Dinosaur Summer Read online

  Billie shook his head. Through the trees, they saw rustling leaves and shooting green forms in the canopy, about thirty yards away. It was a troop of animals the size of howler monkeys, but green.

  Billie lowered himself to his haunches. He looked at Peter. "Do you know what those are?" he asked.

  "No," Peter said.

  The troop pushed overhead, the chirping and buzzing suddenly very loud. They had sleek green bodies with long tails and long scaly heads, long wiry legs with four grasping toes, and bright red eyes; Peter wished that one would be still for a moment so he could see it more clearly.

  Four of the animals scampered down the trunk of a huge old tree, upside down like squirrels in Central Park. They were about five feet from nose to tip of tail, with snake-like snouts and eyes,

  beautifully dappled green and bright yellow. They stared at Peter and Billie, righted themselves, and craned their lizard heads on sinuous necks. He noticed they had very long arms, with a flexible membrane folded between the arms and the ribs and hips.

  "Tree lizards," Peter said, transfixed by the animals' red gaze. "Flying, too, maybe."

  Billie made hand gestures at the animals. They blinked with lazy nonchalance, tensed themselves with heads and eyes focusing straight up the trunk, and then climbed rapidly back to join their fellows in the upper branches. The troop moved on, dropping bits of leaves and branches in its wake.

  " Snakes who eat monkeys become this on Kahu Hidi," Billie said.

  "Snake monkeys. Friends of Odosha?" Peter asked, only half in jest.

  "Yes," Billie said, and smiled quickly at Peter.

  "I can't tell if you are joking or serious," Peter said.

  Billie frowned for the first time. "I have to leave you soon. I teach you what I can, then you're alone, unless you find your father."

  "I'm sorry," Peter said.

  "I am not your damned clown Indian, makingjokes and telling children's stories. I know how you whites think, even when you try not to."

  "Sorry," Peter said again, more quietly.

  Billie lifted the roots and the machete. "We will not go hungry for now, no?"

  Peter nodded.

  Billie seemed suddenly sad. "Everything here is not what I expected. I thought it would be glowing, like a jaguar dream, but

  it is just another mountain, with different animals and plants. It is not a ghost place."

  Peter stood, confused by Billie's sudden change in mood.

  "My mother was Colombian. I have too much of others in me, whites and Fanuru, and I do not see with the right eyes. It is still Kahu Hidi," Billie concluded.

  "Where are you going?" Peter asked. "I mean, do you know where your father went—where he traveled?"

  "He followed the Spirit Path and that is all I know."

  "Where does the Spirit Path go?" Peter asked.

  "From the maze, around Lake Akuena to the northern end, the Cloud Desert and Warrior's Shield. There are many ways between."

  "What will you do if you meet a Challenger?" Peter asked.

  "There is only one Challenger, in many forms. Odosha is the master and comes as Dinoshi, the death eagle."

  "Yeah, but what will you do?"

  Billie shrugged. "Dance or die."

  As they proceeded, they soon crossed small streams, shallow at first, meandering between the trees along shifting beds, leaving many islands separated by ten or twelve feet of glistening clear water. They were descending, and the ground was getting wetter and the vegetation thicker until it presented a wall of green splashed with red-tipped leaves, beautiful flowers yellow and white and violet, and intensely green knobby vines hanging from tree limbs like pea-beaded curtains. Peter had seen none of these plants in the jungle below the plateau, and could not remember seeing them in the books his father had brought.

  New plants, new animals; he thought of the Charles Knight paintings he had seen in New York and tried to imagine them come to life. The forest was not static; it had changed, evolved, in the tens of millions of years since its isolation.

  How many naturalists had come here, desperate to make their reputations by charting and collecting and classifying? Peter thought there had to be thousands of new species waiting to be discovered. Then, looking at Billie's back as the Indian hacked a path through the growth, he understood what Billie meant. I'm thinking like a white man—which is what I am, of course, and there's no shame in that, I hope. But can I really see the forest for what it is?

  "How do Indians think?" Peter asked as they rested beside a small waterfall. Brilliant green and red butterflies played around them, bigger than Peter's hands put together.

  "Like people," Billie said. He sniffed the air and leaned back on folded arms. A hummingbird the size of a pigeon flapped ponderously around their heads before flexing and buzzing off through the jungle.

  "Whites think like people, too, I suppose," Peter said. He looked up at the vine-draped trees rising over them like the nave of a green cathedral.

  "We think like my people," Billie said, clearly not comfortable with this talk.

