Michael Swanwick - Bones of the Earth

They were ambush hunters.

As one, they burst out of the bushes and leapt down from the trees. The air was filled with flying bodies and protomagnolia petals.

Chuck screamed once.

Leyster spun and saw Chuck go down, covered with dromaeosaurs.

Instinctively, he dropped his compass and snatched out the axe. Hollering and swinging, he ran toward the swarming knot of dromies.

Tamara ran past him, yelling at the top of her lungs. She’d thought to drop her knapsack, where Leyster hadn’t. Her spear arm was cocked back, and there was murder in her face.

The dromies scattered.

There were enough of the creatures to kill Tamara and Leyster both. But they weren’t used to being challenged. Faced with a situation totally outside their experience, they retreated across the clearing and toward the shelter of the woods beyond.

Tamara hadn’t dared throw her spear while the dromies were on top of Chuck. She threw it now, shifted her second spear to her throwing hand, and threw that as well.

One spear flew wide. The other caught its target square in the chest.

At the verge of the clearing, a dromie turned to chatter defiance and was almost hit by a stone Tamara flung. Angry and alarmed, it darted back into the forest. Briefly, the brush was filled with dark shadows milling about in confusion. But when Tamara dashed in under the trees after them, they were nowhere to be found.

She turned back toward the meadow. “Chuck?”

Chuck had twisted as he fell. His body lay face down under the protomagnolias. Leyster knelt beside it and felt for the pulse, though he knew what he would find. There had been somewhere between six and nine of the little gargoyles, and they’d all gotten in several bites before being chased away. Chuck had been bitten in the legs, arms, and face. His throat had been torn open.

“He’s dead,” Leyster said softly.

“Oh… crap!” Tamara turned away and started to cry. “Damn, damn, damn.”

Leyster started to turn Chuck’s body over. But it didn’t move quite right when he shifted it, and something started to slide loosely from the abdomen. He remembered then how dromies would latch onto their prey with their forelimbs and use those enormous claws on their hindlimbs to eviscerate their victims. Chuck’s abdomen would be ripped open from crotch to rib cage.

He eased the body back into his original position, and stood.

Tamara looked stricken. He put his arms around her, and she buried her face in his shoulder. Her back heaved with her sobs. But Leyster found he had no tears in him. Only a dry, miserable pain. Living in the Maastrichtian, with violent death an everyday possibility, had made him harder. Once he would have felt guilty for surviving. He would have blamed himself for his friend’s death, and sought after a reason why he should have been spared when Chuck was not. Now he knew such emotions to be mere self-indulgence. The dromaeosaurs had chosen Chuck because he was last in line. If Leyster had been limping, or Tamara had been having her period, things would have gone differently.

It was just the way it was.

In survival training, they’d called it “the buddy system.” To survive an attack, you didn’t have to be faster than the predators—just faster than your buddy. It was a system that served zebras and elands well. But it was hell on human beings.

Leyster unhooked Chuck’s knapsack, so they could redistribute his things in their two packs. Mastering his revulsion, he went through Chuck’s pockets for things they might yet need. Then he removed Chuck’s shoes and belt. Until they mastered tanning, they couldn’t afford to abandon the least scrap of leather.

“I found the compass,” Tamara said. Then, when he shook his head in puzzlement, “You dropped it. I picked it up.”

She held the compass up for him to see, and began crying again.

“There are plenty of rocks in the stream. We should build Chuck a cairn. Nothing fancy. Just something big enough to keep the dromies off his corpse.”

Tamara wiped her eyes. “Maybe we should let them have him. That’s not an entirely bad way to dispose of a paleontologist—by feeding him to the dinosaurs.”

“That might be good for you and me. But Chuck wasn’t a bone man. He was a geologist. He’ll get rocks.”

Leyster wasn’t sure how many miles he and Tamara got under their belts before the night overcame them. Less than they’d planned. More than could be expected. They walked in a kind of daze, tirelessly. Later, he couldn’t remember whether they’d kept an eye out for predators or not.

Just before turning in, Leyster called Daljit and Jamal. He didn’t want to speak with them at all. He really wasn’t in the mood. But it had to be done. “Listen,” he said. “We had a little setback, so we’ll be later than we were expecting to be. But don’t worry, we’ll be there.”

“What happened?” Daljit asked. “You didn’t lose the antibiotics, did you?”

“The antibiotics are fine. We’ll tell you the details when we get there. For now, I just didn’t want you to worry.”

“Yeah, well, you guys better get here soon. Jamal’s not doing that well. His fever is up, and he’s delirious.”

“All I want is a bicycle,” Jamal muttered in the background. “Is that too much to ask?”

“Him and his damned bicycle! I’m going to ring off now. Give my love to Tamara and Chuck, okay?”

Leyster winced. “Will do.”

He stowed away the phone and returned to the fire. He hadn’t gone far from it. Just enough that there wouldn’t be any chance of his dropping the phone where it might get scorched.

“You didn’t tell her?” Tamara said.

“I couldn’t.” He sat down beside her. “Time enough when we get there. She’s got enough to worry about, as it is.”

They said nothing for a long while, silently watching the fire burn slowly down to coals. Finally, Tamara said, “I’m going in.”

“I’ll join you in a bit,” Leyster said. “I want to sit and think for a bit.”

He sat, listening to the night. The syncopated music of frogs, and the steady pulse of crickets. The lonely cry of the moon-crane. There were other noises mixed in there as well, chuckles and distant warbling cries that might be dinos and might be mammals and might be something else entirely. Ordinarily, he found these sounds comforting.

Not tonight.

There were more than three hundred bones in the skeleton of a triceratops, and if they were all dumped in a heap in front of Leyster, he’d be able to assemble them in an afternoon. The sixty-three vertebrae would all be in the proper order, from the syncervical to the final caudal. The elaborate fretwork of the skull would be knit into one complex whole. The feet would be tricky, but he’d sort out the bones of the pes, or hindfeet, into two piles of twenty-four, starting with metatarsals I to V, arranging the phalanges in a formula of 2-3-4-5-0 beneath them, and capping all with an ankle made up of the astragalus, calcaneum, and three distal tarsals. The manus, or front foot, almost simple by contrast, contained five metacarpals, fourteen phalanges arranged in a formula of 2-3-4-3-2, and three carpals—still, it was a rare ability to sort them by sight. Leyster knew his way around a skeleton as well as any man.

He knew, as well, the biochemical pathways of the creature’s metabolism and catabolism; many of the subtleties of its behavior and temperament; its feeding, fighting, mating, and nurturing strategies; its evolutionary history; and a rough outline of its range and genetic structure. And this was but one of the many dinosaurs (to say nothing of non-dinosaurs) he had studied in depth. He knew everything it was possible to know, with the resources at hand, about the life and death of animals.