A Dawn of Mammals Collection Page 5

  Too many things to do, and all in this one day. She was busy adding to and reprioritizing her mental to-do list when Ted called out again. “Still nothing. No animal stuff.”

  “Okay, you all get up to where Ted is, and then you can drink,” she said.

  Most of the kids broke into a jog to catch up with Ted. Zach politely walked by M.J.’s side, listening to his ongoing lecture.

  She needed to quiz M.J. about edible plants of this epoch, so she knew what to look for. Lower priority than fire, shelter, and water, though. And trying to get back.

  They caught up with the group and she drank her fill, filling both her water bottles. “Everybody else with a bottle, fill it up.” She saw M.J. slip out his flask, take another sip, and chase it with some water from a cupped hand. Oh well, it wasn’t a big flask. It’d be empty soon enough. And he wasn’t acting drunk.

  When they were all seated, she kept standing and cleared her throat. “I have some ideas,” she said.

  When all eyes were on her, she went through her list of priorities. “First, we need to check the cave again and see if we can go back.”

  “Do you think we can?” This from Claire.

  “I hope we can, but your guess is as good as mine. If we can’t, then there are a bunch of things we need to do before sundown. So we need to stand up and hike back now.”

  “I can wait here for you,” said Zach.

  “We stick together,” said O’Brien. “In fact, I’d like you to stay with your buddy, no more than arm’s length.”

  “My buddy’s a girl,” said Garreth. “I don’t want her to watch me—you know.”

  “I don’t have a buddy,” said Zach.

  “You’ll be my buddy,” said M.J.

  Zach looked pleased.

  O’Brien took five minutes to reassign buddies by sex and then, with more than a few complaints, they stood back up, shouldered their packs if they had them, and followed Hannah back down the watercourse.

  M.J. pointed out the hackberries, and she went to check them. Still small and green. They’d taste wonderful in November, and the seeds could be cracked to reveal an edible nut too. A memory was tickling at the back of her mind. She thought hackberries were listed as a plant to treat diarrhea too, in a book of natural medicines she glanced at. But was the treatment the fruit? Seed? Leaf? Bark? She had no idea. And she wasn’t a hundred percent sure about the diarrhea. Maybe it was some other illness they helped with.

  What she’d give for a modern herbal in her backpack. No, not all the plants would match. But based on what she had seen so far, some would. She recognized a laurel tree across the stream. They matched the 21st century trees far better than the animals did. As if to remind her of that, a branch snapped, and on the other bank appeared a bizarre deer-like creature with two sets of horns: a small set over his nose, a pair of bigger ones between his ears. Or maybe hers, if females had horns.

  “Look, M.J.,” said Jodi, pointing at it. Her voice made the animal wheel and run away.

  “Protoceras,” said M.J. “Cool!”

  Edible, was Hannah’s thought, more than “cool.” They had to start thinking of food.

  She saw the stand of trees she had memorized as the place to turn for the cave and looked left. The sign of their morning passage was still visible as a narrow path of trampled grasses. To put on her list: teach basic orienteering and reading of trails to the kids. She hoped some of them had experience in the wild, but these days she saw it less and less. “Turn left. See our trail through the grass? Follow it back.”

  By the time they reached the cave’s entrance, the kids were tired, hungry and starting to whine and snap at each other. She thought about the pemmican in her pack, divided the calories out by twelve—or nine, just for the kids—and decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. Maybe it would save one of them in the future. But forty-five calories each wasn’t going to satisfy nine still-growing teens.

  She took the lead, with her flashlight, and made sure there were no side tunnels to confuse them. There weren’t. Just a single straight line back. “I think it was about here, right?” she asked. She should have left something to mark the spot. A food wrapper left at the spot, something like that. She shone the light around and found something she had accidentally dropped: half of one side of a butterfly bandage, the part that peels off.