  "That's what I want to know. How do you think differently from me?"

  "When I find Odosha's foot and eat it . . . Then I will think differently. Like my ancestors when the best of them, the heroes, came here."

  "Odosha again," Peter said. He sniffed. "What's his foot?"

  "Hard . . ." Billie held his hands out flat beside his ribs. "On a tree, blue as moonlight, wide as arms wide." Billie showed his teeth and gave a shiver of his head. "Not for whites. Kill you if you eat it."

  Peter wondered if he meant a giant tree fungus. "But it won't kill you?"

  "Hope not," Billie said.

  "I always thought people were pretty much alike, deep down," Peter said, and then was embarrassed by his presumption.

  "Um," Billie said.

  Twilight was coming and the forest was getting very dark. Peter got up to walk a few steps and pee. He was unzipping his pants when he saw something pale glisten under a broad, spiky-leafed succulent. When he was finished, he zipped up and knelt to look, but still couldn't make out the object in the gloom. He reached beneath the plant and touched something hard and pointed, grasped it, and pulled it easily from the loam. Clumps of dirt fell away. It was bigger than he expected.

  Peter stood and turned it in his hands, realizing it was a bone, the jaw of some animal. He touched the teeth and then froze. It was human. With a shocked cry, he dropped it.

  A few yards away, Billie stooped and pulled a mold-encrusted cloth belt from the dirt. At the end of the belt dangled a brass buckle green with tarnish.

  "Probably white," Billie said. "Not my father. Not yours, either."

  Chapter Five

  Rain pattered down through the forest all night. Something large passed within a few yards of them, but Peter, wide awake in the blackness, could see nothing and smell nothing. Whatever it was, it was not interested in fresh meat. As light filtered through the canopy and a thick fog broke, Peter rose and stretched. He had slept little. His bones popped like firecrackers and every muscle in his body ached. Billie was nowhere to be seen.

  Nearby he found trampled bushes and deep, broad tracks in the earth, but the mucky damp soil had filled in behind the creature, obliterating details.

  Billie returned a few minutes later. "Sammy went by last night," he said. "He does not know how to live in the forest. He is as lost as you and I."

  Peter wished they could find the centrosaur. It would be like finding an old friend—not as good as finding Anthony, Ray, and OBie, but to come so close . . .

  "Maybe he's not far."

  "I found a trail maybe from your father," Billie said. "I show where I think they go."

  They ate more yuca and Billie led Peter toward a broader stream, where three creeks joined. There, on a sandy bank by the water, he showed Peter bootprints. "They are going north, like us," Billie said.

  Peter touched the prints. "We can follow them."

  "They go along thi
s river. You follow. I will go another way."

  Peter thought about arguing with Billie and decided that would be entirely too white a thing to do. "If you have to," Peter said.

  Billie nodded. "You find your father and the others and go back. You do not belong here."

  "Don't I know it," Peter said.

  "I will learn whether I belong," Billie said, looking down at the stream swirling beyond the mud and sand bank. "You take this. I go naked to steal Odosha's magic."

  He passed the machete to Peter, and two yuca roots. Peter did not know what to say. Billie smiled and they shook hands. Billie ran away from the stream, back into the forest. In a few minutes, Peter could hear nothing but the forest sounds and his own breathing.

  For the moment, he felt a crushing unwillingness to move. The forest seemed to float around him, filled with strange life, thick and suffocating. Thousands of insects hovered above the stream. Ants swarmed up a nearby tree trunk, hanging from leaves and vines. Unknown animals near and far made their cryptic squawks, screeches, chitterings, even a new sound, a musical brassy series of notes, like the practice of an expert trumpeter.

  Peter closed his eyes. He took a deep breath, smelled rotting vegetation, water, greenery, hints of lemony sweetness. He had never felt so out of place and alien; he could hardly believe he was in the forest at all. Part of him felt as if he were back in New

  York, and he would wake up at any moment, Doyle's book cradled in his lap, Anthony coming through the kitchen door with an onion and noodle casserole . . .

  He opened his eyes to see a butterfly with a body as big as his thumb, broad wings striped blue and white, pumping and soaring over the stream's glittering surface. An ant carrying a lump of mold crawled up the toe of his boot, hesitated, crawled off again.

  He took another breath. The lassitude passed. The forest was not going to go away. If anything, the forest was dreaming him, and not the other way around. Even if he was going to die, which seemed likely, he could explore and discover a few things before the end.

