like pulling another fern, and another. Carrying another two rocks over, and another two. That was what people were made for.