Bone Beds of the Badlands, page 11
I imagined a meat-eater coming after a triceratops or an ankylosaurus right here in this valley seventy-five million years ago. I imagined the prey fighting back, desperate to live. Well, we were desperate all right, that part we had mastered. But how could we get away? How do you escape when someone twice your size and ten times as vicious has you in his sights?
“All right,” I said, “count me in.”
“The first thing we need to do is—” Dorothy started.
“Calm down,” I said firmly.
She smiled. “Right.”
“We could run, run as hard as we can go, but that would only tire us out, and he would likely catch us anyway.”
“Right,” said Dorothy again, “we need to find some other way to evade him.”
“But first we need to sleep,” said Bomber.
“Eh?” I said.
“He’s not going after us in the dark. Not from that distance. And he is likely counting on us being tired and very afraid and desperate. Desperate enough to do something stupid. But we won’t do anything stupid, will we? We will get some sleep, and in the morning we will make a plan. All we need to do right now is maintain a lookout.”
“You know,” said Dorothy, “you’re not such an idiot after all, Connors.”
“Thanks, Osborne…I think.”
And so, right after we had seen probably the most terrifying vision in our lives…we slept. Each of us was the lookout for about an hour and a half. Only Rhett seemed to have a difficult time with it. He still worried me.
The next morning was like the one before. I woke in a fog, unable to figure out where I was, then felt stunned by the hunger in my belly and remembered everything and almost panicked. I wanted to run. And scream while I did it. But Dorothy looked calm, so I tried to be, too. I figured we were all fooling each other about not freaking out, but this time lying to ourselves seemed to make a lot of sense.
“Let’s move while we talk,” suggested Dorothy.
“And let’s stick to the bottoms of the hills,” added Terry, “that way he has the least chance of spotting us. The hills will hide us.”
And so we started out, trying to come up with a plan as we did. The ideas started slowly and then came fast and furious. We actually did consider the merits of running for a while, but running with a purpose. It seemed to us that the field station must indeed be still to the west—that’s why the Reptile was leading us the other way. So we could run as hard as possible westward. But that wasn’t the smartest idea, as Bomber pointed out, because west was an awfully big direction. We had no idea where in the west the field station was—we might miss it by a kilometre or two. And besides, as Bomber also figured out, that was probably exactly what the Reptile wanted us to do. He had taken us a long distance away from where we needed to be, like a lion drawing a gazelle into running for its life or an eagle hoping that a little mammal will come out of its hole and make a dash. When we ran, he would swoop. That’s what he wanted.
“He’s counting on us being predictable.”
“So, we need to be unpredictable,” said Terry.
“That means moving towards him,” commented Dorothy with a steady look.
If she had said that two days ago (in fact, she sort of had) we would have told her she was a quintuple idiot (in fact, we sort of had), but now that crazy idea was actually beginning to make sense.
“He’s like an animal, and he wants us to behave like animals, too. We have to use our brains. We have to behave like human beings and outsmart him.”
“And how do we do that? I’d say that’s the question.” I hated to sound like a downer but I had to be realistic. How could we outsmart a guy in a life-and-death hunt when that guy was an expert at it? This wasn’t a game. This wasn’t something we could afford to lose. If he won, we were dead…for real.
It was the Bomb who first made a concrete suggestion. What he said was really what Dorothy had been saying for a while, but he fleshed it out. And when he did, it made the decision for all of us.
“We need to see him. Up close and personal. Then we’ll know what he really looks like and what he has and how we might take advantage of him. There’s five of us, we’re a herd, remember. Now, let’s think about where he might be.”
“We don’t have to,” said Terry. “We know where he is, or at least where he was a little while ago.”
“So let’s make ourselves visible.” That was Dorothy, always one for bizarre suggestions. “If we want to see him again, I think we need to go somewhere where he can get a clear view of us. Remember, he’s tracking us, planning some trap. Let’s go up on a hill and just stay there until he shows somewhere to the east. Then, we will track him.”
“I don’t know,” said Rhett. It was the first time he’d said anything during this discussion. It wasn’t much of a contribution, but at least he had spoken.
“No,” I said, feeling a little energy, “it’s perfect! Once we spot him, we might be able to stay out of his sightline and then watch him try to watch us. As he comes towards us…we’ll come towards him. We must always know where he is.”
“Then what will we do?”
“I don’t know,” I said. And I really didn’t. What would we do once we got right up to this cold-blooded killer? What would we feel when we looked into his eyes?
Maybe we would just collapse in terror and he would kill us, one after the other. Or maybe we wouldn’t even get that close. None of us was saying it, but in the backs of our minds we were all wondering if those tracks we had seen belonged to a horse that the Reptile was riding.
What chance would we stand then? We wouldn’t even be able to run. Or what if he had a weapon? A gun? We didn’t even want to consider that.
So we set off, looking for the tallest hill we could find, hoping to expose ourselves to one of the most feared villains in all of Canada. We were going to have to figure out the rest as we went along.
