Dinosaur Summer (20 page)

The conference broke up. Peter and Anthony walked away from the fire toward the steel bridge. It was as big as a covered bridge across a stream, but completely open, mounted on a large motorized pivot sunk into the rock, with girder-hung concrete counterweights slung on both sides behind the pivot. To Peter it resembled a big, thick construction crane, with a roadway built down its center. Its girders were rusty and the engine house had not been painted in years, but tools and oil cans and drums of fuel were lying about; work had been done recently. Anthony peered into the engine house, wrinkled his nose, and walked to the edge with Peter. Ray joined them. "Eager?" he asked.

Anthony nodded. "Yeah," Peter said.

OBie's footsteps sounded behind them, and he lined up beside Ray. "It's been a long time," he said quietly.

They stood on the rim of the cleft between Pico Poco and El Grande. Peter felt dizzy, looking into the windy darkness below. He moved back a step.

"A mile deep," Ray said, leaning over the abyss. The fringe of hair around his high forehead rose and fluttered in an updraft.

They all stared across the gap of one hundred feet at the starlit cliff face opposite, the southern edge of the greatest of all the tepuis. Atop the plateau, beyond a clearing about fifty yards wide, rose the shadows of thick round sandstone shapes, weathered into weird faces and the broken battlements of old fortresses.

For the first time, they looked upon the ancient landscape that Professor George Edward Challenger and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had called the Lost World.

Chapter Twelve

OBie and Ray and the camera crew woke before dawn. Peter had been too excited to sleep--or so he thought--but Anthony roused him before sunrise. For breakfast they ate beans and cassava bread and dried apricots. The air smelled of woodsmoke and steaming coffee and stony damp. The clouds had broken up during the night, leaving clear air still sprinkled with the brightest stars.

Jorge's workers crowded around a smoky fire near their camp. They drank coffee and waved cheerfully as Peter and Anthony walked past. Billie and the river pilots and drivers sat around another fire. Billie leaped up to join them.

"Today or tomorrow will be the big day," he said.

"Looks that way," Anthony said, lifting his camera to check the composition for a sunrise shot. The cages were outlined by skyglow to the east.

Shawmut and Osborne had placed the heavy camera and dolly on their tracks near the bridge. They were making sure the tracks were level and wouldn't wobble as the dolly passed over.

Shellabarger was nowhere to be seen. Catalina Mendez stood with her brothers near the bridge. The bridge motor was being tested. As they neared the engine house, Shellabarger and the taller adjutant emerged, their hands black with grease. The colonel followed. His hands were immaculate.

The trainer glanced at Anthony, face orange and eyes glinting in the flaming sunrise. "Looks like all the engineers need a little help," he said ruefully. Kasem and Keller joined him with more tools from the supply crates. Anthony walked along the length of the bridge, and at several points crawled underneath to inspect it.

The young-faced Army adjutant said, "The bridge is very old and has had no maintenance for almost twenty years. We do not think it is safe." Wetherford stood to one side, picking his teeth with a twig. He seemed disinclined to get involved in the brewing dispute.

Shellabarger approached the colonel as if he would tower over him.

"We were told this bridge would be fixed and ready to go," he said.

"Apparently, Caracas did not know it was so bad," the adjutant said with a half pleading look at Do�Mendez. "The engineers have come and gone. Their report is final."

Anthony

"We have made our conclusions known to Colonel de Badajoz," Catalina told Shellabarger, "but he tells me his engineers are more informed than my brothers."

Shellabarger pointed at the steel-girdered span in disgust. "I've gotten eleven tons of animals and cages and equipment this far. The bridge will hold until they cross. I don't give a damn what happens after that."

Colonel de Badajoz understood enough English to get the gist of the trainer's words. He spoke in a low voice to the adjutant and cast dark looks at Shellabarger. The adjutant, uncomfortable at being caught between these two, said, "The Army engineers say the bridge's main weight-bearing girders have rusted badly across the center span . . . It cannot support a truck and a big animal. Crossing would be disastrous."

