“With the tyrannosaurs after them,” I muttered.
“Yes,” Anya said, some of her old enthusiasm back in her voice. “I’m curious to see if they caught up with the duckbills.”
“There are times,” I said, “when you seem absolutely bloodthirsty.”
“Violence is part of human makeup, Orion. I am still human enough to feel the excitement of the hunt. Aren’t you?”
“Only when I’m the hunter, not the hunted.”
“You are my hunter,” she said.
“And I’ve found what I was searching for.” I pulled her to me.
“Being the prey isn’t all that terrible,” Anya whispered in my ear. “Sometimes.”
CHAPTER 16
The next morning we started our trek out of the swamplands and up toward the cooler, cleaner hills. Subconsciously I expected to find a more familiar world, a landscape of flowering plants and grass, of dogs and rabbits and wild boars. I knew there would be no other humans, but my mind was seeking familiar life-forms nonetheless.
Instead we found ourselves in a world of dinosaurs and very little else. Giant winged pterosaurs glided effortlessly through the cloudy skies. Tiny four-legged dinosaurs scurried through the brush. Their larger cousins loomed here and there like small mountains, gently cropping the ferns and soft-leafed bushes that abounded everywhere.
There were no flowers anywhere in that Cretaceous landscape, at least none that I could recognize. Some of the barrel-shaped bushes bore clumps of colored leaves beneath the feathery fronds at their tops. Otherwise the plants we saw looked nasty, repulsive, armed with spikes and suckers, soft and pulpy and altogether alien.
Not even the trees were familiar to me, except for occasional stands of tall straight cypresses and the mangroves that clustered by the edge of every pond and stream, their gnarled tangled roots gripping the soggy earth like hundreds of sturdy wooden fingers. And palm trees, some of them huge, their trunks bare and scaly, their feathery leaves catching the moist warm breezes high above us. There was neither grass nor grains to be seen, only wavering fronds of reeds and ugly cattails that sometimes covered ponds and watercourses so thickly they looked like solid ground. Until we stepped into it and squelched through to water up to the knees or deeper.
We climbed trees for the nights, although as far as I could tell the dinosaurs slept the dark hours away just as we did. Still, unarmed against the ferocious likes of tyrannosaurs, we had no alternatives except running and hiding.
We saw no more of the tyrannosaurs during our first few days’ march, although their deep three-toed footprints were plentiful. Anya insisted that we follow their tracks, which moved right along with the even deeper hoofprints of the duckbilled dinosaurs. There were places where the tyrants’ claws had stepped precisely into the duckbills’ prints.
There were other meat-eaters about, however. Swift two-legged predators taller than I who ran with their tails straight out and their forearms clutching avidly at smaller dinosaurs, who bleated and whistled like a steamboat in distress when the carnosaurs’ claws and teeth ripped into their flesh.
Anya and I went to ground whenever a meat-eater was in sight. Armed with nothing but our senses and our wits, we flattened ourselves on the mossy ground and lay un-moving the instant we saw one of the hunters. None of them bothered with us. Whether that was because they did not see us or because they did not recognize us as meat, I could not say. Nor did I want to find out, particularly.
Once we saw a half-dozen triceratops drinking warily at a stream’s edge, each of them bigger than a quartet of rhino, with three long spikes projecting from their heads and a heavy shield of bone at the base of the skull. Their flanks were spotted with rosettes of color: shades of red and yellow and brown. They looked awkward and ungainly and extremely nervous. Sure enough, a pair of two-legged carnosaurs splashed into the stream from the other side; not tyrannosaurs, but big and toothy and mean looking.
The triceratops looked across the stream and then pulled themselves together in a rough shoulder-to-shoulder formation, heads lowered and those long spikes pointing at the meat-eaters like a line of pikes or a gigantic hedgehog. The carnosaurs huffed and snorted, jinked up and down on their hind legs, looked the situation over. Then they turned and dashed away.