In Situ (2 page)

Although the sky was clear and the breeze calm, Mot considered that he must have initially been
downwind of them, a situation that he sensed was about to change in the predator’s favor.

The creatures’ footfalls, however, soon passed the rock and were becoming more distant and
, fortunately for Mot, were not moving toward the Arzat entrance. He closed his eyes and focused on the slight breeze trying to detect its exact direction. No question, the beasts had moved down wind of him. A few more paces and Mot knew he would have to risk a run for it.

Mot
quietly slipped down the rock and dropped silently back to the forest floor, stopping and listening intently several times along the way. He could still hear them, breaking tree limbs and snapping their jaws, but the beasts had continued moving deeper into the forest, away from his location. The moment Mot judged that he could get to the cave before they could get to him, he would make his move. Maybe he would be lucky. No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than the threesome stopped suddenly. Mot imagined them sniffing the air, aware that the beasts had probably caught his scent. He immediately began to run, literally for his life.

The long nails on his toes bit into the soft ground of the forest floor and propelled him forward like lightning.
Mot was a fast runner, one of the fastest in his clan, but the darkness made it difficult for him. He did his best to move quickly yet quietly the way he had been taught by his father—a necessary skill for an Arzat Hunter—and drew his weapon from its scabbard without breaking pace. But the beasts were on to him, they had sniffed him out, and Mot could hear their angry cries carry through the night as they trampled through the forest and scrambled to intercept him.

As Mot ran the la
st stretch of path to the cave, he was surprised to see that the entrance appeared to be open; the dull orange glow from the torches that burned further inside dimly lighting his way. Something was wrong; the barrier was never down, night or day. Mot found himself momentarily annoyed at El, but he didn’t have time to question. He could feel the threesome almost at his back, howling with rage, as if Mot had unfairly deceived them. Then, just a stride or two from the entrance, one of beasts leapt out of the darkness, snarling and roaring. Mot was forced to turn and confront the animal or die. He spun around, baring his own sharp teeth, mustering the best battle cry he could produce, and raised his hunting stick to protect himself. As he did so, the attacker stopped, suddenly suspicious. It craned its head to the side, studying Mot, looking him directly in the eyes as if he were taking Mot’s measure. The beast hissed and growled, saliva dripping from its enormous jaws, its breath reeking of spoiled meat, but did not attack.

The creature was waiting for something
, and when its partners finally emerged from the forest, Mot recognized the reason. The animal instantly lunged at him now, confident that it had the support of its mates. Mot knew he was dead, but he was going to make his attackers work for their dinner. He drew back his hunting stick and stepped forward. As the first attacker dove at him, Mot swiftly shoved his hunting stick deep into one of the creature’s eyes, so forcefully that the tip emerged from the back of its head. The animal reeled back, tearing the weapon from Mot’s grip in the process, its deafening roar filling the night air as it began almost immediately to die. The creature staggered, mortally wounded, and disappeared screaming into the forest.

The other two beasts
, momentarily confused, quickly recovered and charged, anxious to disembowel Mot with their razor sharp claws. His hunting stick gone, Mot’s only option was to retreat. He turned and sprang for the cave, but as he did so, he tripped and fell headlong through the entrance, almost impaling himself on one of the eight or nine hunting sticks that were poised and waiting just inside. His remaining attackers, now in a rage and having lost all sense of caution, plunged through after him.

*

Mot, dazed and exhausted, rolled to the side and watched with a sense of awe as a group of Arzat Hunters who had positioned themselves just inside the entrance skillfully dispatched his pursuers
—each of them very quickly and methodically receiving three or four vicious stabs to the chest and one through the head. Even so, the creatures did not die right away, and the floor of the cave became treacherous and slippery with their bowels and blood, as the Hunters held them down and watched the beasts scream and squirm until there was no longer any sign of life in them. When it was over, the Hunters gathered their weapons, stood over their kills, and gave a collective howl of victory that resonated through the cave and shook the walls. The barricade was carefully rolled back into place, two new sentries were assigned, and the Hunters began to disperse to the Main Chamber of the cave.