  “Okay, does anyone see anything like the light we walked through?” she called. The kids were gathered around her. They were looking all around, as was she. But there was no glimmer of light.

  Ted pushed out of the group and walked back. He stopped, checked in every direction, and said, “Right about here. I think this is where I landed.”

  Four or five of the others went to join him. Hannah watched them carefully, half-expecting them to disappear. They didn’t. “Who weighs the least?” she said.

  “Me?” said Nari. “Maybe.”

  “Ted, give Nari a boost up into the air.”

  “Be careful,” said O’Brien. “Don’t drop her.”

  Hannah watched Nari, obviously nervous, go to Ted, who grabbed her by the waist and swung her up. Nothing.

  “Farther, just a little,” Hannah said. “And Nari, stick your hand up, see if you feel any of that weird tingling.”

  They did it again and, at her insistence, four more times, moving a few inches to one side or the other each time.

  Nothing.

  She shook her head. “I think that’s the spot too. Anyone who disagrees, tell me, please.”

  Jodi said, “Maybe a foot closer to the wall?” Her doubt was clear in her voice.

  Ted boosted Nari up another three times in that direction. Still nothing.

  Hannah sighed. She wasn’t really expecting anything. But she was hoping. She turned to face the rest of them to give them the bad news. “I guess we aren’t going back today.”

  Chapter 11

  There was a surprised silence. Then Nari squeaked, “You mean we can’t get back home?” The silence gave way to unhappy exclamations. Claire sat down and put her head in her hands.

  O’Brien called out reassurance. “Just not right now. Maybe it needs to be a certain time of day. Or a certain phase of moon. Or....” He seemed to run out of ideas.

  “Or we just wait for the shimmer,” said Laina. “It’s interesting that it’s not there. Was it when we came through?” She looked at Hannah.

  “No,” she said, feeling pretty certain of that. “At least not that I saw. And when I turned on my light, it wasn’t there. Everyone just popped out of the same place.”

  “It’s like something from Star Trek,” Garreth said.

  “Stargate,” said Rex.

  “Supernatural,” said Dixie.

  They debated which TV show their situation most resembled, and Hannah was relieved at the break it gave her to think. To get her head around this. To decide what to do next. She handed her flashlight to Ted and made her way to the back of the group, nearer the cave’s entrance, where O’Brien and M.J. were. She jerked her head to get them to move farther up and out of the shadows.

  “I’m torn. Do we set up camp here? Or find the source of the stream and set it up there?”

  “This is protected,” O’Brien said.

  “But a long hike from the water,” said M.J.

  She said, “At least it’s not uphill to get to the stream. But if we don’t find food, we’ll become less and less able to make it. Needless to say, there’s no food in here.”

  O’Brien said, “We should explore this, see where the cave leads. Are there two entrances, or only one? I’d feel better with something against my back, I think.”

  “We can always build a shelter. Or maybe there’s a rock face at the stream source.”

  “Maybe we should wait until tomorrow, and start all over again at dawn,” said O’Brien. “M.J., what do you think? You know the most about the predators.”

  “I know about the ones we know about, if you understand me. You know as well as me, Bob, we think we only have
fossil remains for one out of a hundred mammals. There could be whistling amphibious whales wearing top hats, for all I know.”

  “Maybe not that,” said O’Brien.

  “But you know—almost anything is possible.”

  “Go over them again, the killers that you know of. And if they’re daytime or nighttime hunters.”

  “Behavior’s always a guess. An educated guess, sure. But like with nimravids? There haven’t been any for millions of years. Cats took over for them. Some big cats hunt in the day, some in the night. It might be true of nimravids too. Some species claimed the daytime as theirs, others the night. Eyes don’t fossilize. Brain structures don’t either—except for a few rare casts of the outside of the brain. I can only guess, and my best guess is that night and day, something will be out there looking for a meal.”

  “Then maybe,” said O’Brien, “we can think like early primates. How did they survive? In trees.”