Catalina rolled her eyes and turned to Anthony, just back from his inspection. "My brothers are good engineers," she said. "There may be some concern about a truck carrying an animal crossing together, but the bridge is sound enough to bear at least three tons."

"Our heaviest animal weighs three tons," Anthony said. "We can change our plans and keep the trucks off the bridge. We push the animals across the bridge, let them go free, one at a time, and after that . . ." He smiled at her. "We're done. Nothing over three tons."

"We don't expect to crash a truck into it," Shellabarger snapped at the adjutant.

The adjutants and the colonel drew back and conferred for a few moments. The taller adjutant returned and said to Shellabarger and OBie, "We are here to ensure your safety. There is also another matter--that of quarantine inspection. The animals must be inspected before being released back into the wild. We apologize that our livestock inspectors have not yet arrived. They will be flown out of Uruyen within three or four days. Perhaps by then we will have resolved this controversy--"

"None of this was brought up before," Shellabarger said. His face was growing dangerously red. He turned toward the colonel, hands raised to heaven. "The animals will be dead in three or four days! We don't have the proper food--they have to be returned to the wild--"

He advanced on the colonel, who fingered the strap of his pistol's holster. The adjutants tried to push between their superior officer and the beet-faced trainer. Catalina intervened, taking the trainer's arm.

"Se�hellabarger, come with me, please." She nodded for Anthony and Wetherford to follow as well. Peter tagged along with them to the concrete pad surrounding the bridge's engine house. OBie and Ray listened from a few yards away.

"Can't you just order them to stand aside?" the trainer asked.

"It is not so simple," she said, sighing deeply. "None of us knows what may happen next between the junta and the president. May I make a suggestion?" She stood with hands on hips, taller than the trainer, glaring down at him.

Shellabarger drew up one side of his lips in an acquiescing grimace. "Sure," he said.

"You do not have to worry about the inspectors. They are civilians and under my authority. I can waive the inspection, which I did not ask for in the first place."

"Our animals are healthy," Shellabarger grumbled.

"I see that," Catalina said. "I suggest that we test the bridge to learn what sort of weight it might bear. We can drive an unloaded truck across first. If the bridge survives that, and my brothers are certain it will, we can then send the animals across. The Army cannot object reasonably under those circumstances."

"What about unreasonably?" OBie asked.

Catalina looked to the sky. This was the best she could offer.

"All right," Shellabarger said. "Let's try it."

Catalina and her brothers spoke with the adjutants andel Colonel, voices rising several times. The colonel finally gave in, with some sharply worded provisos. Catalina agreed.

She returned to the concrete platform. "They will allow testing."

Shellabarger softened a little and his face lost its reddish hue. "We appreciate the help," he said gruffly, and returned to work in the engine house, where the motor had begun to roughen its idle. Keller and Kasem entered after him, and then Billie.

Wetherford pulled the twig out of his mouth and tossed it aside, then stuck his hands in his pockets and ambled over to the weed-grown, sun-cracked macadam roadway leading to the bridge.

Anthony looked at Peter and gave him a wan smile. "That bridge cost a lot of money in 1914," he said.

"Is it really solid?" Peter asked.

"It'll hold at least four tons for now. In another couple of years, who knows?" He made his left hand into the edge of the cliff and sailed the right over it and down.

A crowd of J.E.M.'s workers began to cut at the brush and trees on the edge of Pico Poco. Ray filmed them briefly, then joined OBie near the bridge. Peter watched the two framing shots with their hands and looking through little sighting scopes. The film crew began measuring and marking distances to points near the bridge from the dolly and tracks.

Shellabarger called for Peter and he joined the trainer near Sammy's cage, still on the back of its truck. "He's our main problem. The venator's only two tons; Sammy's three. All the other animals put together weigh less than either of them. Poor Sheila was five tons." He shook his head sadly. "She might not have made it anyway. If your father and the Mendez brothers are right, the bridge will still hang together." He sighed. "But we don't want anyexcitement. "

Peter nodded.

"We're going to build a stockade to hold all the animals except Dagger. He stays in his cage and goes last. We'll dismantle the other cages and use the ramps to make a run for him directly from his cage to the bridge. I trust he'll have sense enough to go straight home." Shellabarger walked over to the venator's cage, Peter by his side. The tarp had been raised and tied back, giving the animal a clear view of the proceedings but shielding him from the direct sun.

