“Sheer funk,” the white hunter told me. “It’s hairy back there. He shot well, but it got to him. Goodness, it got to me. Look up and see a monster with a mouthful of teeth coming at you out of nowhere and your guts just turn to water. He’s perked up now that we are out. He’ll be the great, hunter, fearless, intrepid, nerves of iron, when we go through the gates and the newsmen start closing in.”
He grinned. “We’ll not stop him. Let him play the role to the hilt. It is good for business.”
Rila and I stood and watched the safari outfit go rolling down the ridge and disappear into Willow Bend.
“That does it,” Rila said. “Once the pictures of those trophies are shown on television and appear in newspapers, there’ll be no doubt, any longer, that traveling in time is possible. We no longer have to prove it.”
The next morning, before we were up. Herb was pounding at the door. I went out in robe and slippers.
“What the hell?” I asked.
Herb waved a copy of the Minneapolis Tribune at me.
I grabbed the paper from him. There, on page one, Was the picture of our client-hunter, posing beside the propped-up head of a tyrannosaur. A six-column headline trumpeted the story about the return of the first safari.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Hiram was still in the hospital and, once again, I hunted up Catface and found him in the orchard. I told myself I only wanted to keep contact with him to keep him from getting lonely. Hiram had talked with him almost every day, and since Hiram wasn’t here, I thought that someone should make a point of seeing him. But in the back of my mind were those little minnows that had been nibbling at my brain, and I couldn’t help but wonder if, when I saw him again, the minnows would resume their nibbling. I had a queasy feeling about it, but was nevertheless somewhat mystified. Maybe, I told myself, this was Catface’s way of talking, although if it was, I was certainly badly in need of an interpreter. I wondered if the nibbling had been what Hiram had felt and, through some strange quirk in his mind, had been able to understand the language. Maybe this was the ability that enabled Hiram to talk with Bowser and the robin, if he did actually talk with either one of them.
Once I found Catface, I didn’t have to wait long to have my question answered; almost immediately the minnows were in there, nibbling away at me, “Catface,” I asked him, “are you trying to talk with me?”
He blinked his eyes for yes.
“Tell me, do you think that you can do it?”
He blinked three times, very rapidly, which amazed me somewhat as to meaning, but, after a bit of thought, I decided that it meant he didn’t know.
“I hope you can,” I said. “I’d like to talk with you.”
He blinked his eyes for yes, which I imagine meant that he would, too.
But we weren’t able to talk. It seemed to me that while the minnows were more persistent than they had been before, we were getting nowhere. For a time, I tried to open my mind to the minnows, but that didn’t seem to help. Perhaps nothing I could do, I told myself, could help. Whatever was to be done, if anything was to be done, was strictly up to Catface.
I had the feeling that he must have thought he had a chance, or he never would have tried. But once I thought that over, I detected a lot of wishful thinking in it.
When the session came to an end, it didn’t seem to me we were at all ahead of what the situation had been when it had first started.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” I told Catface. “You can try again.”
I didn’t tell Rila about it because I was afraid she might laugh at my simple-mindedness. To me, of course, in a sort of sneaking way, it was no simplemindedness. If Catface could fix it so we could talk together, I sure as hell was willing to give him a chance to do it.
I had told him I’d be back the next day, but I wasn’t. In the morning, another of the safaris, number two, returned. They brought back only one tyrannosaur, plus several triceratops, but also three crested hadrosaurs and a Polacanthus, an armored dinosaur with a ridiculously small, tapering head and big horn-like spikes sticking out of its back the entire length of its body. Polacanthus was distinctly out of place.
It shouldn’t have been in our part of the Cretaceous; it was supposed to have died out in the early Cretaceous and should not have been in North America at all. But, there it was, in all its grotesque ugliness.
The safari had brought back the entire body. Despite being dressed out, its body cavity scraped and cleaned as well as possible, the carcass was beginning to get a little high.
“Be sure to call this one to the attention of the paleontologists,” I told the hunter-client. “It will drive them up the wall.”
He grinned a toothy and satisfied grin at me. He was a little squirt and I wondered how a man of his size could stand up to a dinosaur gun. I tried to remember who he was and it seemed to me I had been told that he was some aristocratic bird from somewhere in England, one of the few who had somehow managed to keep a tight grip on the family fortune in the face of the British economy.
“What’s so special about this one?” he asked.
“There were quite a few of them. I picked out the biggest one. How would you, sir, go about mounting such a specimen? It’s a sort of unwieldy creature.”
I told him what was so special about it, and he liked the idea of confounding the paleontologists.
“Some of these learned types,” he told me, “put on too many airs.”
The safari had barely disappeared into Willow Bend when number four came back. It had four tyrannosaurs, two triceratops and a bunch of other stuff. It was lacking one truck, however, and two men were on stretchers.
The white hunter took off his hat and wiped his brow. “It was those damn things with horns,” he said. “The ones with parrot beaks. Triceratops, is that what you call them? Something scared them and they came at us, a dozen or more of the big bulls. They hit the truck broadside and made kindling out of it. We were lucky no one was killed. We had a hell’s own time rescuing the men who were in the truck. We had to stand off the bulls. I don’t know how many we put down. They were milling all around us and had their dander up. Maybe we should have gone back and picked up some of the heads. But when we finally fought our way free, we sort of voted against it.”
“It was rough,” I said.
“Rough, sure. But when you go into new country, before you know what to expect, it can get rough. I learned one thing: Never press in too close to a herd of triceratops. They’re short-tempered, ugly brutes.”
After the day’s second safari was gone, Rila said to me, “I’m worried about number one. They are overdue.”
“Only by a day,” I said. “They all set two weeks as the time they would be out, but a couple of days one way or the other doesn’t matter.”
“The one that just left got into trouble.”
“They made a mistake. That is all. Remember how Ben stopped us when we walked up too close to the triceratops? He said there was an invisible line that you don’t cross over. These folks walked over that line. They’ll know better next time.”
I saw Stiffy shuffling up the hill. “We’ve got to get him out of here,” I said.
“Yes, but be nice about it,” Rila said. “He’s such a lovable old guy.”
She went into the house and got a couple of bunches of carrots. Stiffy shuffled up and accepted the carrots very gracefully, grunting and mumbling at us. After a while, I led him off the ridge, back into the valley.