  “We fall from trees much harder,” pointed out Hannah. “Our mass is greater. And we don’t have prehensile tails. Besides, cats can climb trees. Bears can.”

  “No bears yet,” said M.J.

  “But something dangerous probably can. I say we have to stay on the ground. But here, or near our water source?”

  There was a long silence as the men thought about it. “Here,” said O’Brien.

  “I’d go with water source,” said M.J.

  Hannah had to break the tie. It totally depended on how they could form a shelter upstream. “Water source, provisionally. The cave is our backup plan,” she said. “Sorry, Bob. If I can call you that.”

  “Of course you can. I’ll go along with your decision. But we need to stay flexible at this point.”

  “Right, I agree entirely with that,” she said.

  She heard a voice raised in distress. “But I miss my family!”

  “They’re just getting it,” she said.

  “I’d better go talk with them,” said Bob.

  Hannah did not have a lot of skills in dealing with upset kids. It just made her want to run away, truth be told. She hung back. In the dim light, she could see M.J. take another pull from his flask. “Isn’t that about empty?” she said.

  “Getting there.” He sounded worried. “Maybe I should save the rest for tonight.”

  “Maybe you should save the rest to disinfect the first serious wound we have,” she said.

  “Don’t you still have some alcohol wipes or antibiotic cream or something in your little kit?” he said.

  “Not much. Not enough for twelve people for....” The next word stuck in her throat. “A lifetime.”

  Chapter 12

  “The door—the timegate—worked once. Surely it will work again,” M.J. said.

  “A miracle happened once. I don’t think that means you can demand it set a schedule to recur,” she said.

  “Something made it work. Something in the realm of the real world. Of physics. Something identifiable by science.”

  “Agreed. It happened, therefore it must be able to happen. Maybe it was one of those weird particles physicists talk about. An anti-muon burst or sparticle or whatever. Maybe it was just passing through.”

  “I had no idea you followed physics.” He sounded very happy about it.

  “I watch Nova. The point is, we may be stuck here forever. And love the research possibilities here as you so obviously do, if there’s no way to send the data back ahead, it doesn’t really help you, does it?”

  “Hmm,” he said. “You know, there will be more Eocene fossils here than in the present day.”

  “This is our present day. Probably forever.”

  “The year two thousand and whatever, then. Two hundred thousand years after the rise of sapiens sapiens. Then-today. Not today-today.”

  “I got it the first time.”

  “Irrespective, I can do some collecting. And dinosaur fossils—not that I care about them—but if I could find a site, that’d entertain the kids. Take their mind off missing home.”

  Among all that nonsense, he had a point. The kids couldn’t forget the distance between them and their families, but they could be distracted for a few hours at a time. She couldn’t afford having one of them fall into a depression so deep he’d refuse to eat, or work, or follow orders. “I need to write a list. I’m going outside. I’ll see you all when Bob gets them soothed. Don’t let it be too long.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, with a jaunty salute. She saw him reach for his flask again.

  She navigated the cave by keeping her right hand trailing against the wall until she saw the light of the entrance ahead. She poked her head out and took a good look around, all 360 degrees, making sure there was nothing about to pounce on her. Then she sat down and pulled out pad and pencil and began making notes.

  At first, she scrawled anything that came to mind. Then she started with a fresh sheet and started making lists: Shelter. Food. Lookouts. Fire and fuel. She skipped a few lines and added Orienteering lessons. Survival lessons. Weapons making. She wondered if there were fish in the stream. If so, she could get one of the kids to start weaving a net. If she were to be the general of this group, and M.J. its entertainer and library, and Bob its...den mother, she supposed, that would be fine, but she needed to comb through the other adults’ brains to see if one of them had some hidden skill. No, scratch that. Everyone’s brain. Maybe a net for fishing could be made by someone who had learned macramé at summer camp. Who had the best eyes? Best ears? Who was it that hadn’t been able to see the colors in the rocks—he was probably color blind. She needed to know all that. ASAP.