13
Up Close and Personal
We picked our hill and up we went, like old-time criminals climbing a scaffold to meet the executioner. At the top we stood as tall as we could and scanned the horizon, mostly looking towards the east. We took out the canteen and drank the last few drops. Then we waited, our hearts pounding.
Sure enough, in about ten minutes he appeared. It was chilling to see his figure again, tall and black on the horizon. He didn’t have the flag any more, didn’t need it. It had done its job. He was still on a high, distant elevation. We saw him stop and then descend, quickly.
“Let’s go! Let’s do the hiding part!” snapped Rhett.
“No,” said Terry, “this is where we do the whites-of-his-eyes thing. We need to see just exactly how he plans to get here.”
Sure enough, we could follow his progress. We stood there for about ten minutes, watching him come all the way down to the bottom of the cliff he had been on. Then he began moving towards us.
“Look,” cried Bomber. “Look what he’s doing!”
“He’s following that old riverbed,” exclaimed Terry. “It goes…” His eyes followed a path that led towards us. “It goes right past us! That’s how he’s coming! All the way!”
I could feel the goosebumps come out on my skin.
“And he won’t veer off,” said Dorothy quietly, her eyes narrowing. “He will never even consider the idea that we might come after him. He’ll just stay on that riverbed until he gets here.”
“Let’s go,” I said.
And we were off. We headed down the hill, out of his sight, and then moved on a line that ran right in the direction he was coming from, but a few hundred metres off to the side, parallel to him.
Fifteen minutes later we stopped, and Terry scrambled up a hill to look for the Reptile. He came back down breathless. The big lizard was coming all right, moving at top speed, half a kilometre away!
We all sat down. It took us a few minutes to gather ourselves. I wanted to run again, and I could see the same fear in everyone else’s eyes, especially Rhett’s. Dorothy’s look was kind of spooky, as though she had her mind on something she had been thinking about for a long time, just fixed on it, burning holes in it with her eyes. She looked frightened, too, but pumped, big time. “Do the unexpected,” she whispered to herself, as if in a trance.
We got up and walked towards the Reptile. When we figured we were very close, we all crawled up a hill and peered over the top.
There he was!
So near I probably could have fired a puck that would have rolled right up to his boots. He was standing about as far away as one end of a rink is from the other. And he didn’t look happy.
He stood still. Very still. He seemed to be listening. And he sniffed the air like a bloodhound tracking a scent. Then his head tilted on his shoulders like a bird’s. He looked in front, to one side, then the other, then he turned and looked back in the direction from which he had come.
I had never seen a face like his. His eyes were like flattened diamonds, cat’s eyes set far apart on a tall, thin head. His mouth was a slit. His skin, very white despite the sand and the sun, looked tough and wrinkled like leather. His whole face seemed as if it had been stretched over a skull, as if you could kind of see through to the bone. He was wearing a long black coat that hung almost to the ground and big black cowboy boots. That dark Stetson seemed a metre high on his head.
He scowled.
Then he turned and looked right at us.
Or, at least, it seemed like he did. But after a second he turned away, glancing in another direction. Finally, he started walking again, at the same frantic pace he had used when he came down the cliff and up the riverbed: big, wide ostrich strides. He was heading straight west, away from us.
“Whew!” said Rhett.
“We’re going after him,” proclaimed Dorothy.
“What? We’ve given him the slip, like you said. Now let’s get out of here!”
“Where? Back towards the east? Away from the field station?”
“Dorothy’s right, Rhett,” said Bomber. “Listen, remember in football when Coach Garland always told us: ‘Don’t give your opponent the sidelines’? He wanted us to force them to the centre, to where the action is. Because in the centre of the field you have more help. Your teammates can help you make the tackles. We want the Reptile to head back towards our help. That means closer to the field station, not away from it. If we go the other way and he figures it out, we’ll be even more vulnerable than now.”
“We have to stay downwind from this guy,” I said. “We have to always have him in front of us. If we ever lose sight of him again…we’re history.”
I hated putting it that way. But it was the truth.
So we started following the Reptile. We stayed a couple hundred metres away, always on the other side of hills. One of us would walk higher up and dart to the top every now and then to see exactly where he was. For the longest time he just kept walking, maintaining that frantic pace, heading straight west.
It must have taken more than half an hour for him to slow down, but finally he did. And then he stopped.
I was on the lookout. I raised my hand to the others down below and they all stood still. Then I motioned to them and they edged up the hill near me.
He was looking around again. He had taken off his hat and was scratching his leathery, shaved head with his long, spidery fingers.
“Notice where he is?” whispered Dorothy. She sounded anxious.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“He’s where we were when he saw us from the top of the cliff.”
And so he was.
He squatted down and looked at the ground around him.
“Were we ever exactly there? Right where he’s standing?” I asked Dorothy.
“Yes,” she whispered again, “exactly there.”