Mot eventually got to his feet and silently watched as each of the Hunters passed him, their bodies covered in the blood of their victims
. In their eyes, a mixture of anger and pride. Anger at Mot for having risked the lives of the entire clan; pride in themselves for having successfully settled the problem that Mot had created. The Arzat Hunters knew they were extremely fortunate that no one had been injured or killed due to Mot’s indiscretion. Mot’s own father had been the last to walk past, but he had done so without looking at his son.

It was then that Mot had a revelation
. He suddenly and clearly understood what was meant by “atrocity,” and that he had just committed one.

C
hapter 2

I
n Situ

“Yeeeeesssss!”

Alex screamed at the top of her lungs
as she stretched her arms into the sky in triumph. The sound of her voice reverberated around the high desert canyon and eventually came back as a mere whisper, gently reminding her that there was no one around for miles to hear. The thought made her smile. She liked being alone.

“Yes, yes, yes,” she repeated to herself in a lower tone as she looked eagerly back down at the rocky swatch of earth she had been bent over for most of the last two days.
To the layman, the obscure lines on the ground might not have meant much, but to Dr. Alexandria S. Moss, they were a revelation.

Finally, after days of searching, a dinosaur, a real honest-to-god dinosaur.
Not just any dinosaur either. Finding one out here was easy. They are all over the place. Jurassic, no problem. Stegosaur, Allosaur, Brachiosaur? What do you want? This whole area was a veritable dinosaur hunter’s heaven for Jurassic era fossils, and Alex had found more than her fair share over the years. Even a Cretaceous specimen wasn’t all that tough. They were all over the place if your eyes were open. Mostly though, the discoveries came in bits and pieces: a bone fragment here, a tooth there. But finding a near perfect and totally complete skeleton from the late Cretaceous was like hitting the jackpot, the mother lode of paleontology. The animal’s bones appeared to be perfectly in situ, exactly as they had since it had died so many millennia ago. Far better than that, as near as she could tell, Alex had just discovered an entirely new species. If that were true, she would ultimately have the pleasure of naming her new find, a goal she had been dreaming of her entire career. Alex and her father had spent many years in these hills looking for this particular type of animal, and now there it was, right in front of her. She had finally unearthed enough of it to determine that it was almost surely complete.

“Needle in a haystack, Alex, needle in a haystack.”
She could hear her father in her head as clearly as if he were standing next to her. “Patience, Alex, patience!” She had heard him saying over and over as she had carefully exhumed the first parts of the skeleton. She wished old Simon could have lived to see this moment.

*

Alex had spent the entire fall semester, on sabbatical from the University of Utah at Salt Lake, scouring the remote deserts of northeastern Utah, looking for specimens from the Cretaceous. Not that this was necessarily a big enough deal to win her “paleontologist of the year” or anything, she thought, but this one was going to be
her
dinosaur. No,
our
dinosaur, she corrected herself. Dad would have been proud. As she worked, she busied herself concocting potential scientific names for the find. Whatever it would be, it would most certainly include some reference to her father.

The specimen she had discovered
was right on the K-T boundary of the Cretaceous-to-Tertiary period change, a geological marker separating the time of the dinosaurs from the present. It was largely becoming accepted in the scientific community that a massive asteroid had impacted the earth around 65 million years ago which had led to the extinction of most dinosaurs shortly thereafter. There was speculation that the K-T asteroid’s impact theoretically would have been the equivalent of a billion atom bombs simultaneously detonating, which was almost impossible to imagine.

Alex’s father had been obsessed with the idea that there must have been intelligent life before the event.
If the 65 million years since was just a drop of time in earth’s history; the time of the development of significant mammals, and finally man, was just a molecule. It had never made sense to old Simon that intelligent life would not have developed in the millions and millions of years of evolution during the long reign of the dinosaurs. In fact, if Darwinian Theory was taken into account at all, it made no sense whatsoever.