  By the time M.J. and seven of the kids were out, she was ready to begin organizing them. She looked around. “Where are Bob and Laina and Ted?”

  “Checking out the other end of the cave.”

  Great, another thing to worry about. At least Bob was there. As the minutes passed, she paced, wanting them to hurry back. M.J. lectured about the rise of grass and what it meant to the ecosystems of the Oligocene. Claire’s face, Hannah noticed, was tear-stained. She’d taken it hardest. Or understood it first, perhaps.

  It wasn’t a half-hour before Bob and the others exited the cave. He handed the flashlight back to Hannah and she clipped it to her backpack to charge again. “This is the only opening.”

  “That’s good for protection,” she said. “If we can’t find anything better, we know it’s here.”

  “Okay, kids, back to the stream,” said Bob.

  “I’m tired,” said Dixie.

  “Me too,” said Nari.

  “Getting hungry,” said Garreth.

  “We’re all tired and hungry. But we need to get this done,” she said. “So we’ll suck it up and walk back one more time today. And then there’s plenty to do before sun fall.”

  It was high noon when they reached the spot where they had drunk water before. She let them drink their fill again, but then marched them further up the watercourse. After two hours, they still hadn’t found its source, but it was getting to be a thin trickle between two high banks. It must run a lot higher in the raining months—which could be March or any month. A huge tree had fallen across the stream, forming a natural—but dangerous-looking—bridge.

  “Let’s take a short break,” she said, but she was thinking maybe they needed to stop for the night. The kids were getting awfully tired and whiny. Only Ted took the opportunity to walk back and forth across the tree, his balance good and his step sure. The rest flopped down on the ground, or stayed to drink from the water.

  Hannah watched Ted for a moment and then went to the tree and walked alongside it down to the streambed. The bottom of the tree was at about her shoulder.

  “Whatcha doing?” asked Ted, leaning over.

  “Looking for protection. Maybe a carved-out bit of bank under the tree.”

  Behind her, M.J. was talking about the tree. “Metasequoias covered half the continent,” he was saying.

  She tuned him out. There was a space beneath the tree
where the stream had carved a hollow, one on each side, big enough to put three kids on one side, two on the other. But it wouldn’t deter a predator for long. Besides, there were twelve of them, not just five. She sat down on the ground a foot from the stream, seeing if water seeped into her pants. It didn’t. She picked up a handful of the dirt beneath her, and looked at it. Small rocks and pebbles and sand, really, more than dirt. The surface would work for a night’s sleep.

  The tree had several dead branches. They could snap them off and plant them in the ground along the streambed, make a sort of wall. Keep them hand-width apart, and no big predator would squeeze between. Of course, they could just knock them down.

  “What’re you thinking?” asked Ted.

  She saw no reason not to share her train of thought.

  “We could push them down hard,” he said. “Way into the ground. Then they wouldn’t be knocked over so easily.”

  “Maybe. If they snap off the tree easily, though, they’d snap if we put too much pressure on them.”

  “Let’s see.” He sat, straddling the big tree, and pulled at one of the smaller limbs. He leaned back, putting more and more effort into it. Finally, with a loud crack, it broke off. “Not too easy to break that,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said. “It’s a start. But we’ll need longer branches than that one.”

  Laina and Garreth came over. “What’s going on?” Garreth asked.

  Ted explained.

  “Like a stockade, in the American West,” said Garreth.

  Hannah said, “Right, but we don’t have time to get that fancy, so a little farther apart.”

  “They had sharpened tops.”

  “No time for that—and not worth the effort for one night—but sure, that’s the idea,” she said. She was pleasantly surprised how bright these kids were. Not every group she’d dealt with in the park system had been. The poor choices of campfire-building alone made you wonder just how lacking in common sense some people were. But then these were some sort of science honors students, taking a summer course by choice. They weren’t stupid, she reminded herself. Just young.