“I don’t know. It looks kind of like it’s reinflating—”
Gronk!
Tamara clapped a hand over her mouth, cutting off a high-pitched laughter in mid-shriek.
“Look over there,” Nils said. “Somebody else wants to get into the act.” A second triceratops was approaching the first, slowly and meaningfully. “Intraspecific aggression, do you think? Dominance display? Are they going to fight?”
The first triceratops had his nasal sacs half inflated again. The second stopped within charging distance of him and then bowed its head. Slowly, ponderously, it rolled over onto its side.
“I don’t think so,” Leyster said wryly. “It looks more like a mating display.”
“It’s a girl!” Tamara cried.
Gronk!
Lying on the ground, one rear leg raised in the air, the female shivered.
“She’s mesmerized!”
“C’mere, big boy.”
“Oh, mamma. You know you want me.”
With unhurried dignity, the male maneuvered himself alongside the female, one foreleg to either side of her tail. It paused then, seemingly baffled. The female made a plaintive sound, and he took a step backward, then another forward, trying to get himself into position. That didn’t work either. But on his third attempt, he finally got their bellies properly aligned and slowly eased himself downward.
“Man, oh, man,” Patrick muttered. “These shots are going to be great.”
Ponderously, the two triceratopses began to mate.
It was sunset when they finally got back to camp and discovered that Jamal’s crew had moved the contents of two of the tents into the long house, and lashed the tents’ canvases to the frame to make walls. So up the slope they went, to share what they’d seen.
The interior of the long house was bright with artificial light. It looked infinitely welcoming. Of course, their flashlights, even with the solar rechargers, would only last so long. All the more reason to use them now. Brandish ye flashlights while ye may, Leyster thought. Old Time is still a-flying.
“Take your shoes off!” Katie called cheerfully as they entered. “There’s a space for them by the door.”
The interior was fragrant with the smell of ferns, which had been brought in by the armload and dumped over the floor, and with turtle soup, simmering in a kettle over the fire outside. Leyster and the others came in and sat.
“Welcome the intrepid dino hunters!” Chuck declared. “You’re just in time for supper. Come in, sit down, tell us everything.”
While Chuck distributed bowls and Katie ladled soup, Patrick passed around his camera, showing off a sequence of his best shots.
“What are these two doing?” Gillian asked incredulously when she saw the first picture of the two triceratops.
“Exactly what you think they’re doing,” Patrick said.
“The filthy things!” Gillian wagged a finger reprovingly. “Naughty-naughty.”
“Dino porn. This stuff would be so marketable,” Jamal mourned.
“But who would buy it?” Chuck asked. “I don’t see much of a market.”
“Are you kidding? It’s sex, it’s funny, and it’s something you haven’t seen before. It creates its own market. Why, the calendars alone…”
Everybody laughed. Jamal flushed, then ducked his head and grinned ruefully. “Well, it would!”
They continued the discussion through dinner. “So you lost the shotgun?” Matthew asked when they told the story of being scattered by the post-coital triceratops.
“I was caught by surprise!” Lai-tsz said. “We all were. But, damn it, they told us in survival training that the noise of a shotgun blast would scare off anything. So when I shot the gun off in the air, I wasn’t expecting the thing to charge! It came barreling down on us, and we all just ran. If it had been a little faster, it would’ve gotten me.” She shook her head. “There was definitely something wrong with that animal.”
“Did you go back and look for the gun?”
“Yes, we did. All the ground was trampled into mud. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
“I’d rather lose all four shotguns than a single Swiss Army knife,” Jamal observed. He turned to Leyster. “Still, that trike wasn’t supposed to charge like that. Our instructor told us she’d frightened off ceratopsians herself, dozens of times. Why didn’t it run?”
Leyster shrugged. “Back in grad school, Dr. Schmura used to say, ‘The organism is always right.’ Living things don’t always do what they’re supposed to. Some days sand fleas eat medusae and minnows attack sharks. When that happens, your job is to take good notes and hope that someday you’ll be able to make sense out of it.”
Hours passed as they quietly talked. It had been so long since they’d all been friends. Nobody wanted it to end.
“Hey, look what I found,” Chuck said. He darted into a shadowy corner, and wrestled the skull of a juvenile triceratops into the center of the room. “I found it bleaching in the sun. You wouldn’t believe how much work it was to drag it up here.”
“Why on earth would you bother?” Tamara asked.
Chuck shrugged. “I always wanted one of these things. Now I have it.” He lifted it up and held it before him, waggling it from side to side, as if it were in heat and courting a mate.
“What’s that sound it made, again?”
“Gronk!”
“More like grawwnk! With a little glissando on the awwnk.”
Chuck, who had early on assumed for himself the role of group clown, began to sing, “…darling, ‘cause when you’re near me…”
Katie picked up the tune, singing, “I’m in the… mooood… for love!”
Joke made, Chuck stopped. But Katie went on singing and, one by one, the others joined all in, singing the old romantic standard. Then, when that was done, they sang “Stormy Weather,” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”
Then Chuck, squatting behind the triceratops skull, began beating its frill with the flats of his hands, as if he were playing bongos. In a high, clear falsetto, he began to sing
until the music filled the long house like a living spirit. Outside, the night was dark and filled with the furtive scurrying of small mammals. Within, there was the warmth of friendship and good times. People traded off verses, making them up extempore, so that when Daljit sang
They all collapsed, laughing, on the floor. It took them a few minutes to catch their breaths afterwards.
Leyster was about to suggest another song when suddenly Katie threw her blouse in the air. Patrick cheered and clapped, and then, as if that had been a prearranged signal, everybody was shucking clothes, struggling free of trousers, frantically untying bootlaces.
Leyster opened his mouth to say something.
But Tamara, sitting beside him, touched his arm and said in a voice so soft that only he could hear, “Please. Don’t spoil it.”
For an instant, Leyster did not know how to respond. Then he began to unbutton his shirt. By the time he had it off, somebody had already undone his fly and was tugging down his trousers. He kissed Gillian long and hard, and she pressed his hand between her legs. She was already moist. He slid a finger deep inside her.