*

The specimen that Alex had found might just prove him right. Look at the prefrontal lobes on that guy, she thought to herself. She decided that, for the time being, until she came up with a scientific name, she would simply refer to the new discovery as her Einstein-osaur. She laughed at the thought.

Despite her excitement, Alex had to stand for a minute and see if she could shrug off the pain in her back.
She had been bent over most of the day, digging in the rocky soil with not much more than the equivalent of a toothbrush and a chisel. As she straightened up, she grabbed a bottle of water from her knapsack, threw off her wide brimmed Tilley hat, tipped her head back, and took a huge drink. Water never tasted so good. Alex kept the bottle pressed against her lips until it was almost empty then lifted it away and let the last of the liquid run over her forehead and down her face.

“Hydrate
, Alex, hydrate.” It was the ghost of her father again. She smiled and shook her head.

Everything
Alex knew about this desert she had learned from him. A brilliant paleontologist in his own right, her fondest memories of Dr. Simon D. Moss had been born out here in the high deserts. They had spent countless summers and school breaks all over the west, camping and digging, always on the hunt for that elusive discovery. It got into your blood, and Alex had definitely inherited the paleontologist’s blood of her father. She earned her PhD from Cal Berkley, but had fought for and finally won a teaching job at the university in Salt Lake, near the deserts she had always really called home. These were some of the best dinosaur-hunting grounds in the world, the high, barren expanses of central and northeast Utah.

As she looked around,
Alex felt a cool afternoon breeze cross over her. The rocks were starting to grow long shadows. Her camp was in a canyon just below the dig site at the base of an ancient rock formation. The cliffs overhead topped off around 100 feet above her.

It was only
late September, but Alex could already sense the desert beginning to shift toward winter. It was something felt rather than seen. The day had been sunny and warm. Now, as the sun started to sink lower in the sky, the hills and canyons began to cool and color, a million variations of the light spectrum; greens and blues, reds and orange—a gigantic rainbow draped like a blanket over the dull grey rocks.

“There is no possible way I could ever describe this to anyone,”
Alex quietly said to herself as she stood watching the change. She took a long, deep breath then exhaled in what was almost a sigh.

Alex considered it
to be quite normal to talk to herself and others, both living and dead, when she was out on one of her “dig binges,” as she liked to refer to them. It was a necessary by-product of self-induced solitude. Sometimes she had arguments with rocks and other inanimate things that were blocking her way. She usually won. Out here, there was no one to ask permission of, no one to seek approval from—total freedom. For her, the desert was a place to gain perspective. When she felt too full of herself or dulled by life with her own species, Alex liked to retreat to the vastness of the high Utah desert and hang out with her dinosaurs.

Only when she wiped her cheek with the back of her hand did she suddenly realize how dirty she was
, covered in dust that was millions of years old. The almost white powder became suddenly dark and muddy when wet. She laughed when she thought about how her face must look-filthy. But she was far away from a mirror at the moment, and since she preferred to work alone, there was no one around that might have any comment about the dark lines of grime she had created with the splash of water. In fact, there was no one around to say anything, which was exactly the way she liked it.

“It’s going to take me a week to get this stuff off,” she said quietly to herself as she examined the backs of her hands.
The grit was already becoming lighter as the dry desert air quickly wicked the moisture away. She looked at her hands critically, flipping them over as she would if she were preparing for a manicure. “Man, oh, man,” Alex shook her head as she fully realized just how far she had strayed from civilization. She wondered absently, for just a moment, whether or not somewhere, under all of that muck and abrasion, the rather beautiful hands that she had brought with her could be found again. “What do you think there, Albert?” she said to her new-found fossil. “Think there might still be a woman hiding out under here or have you ruined me forever?”

In fact, the rather sodden female that now stood in the middle of nowhere was quite a beauty.
Not that she thought of it much any more, but it had been an issue both in school and early in her career. Doors had been opened and opportunities presented that Alex had often wondered about. Were they more linked to her looks or to her academic efforts? Men were everywhere and interested, some obnoxiously so. For a short time, she had even become somewhat resentful and suspicious. It had taken her father, as usual, to straighten her out when she had one day protested.