The Reptile seemed to smile. He glanced up into the hills nearby and then at the spot where we were crouching. We lowered our heads for a few seconds and then peeked out again. He was picking something out of his pocket. It looked like food. He kind of gnawed on it for a couple of minutes. He pulled a huge canteen out of another massive pocket and took a swig from it. It was twice the size of ours. Then he lay down and put his hat over his head to shield his eyes from the sun. He was very still for a long time.
“What’s going on?” asked Rhett.
“Do you think he’s fallen asleep?” whispered Terry.
No one answered. We had all dropped down out of view and were lying flat on our backs. There was silence for the longest time. When someone finally spoke it was Dorothy, and she sounded frightened out of her mind.
“He knows we’re here,” she said.
14
A Killer on Our Trail
Well, it looked like that moment was about to happen. That moment I had thought about a while back. The one when we would come face to face with the Reptile and find out what we were made of.
I didn’t doubt what Dorothy had said. I had felt it, too, about a split second before she opened her mouth. And she hadn’t tried to hide it. She had said it loud enough for everyone to hear, like she was mesmerized or something. Our wonderful, fearless Dorothy was about to lose it.
And so was I, and Bomber, and Rhett, of course. The only one who seemed calm was Terry. But what happened next took the courage out of even our bespectacled, strangely collected goaltender.
First we heard a noise, a sort of scurrying sound, like something rushing along the sand. Something big. I peered up over the peak of the hill.
The Reptile was almost on top of us!
He was screaming up the hill, arms outstretched, his billowing coat making him look like a giant buzzard swooping in for the kill. He screeched as he ran and locked his eyes onto us. It was as if the Wicked Witch of the West was right in front of us…on steroids.
We spread out and streaked down the hill in a hundred directions, like those gazelles running from the lion. All except Rhett. He just lay there, petrified. The Reptile swooped in and pounced.
The rest of us had gone down into a valley and up the side of another hill before we realized that we had lost someone. For some reason we had converged near the top of that hill and noticed that our pursuer wasn’t on our tail any more. We turned and looked back. The Reptile was standing over Rhett with one foot on his chest, looking out across the valley directly at us.
It was that moment, clear and simple. We looked at each other. Without saying a single word we made a decision. We started to scream, and with that scream we took off, Terry in the lead, back down the hill and straight at the Reptile. He looked more than a little surprised. His prey wasn’t supposed to do this. But we were a herd of enraged plant-eaters.
The Reptile took his foot off Rhett and stepped back. As he did, our cool defenceman, who had been so uncool since the minute we’d realized we were lost, seemed to recover. He leapt to his feet and ran with an energy I’d never seen in him. The Reptile turned as if to chase him but then looked back at us, approaching at top speed. He hesitated.
When Rhett was far enough away we veered off, like the Snowbirds in formation; Dorothy and I going one way and the other guys, following Rhett, running the other. Again the Reptile hesitated. Then…he went for us.
“CASTLES!” Dorothy shouted as we tore back down the hill. I didn’t know why she said that, and I didn’t really care. She might have just been totally losing it now. Who wouldn’t, with the Reptile breathing down your neck? He was after us like a heat-seeking missile. As we went through the valley and back up the other hill, he seemed to be gaining on us, a Big Unfriendly Giant making those ostrich strides again.
Dorothy had fallen behind a little, and as I glanced back, I saw that the Reptile had almost caught her. He was reaching out one of those big skeletal hands with its long fingernails…closer, closer, trying to grab the part of her dress that was flying out behind her. This was one time when it didn’t help to dress like a girl.
I spotted a big pink rock coming up to my right. It was a fossil about the size of a fist, but I didn’t take the time to lick my finger or check it out. I just picked it up, planted my feet, and fired a high, hard one down the hill towards the Reptile’s head. I’m not a baseball player, but I can “sling the pill,” as they say. It caught him on the forehead just above his right eye. He groaned, fell back, and rolled down the hill. Dorothy sprinted up to me. We glanced back. The Reptile seemed stunned. He was on all fours, trying to get up.
Several hundred metres away now, on the side of another hill, Terry, Bomber, and Rhett were reaching a peak and disappearing. Dorothy and I did the same. And when we were out of sight we did so many zigs and zags through valleys and hills and rock formations that we lost all track of which direction we were going. But we didn’t care any more. We just wanted to lose our giant hunter.
It took us a long time to feel safe enough to slow down. And even then we walked quickly, still breathing hard.
“I knew there was something about him that didn’t make sense!” said Dorothy suddenly. “Other than the obvious!”
“What’s that?” I puffed.
“He doesn’t have a horse!”
She was right. He was on foot. So…who made that campfire? And who rode off at top speed on horseback?
It seemed like there was someone else out there, maybe involved in this in some way. Who was another question.
Despite our fatigue, our hunger, and fear, we kept walking. We had no idea where the other guys were now, or how near the Reptile was. All we knew was that we couldn’t see him any more. And it was very quiet. Not long ago I had said that if we ever lost sight of him, we’d be dead. Now, I could only hope that wasn’t true.
