Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever (4 page)

Relieved,
She
decided the danger was past, left far behind.

But where was
She
? She looked around.

The tall sequoias — thick pillars with reddish bark — seemed unfamiliar. After a short exploration,
She
realized She had never been in this part of the forest before. Lifting
Her
head, She took a deep breath and let out a long, sad, piercing call. Then
She
listened. Every living being in the forest around
Her
went still, their daily routines suddenly interrupted by the strange, loud call. She called again and listened.
Silence.
She called a third time — but there was no reply. That could mean only one thing: She was so far from the herd they couldn’t hear
Her
anymore. And that filled
Her
with unease.
Fear.
Alarm.

Throughout the day,
She
called and listened, called and listened, called and listened. Finally,
She
only called, growing more and more desperate with every unanswered call. For the first time in
Her
life, She was separated from the comfort of the herd.

For the first time in
Her
life, She was all alone.

~~~

Vesna sits on the bench under the pines. Sunset blazes above the sea, setting the sky on fire. Behind her, in a laurel bush, a little dinosaur with watchful eyes warns that a cat is on the prowl. The dinosaur has wings, black feathers, and a yellow bill. Next to Vesna, sketched on sheets of paper in the portfolio, rest some other dinosaurs:
distant relatives of the blackbird with the watchful eyes
, the chirping sparrows and the titmouse above her, and gulls returning from the sea.

A lock of blonde hair falls across Vesna’s eye. She swipes at it angrily. And then the day’s pent emotions erupt like magma from somewhere deep inside her, and her lake-blue eyes fill with tears. Vesna covers her face with her hands and shakes as she sobs. The knot in her stomach – clenched there since morning — threatens to burst loose. Somehow she managed to hold back on the dig, to hide tears from her colleagues, to evade questions and sympathetic looks.
But now …

Sobs bring release, and after several minutes she calms down, sniffing, wiping tears from her cheeks, feeling somewhat better.
Tissues
.
She reaches for a package of paper tissues in her bag.

Suddenly, she’s aware of a hand holding a neatly folded, perfectly clean handkerchief.

The young woman lifts her tear-filled gaze. A gentleman in what looks to be his 60s stands before her, his gray hair parted at the center, his mustache neatly trimmed. He’s dressed in an impeccable, sand-colored suit, appropriate for early autumn, with a scarf around his neck and a walking-stick in his other hand.

“Thanks.” Vesna takes the handkerchief, wipes her tears and blows her nose. She returns the handkerchief with an
embarrassed
smile, as if apologizing for making a fool of herself.
How long has he been standing there
?
she
wonders. “I’m afraid —”

“It’s perfectly all right, Miss,” the man replies with a slight bow. Vesna smiles once more and sighs. It’s getting late; it’s time to go. She picks up her bag and portfolio. Laurels and oleanders and pines sink into the dark, night creeps into recessed corners of the shrubbery, and dinosaurs that are birds settle down and turn quiet. Lights come on along the promenade covered with gravel.
Time to return to her cheap motel room, where she’ll probably cry some more.

“Excuse me, Miss.” Vesna feels a trace of urgency, almost a plea, in the man’s voice. She pauses. “It looks to me — correct me, if I’m wrong — that you’ve had a strenuous day. If you’ll allow me … Perhaps I could take you out for dinner somewhere?”

His offer takes Vesna by surprise. She doesn’t know what to answer: The man before her could easily be her grandfather.
A dinosaur
, she thinks wickedly, and is at once ashamed. Somehow, she feels that, like the dinosaurs,
he
doesn’t belong to this world and time, and maybe that’s exactly the reason why she suddenly finds herself attracted to him.
And why the hell not
, she asks herself after a brief consideration.

“Vesna.”
She smiles as she introduces herself, offering the man her hand. He takes it in his and kisses it lightly, like a true gentleman. Vesna raises an eyebrow, surprised and amused by the man’s old-fashioned manners. She tries to remember if anybody else ever kissed her hand like that. No, nobody ever did.

“Šaric.
Professor Šaric.” The man introduces himself with a slight bow. Something in that bow fills Vesna with confidence, and she allows him to take her arm under his and lead her down the path, some ten minutes’ walk to a restaurant with a cozy terrace. As soon as he’d suggested it, Vesna realized how hungry she was. Somewhere above them, in the dense pine crown, a small nocturnal dinosaur, brown-feathered, thickset, with large yellow eyes and a sharp beak — a little owl — calls at them from its roost before going out to hunt.

~~~

She reached the seashore on the fifth morning, following the stream
She
discovered the day after the megalosaurs attacked Her herd. The stream murmured through the forest, merging with other streams, widening after two days into a slow river. Clear water quenched
Her
thirst; clear water guided Her through strange, unknown country.

The sea spread before
Her
. For the first time in
Her
life, She saw plesiosaurs, their distant, small heads on long grayish necks high above the waves, bodies and fins paddling beneath them. Silhouetted against the clouds, large pterosaurs soared in circles, carried by rising thermals, their long wings motionless. Several smaller pterosaurs — with folded wings and long tails, bare red heads and yellow jaws filled with needle-like teeth — feasted on a dead fish on the beach.

She walked across the soft sand, pausing to sniff a large spiral ammonite shell washed ashore. The smell of decay from inside the shell was unfamiliar to
Her
. Curious, She nudged at the shell with
Her
nose, but nothing came from inside. Lifting
Her
gaze, She noticed a line of footprints going down the beach and then turning and disappearing among the cycads and araucarias. She looked more closely, only now seeing there were more footprints.
Tiny ones, made by the swift-running feet of small dinosaurs.
And large circular ones, impressed by a sauropod, a herd animal like herself
She
had once seen, with trunk-like legs supporting a massive body, long neck and a whip-like tail.

