Had they followed the migrating herd we had seen so that they could find the duckbills’ nesting ground and kill all the dinosaurs nesting there? Obviously the hilltop was being used by more than the forty-some duckbills we had seen in the swamp. There were more than a hundred nests up there. But they had all been slaughtered by the tyrannosaurs.
When I returned to the hilltop with an armload of firewood, Anya showed me the answer to my question.
“Look here,” she said, pointing to the edge of one of the nests.
I dropped the tinder near the nest where our prospective dinner waited and went to where she stood.
Footprints. Three-clawed toes, but much too small to be a tyrannosaur’s. Human-sized. Or humanoid, rather.
“One of Set’s troops?”
“There are more,” Anya said, gesturing toward the other nests. “I think they deliberately smashed the eggs that weren’t broken when the tyrannosaurs attacked.”
“That means Set—or someone like him—is here, in this time and place.”
“Attacking the duckbills? Why?”
“More important,” I said, “whoever it is, he’s probably searching for us.”
Anya raised her eyes and scanned the horizon, as if she could see Set or his people heading toward us. I looked, too. The land was flat and depressingly green, nothing but the same tone of green as far as the eye could see. Not a flower, not a sign of color. Even the streams meandering through the area looked a sickly, weed-choked green. Mangroves lined the waterways and giant ferns clustered thickly, waving in the warm wind. Whole armies could be hidden in that monotonous flat bayou country and we could not have seen them.
It struck me all over again how helpless we were, how useless in the Creators’ struggle to overthrow Set and his kind. Two people alone in a world of dinosaurs. I shook my head as if to clear it of cobwebs but I could not shake this feeling of depression.
Anya showed no signs of dismay, however. “We’ve got to find their camp or headquarters,” she said. “We’ve got to find out what they are doing in this era, what their goals are.”
I heaved a big hungry sigh. “First,” I countered, “we’ve got to have dinner.”
Returning to the two unbroken eggs, I started to build a small fire, knowing now that there were eyes out there in the distance that could detect it and locate us. Yet we had to eat, and neither of us was ready to face raw eggs or uncooked meat. Using a duckbill’s pointed scapula, I scraped out a pit in the soft dirt so that the meager flames could not be seen above the crest of the hill by anyone watching from below. Yet I knew that even primitive heat detectors could probably spot our fire from its thermal signature against the cooler air of the late afternoon.
“Orion! Quickly!”
I turned from my blossoming fire, grabbing for the nearest bone to use as a weapon, and saw Anya staring tensely at our eggs. One of them was cracked. No, cracking. As we watched, it split apart and a miniature duckbilled dinosaur no more than two feet long crawled out of the shell on four stubby legs.
Anya dropped to her knees in front of it.
The baby dinosaur gave a weak piping whistle, like the toot a child might make on a tin flute.
“Look, it has an egg tooth,” Anya said.
“It’s probably hungry,” I thought aloud.
Anya dashed over to my tiny fire and pulled out a couple of twigs that still had some pulpy leaves on them.
Stripping the leaves off, she hand-fed them to the little duckbill, which munched on them without hesitation.
“She’s eating them!” Anya seemed overjoyed.
I was less thrilled. “How do you know it’s a female?”
She ignored my question. Eating the other egg was out of the question now, even though it never opened that evening and was still not open the following morning. Our dinner consisted of a single rat-sized reptile that I managed to run down before darkness fell, and a clutch of melons that I picked from a bush, the first recognizable fruit I had seen.