“Alex,” he had said in his usual authoritative way, “I’m going to try to tell you this as a man
, and not your father. You have a gift of beauty—clearly inherited from your mother, not me—that most young women your age would die for, and most, shall we say ‘senior’ women, probably envy to no end. The fact that men are paying attention to you is not a problem. When they stop, that will be a problem, because you’ll be old and gray like me and wish—oh how you will wish—that you were young again. As far as your performance on professional or academic fronts, just as is true for most anyone who has ever accomplished anything, you will have to learn to become your own best judge and jury. In the meantime, buck up kid, and enjoy the fast and fleeting ride of youth. Besides, being as beautiful as you are can’t really be all that bad, can it Alex? You’re a very lucky girl.”

She still remembered how he had smiled at her
with the famously disarming “trademark” Dr. Simon Moss wink. Alex had never complained again.

Her father had only been gone for two years
, and the pain of his mysterious death still lingered. It made her feel older somehow. But at 29, youth was very much with Alex, and she figured that she could still pass for a college freshman in the right clothes and make up. It was almost a certainty if she were to make the rare move of letting her long amber hair fall from the normally “clipped-up for convenience” style that she wore 90 percent of the time. The fact that she was occasionally carded at restaurants and bars around campus she now took as a compliment.

She’d left her hair long, not just because she liked it.
Alex could still remember her mother, an actual beauty queen herself when she was in her youth, cutting her own long black hair into what she had told Alex at the time was a “mommy cut.” Her mother had still remained attractive despite the scissors, but even at her own young age at the time, Alex had sensed finality in the move. Her mother had passed from one era to another, from youth to middle age. Not long after, she had died in a tragic automobile accident, leaving Alex and her father to fend for themselves. Alex had a vague notion that when she finally cut her own hair, she would be passing through her own era. For the moment, she figured that since she pretty much liked the current one, there was no hurry. The thing about time was that “there’s never any going back.” Her father, as usual, had been so very right. But there was one way you could sort of go back, she thought, as she cast her eyes back down at the ground in front of her.

*

She had found a unique dinosaur, something that had probably lived somewhere in the vicinity of 65 million years ago. This was a bipedal carnivore of some sort-a theropod that walked upright on two feet-of that she was certain. The elongated head and the heavy jawbone that was lined with what would have been razor sharp teeth were all dead giveaways as to its diet. Those facts in themselves were not significant. There were plenty of well-known theropods that fit the description: Tyrannosaurs, Velociraptors, Chindesaurs. The list was long. But most were from the Jurassic, or even the Triassic. This big boy… might be a female, Alex, might be a female, she corrected herself, was something that existed at the edge of the Cretaceous extinction.

Hell,
Alex thought, he or she might have even been a witness. Of course, she would have to carbon date to be sure, but the creature’s proximity to the long line of dark iridium-laden sediment around him suggested that he was “right there” when the world had exploded so many millennia ago. Alex guessed, based on its size and what she could see of its skeletal structure, that it had died as a young adult. He would have stood over eight feet and weighed over seven hundred pounds. But what she found particularly interesting about this creature was the size of its skull, especially in the area of the prefrontal lobes, the thinking part of the brain. It was enormous even compared to Velociraptors-known theropods from the Jurassic thought to have been extremely intelligent.

As Alex bent to get a closer look
at the skull, she discovered something else. There appeared to be some sort of damage, a round jagged hole in the back right quadrant. Alex couldn’t see any other obvious signs of trauma, but she had only just barely exposed the side of the animal. She shrugged. Ultimately, she knew she would have to get the creature back to the university labs to determine how it had actually died, and with any luck, when it had died. A part of her wanted to keep working, but it was getting late and she had been at it since dawn. She looked at the sky one more time, then decided to make some notes and further document the find before it got dark.