"For twenty years I've watched him, and he's watched me," Shellabarger said. "I've never made a false move . . . and he's never had a chance to show us what he can really do."

Still crouched on his belly, the venator viewed them with a half shut eye. Simply being near the beast made Peter's insides twist. Every cell in his body knew that here was swift death: ivory teeth and shining claws.

"I worked in an abattoir in Chicago when I was a kid," Shellabarger said. "Hauled slops from the drainage floor to make sausage and fertilizer. He stinks worse than anything I ever hauled." But the trainer's expression and tone revealed no disgust; rather, admiration, and something like regret.

The sound of axes and machetes reached them from the edge of the mountain forest. Shellabarger walked around the cage, rubbing the thick gray stubble on his jaw with one hand. "They all wanted to come close to him. Men, women, kids . . . hundreds of thousands of them. They all wanted to look death in the face. Caged death. We didn't bother telling them there were bigger, meaner, swifter animals on El Grande."

"The death eagles?"

"Yeah," Shellabarger said. "I saw one on my last trip. We didn't even bother trying to catch it. Twenty feet tall and thirty long, with a wicked hooked beak and teeth to boot . . . a big dish of white feathers around its neck, and brown and white feathers hanging from its arms and fanning out from its tail." The trainer hung his fist in front of his abdomen. "Center of gravityhere, not backhere, with a shorter, thicker tail, like one of the avisaurs but really"--he sucked his breath in--"big." Shellabarger looked at Peter and smiled. "Dagger isn't the meanest son of a bitch in the valley of the shadow of death." They walked a few yards back from the truck. "We'll send him back where he belongs. He'll be on his own then."

"Do you think he'll find a mate?" Peter asked.

"I don't know," Shellabarger said. He surveyed Peter critically. "You've put on some muscle, son, don't you think?"

Peter smiled. "Hauling Sammy's alfalfa," he said.

"There wasn't time to tell you back on the river," Shellabarger said, "but that was a hell of a thing you did, jumping into the river after your father. Quick thinking." The trainer tapped his head.

Peter did not know what to say. The trainer was not prone to sentiment, but he was clearly focused on speaking his mind about Peter, and Peter was embarrassed and pleased at once.

"You've learned a lot about the animals."

"I wish we could have saved Sheila," Peter said, glancing back down the road, as if she might be thumping along to join them even now. "If the circus was still a going concern, I'd hire you in a minute," Shellabarger said. "Tell your dad that."

Peter watched the trainer as he crossed the sandstone flats to the engine house.

***

After lunch, the workers began carrying the fruits of their toil up to the flats--long straight logs, creepers, branches, palm fronds. With OBie and Ray filming, and Anthony and Shellabarger and Billie supervising, they started work on the stockade.

The soldiers andel Colonel stayed out of their way. The Army and the Indians behaved like oil and water, refusing to mix or even to come too close together.

It was hard to believe this would all be over soon, and they'd take the trucks back down the trail, ride the boats downriver to the towns on the Caron�nd the Orinoco, and then catch a ship back to the States--to home, wherever that would be. OBie and Ray would have their movie film, and he and his father would have their still pictures and their memories.

He did not know what Shellabarger and Lotto Gluck would have. Memories as well, he supposed.

Peter opened his notebook and wrote:

Until now, I've never understood my father's need to find excitement and go to interesting places. I always felt safest going places in my head. Now that we're here on Pico Poco and the animals are going home soon, I wonder if I'll ever have another adventure again. I'm pretty sure that if another opportunity like this comes my way, I won't turn it down. So now I know more about why my father behaves the way he does--and why my mother could not stand it.

Mrs. Birdqueen

Chapter Thirteen

By three o'clock that afternoon, the stockade was finished. The walls stood eight feet high. The five separate enclosures within the irregular construction gave the animals ample room to turn around. They would not be in the stockade for more than a few hours, but they would be much happier than they were in the cages, Peter thought.