She looked back: She, too, impressed footprints. And then
She
saw another line of prints. Her nostrils flared as
She
inhaled their feeble, old scent, recognized the stench, and froze. A megalosaur had prowled here some time ago. Perhaps it was scavenging for carrion before it returned into the dark forest. Or maybe it was hunting.
Teeth
.
Danger lurked here, too,
She
realized. She’d have to be cautious. Still,
She
was relatively safe as long as She was on the beach itself. It would be difficult for a carnivore to stalk
Her
and jump Her while She was in the open.

Then, a deep hooting call resounded across the beach, and the pterosaurs feeding on the fish raised their bare heads in alarm.

~~~

Vesna presses the green button and looks at the illuminated screen of her cellular. No new messages. She knows her hopes are vain; Slaven will not call back. He doesn’t have the guts for that. He doesn’t even care. Vesna makes a solemn promise never again to enter a relationship with the kind of guy who breaks up by cell phone.

She leans back on the bench, letting the breeze from the sea cool her. White dinosaurs glide across the sky, jubilant in the freedom they enjoy high up. On a nearby rock, a brown juvenile gull quarrels with an adult over a morsel, a piece of bread. The adult wins, and the juvenile spreads his wings, takes off and flies low above the waves to look for his fortune elsewhere down the coast.

Vesna spreads her portfolio open. She leafs absently through the drawings of petrified footprint impressions. A grid of squares is drawn neatly across them. On the dig, the same grid is laid down in taut ropes. This morning, the crew has been busy clearing another thirty square meters, uprooting bushes, removing earth and stones. The newly exposed part is not pegged off yet for Vesna to scale down.

A sense of presence snaps Vesna from her reverie. Professor Šaric stands politely by the bench, trying not to show that he’s interested in the contents of her portfolio. “Curiosity is a reflection of intelligence, Professor,” Vesna teases, looking back at the drawings.

“Thank you.” The professor blushes.

Vesna smiles and moves aside, an unspoken invitation that he accepts with relief. Today, the walk felt more strenuous than usual. Age … “May I?”

“Sure.” Vesna passes him the drawings. The professor realizes they’re a series, continuing one after another.

“This is what people are talking about?”

Vesna nods. All of Istria has been buzzing about the new find: hundreds of footprints frozen in stone. At least five dinosaur species and countless individual animals: iguanodons, a huge sauropod next to numerous small herbivores — some of them probably hypsilophodons — and a meat-eater.

“They’re from early Cretaceous.” Vesna points to the main map. “This one is a sauropod. See here, it just strolled by. It was a big one —
notice
the diameter of the prints! Twenty meters long, maybe more. And this is a large carnivore, possibly a megalosaur or something similar. We can’t yet determine the exact species of carnosaur based on footprints alone … And these are the iguanodons —” Vesna pauses when she notices the professor’s confused stare.

“I’m in a different field, you know. English, German, Italian … Dinosaurs … I only know they existed.”

“I’m sorry.” Vesna smiles as she apologizes. “Sometimes I forget myself. Here.” She pulls out several reconstructions drawn between her careful copying of the footprints in the grid. Professor Šaric nods, impressed by her skill for making long-extinct beasts come alive in detailed pencil drawings.

“So, these are the footprints of iguanodons?”

“Yes, we’re quite certain of it. But we don’t know what these ones mean. Nobody ever found anything like this before! Look how the soil was trampled.” Vesna takes the drawing and points excitedly. The professor follows her finger as it skims across the paper. “This was one animal. It approached the second one, a smaller one. See — it’s this trail. And look here—” Vesna leafs through several sheets. “They faced each other.
Nothing in itself, right?
But look more closely! As if they were turning around that way, but still facing each other…”

“Perhaps fighting?” Professor Šaric suggests.

“No, we don’t think so.” Vesna looks at the drawing. “It looks too neat for that. For a week now, the entire crew has been trying to figure it out. But we can’t. Maybe we’ll never know,” she sighs.

The professor studies the drawing more closely, frowning in concentration. The layout of the footprints seems somehow familiar to him. Until—
 

Damn, it can only be … But it’s impossible!

Still, if they were human feet, there would be no trace of doubt, not for a moment. He starts humming a melody, barely audible, as Vesna looks at him, perplexed.

Yes, that’s it! It can be nothing else, say what they may. And the poor child doesn’t see it. Of course, she doesn’t, this modern youth …

Finally, the professor returns the drawing to Vesna, thoughtful, saying nothing, merely smiling enigmatically.

~~~

Her heart shivered! Immediately
She
recognized the call of a male of Her own species. She replied, paused to listen, was answered at once. Splashing through waves washing the shore,
She
rushed across the wet sand, scattering several pterosaurs into a flurry of flapping wings and protesting cries. Where was He? Why couldn’t
She
see Him? Frantic,
She
stopped and called once again.

He stepped out from beneath the tree ferns. While He was motionless, the play of sunlight and shadows cast by leaves on His strong brown body with its narrow white stripes made Him almost invisible. He was watching
Her
intently.

She stopped in
Her
tracks. As much as
She
wanted to greet Him, as much as She rejoiced in seeing Him, She paused, cautious, not approaching any closer. She knew
She
was unfamiliar to Him, a stranger. He might consider
Her
an intruder. Maybe He was guarding His herd; if that were the case, He could attack
Her
to drive Her away from His territory.

Standing almost motionless, they studied each other for a long, long time. No other iguanodon stepped out of the shadows. She heard no other herd members. The male was alone, just as
She
was.
Both alone, both diffident.
Any sudden move could be understood as an act of aggression.
Therefore, diffidence.
Suspicion.
Solitude.