  He wondered about the man whose jaw and belt they had found. What was the last thing he saw? Was it worth dying for?

  Peter felt calmer than he had in days. Whether that was resignation, courage, or simple exhaustion, he could not say— but he decided to follow the stream, search for the others, and stay alive as long as he could.

  He saw no more bootprints as he walked along the stream bank, now confined in a channel of stones and pebbles. Using Billie's machete, he cut his way through thick vines and branches, then jumped on several rocks to the other side of the stream, where the path appeared easier. After walking beside the flow for several dozen yards, he found another tree crawling with ants. He stopped for a moment to watch the glistening blanket of small brown insects.

  "Myrmecology," he muttered. "The study of ants." It was one thing to know the words from a dictionary—quite another to understand what they represented. He had seen so many different kinds of insects since the journey began, and at least two dozen varieties of ants, enough for a whole university full of professors to study—yet to him, and the people who wrote about the plateau, El Grande had always been a land of dinosaurs and other big, ancient creatures suitable for newsreels and circuses. Trophies. How narrow a view! The little things were important, too—and perhaps just as strange and isolated as the dinosaurs.

  He thought he saw a banana tree peeking out a few yards from the stream. He was about to cut through to see if it bore fruit when he heard a distinct cow-like bellow and the sound of brush being trampled. He froze. It was on the other side of the stream, whatever it was. A log had fallen across the stream and knocked down small trees and brush, affording a better and higher view. He climbed onto the log and craned his neck to see a lumbering green and brown shape some yards west in the forest. The shape raised its large head, showing a parrot-like beak munching on leaves, a forward-curved nose horn, and a broad crest.

  " Sammy!" Peter called. He crossed the log quickly and hacked and snapped away a few black creepers, then plunged through a glade covered with thick green grass. In the middle of the glade, chewing at the leaves on a tree, a centrosaur stood with its left side turned toward Peter. Its jaws worked for a second, then stopped. The huge head turned slowly.

  Peter wanted only to touch the animal, to reacquaint himself with an old friend. He smiled broadly and held out his hands. From behind the animal, two smaller centrosaurs emerged, also chewing leaves.

  "Sammy!" Peter exclaimed. "Where did you find babies?"

  The realization came almost too late. Peter examined the shield and the eyes and the shape of the nose horn, saw that this animal was several feet longer than Sammy, and realized this was a female, not Sammy. With a snort, the mother centrosaur swung around to face him. She thrust her horn into the air.

  "Babies," Peter said under his breath. He walked backward. "Sorry." His foot fell into a hole and he stumbled.

  With an angry snark, the mother centrosaur took a run at him, head twisted to one side and nose horn pointing straight at him. Peter picked himself up and stumbled toward the forest. "I'm sorry!" he shouted. "I'm sorry!"

  But the mother was having none of that. He was back in the forest and tangled in vines before he realized he had dropped the machete. The mother was ten yards behind, trotting steadily, when one of her babies emitted a high, pig-parrot squeal. With amazing adroitness, she stopped dead and reversed course.

  Peter found himself halfway up a large tree trunk, grabbing at creepers and branches for support. The centrosaur babies had moved away from the center of the glade. On three sides they were being stalked by what Peter at first mistook for bald bears. They were the size of grizzlies and dark, but they had scaly wolf snouts and tiny ears. Peter had seen their pictures in books: these were Lycognathus, wolf-jaws, fast, strong carnivores, much larger cousins of the dog-lizards. Though a ruff of red-tipped black fur covered their shoulders, and patches of smooth short pelt mottled their flanks, on their heads and forelimbs they had no fur at all.

  At the mother's charge, two lycos scattered, leaving one immediately behind the bigger of the two babies. The mother Centrosaurus could not attack this animal without running over her baby, so she stopped and swung her head and tail, complaining in a braying, bawling succession of honks.

  Peter heard something below and felt a breath on his ankle. He looked down and saw the onyx-black eyes of a fourth lyco directly beneath him. The animal's jaws opened and it sniffed audibly at this strange prey, broad forked tongue lolling. Peter scrambled higher into the tree just as the beast decided to lunge.

  The lyco's teeth sank into a branch inches below his foot and it shook its head and backed away with a sneeze.

  "Good of you to visit," said a voice above him. As Peter climbed up a few more branches, he looked up and saw Ray three yards above him. The cameraman squatted casually on a thick limb.

  Below, the lyco leaned its foreclaws against the trunk and fixed its eyes on Peter.

  Peter was too scared and out of breath to say anything immediately. The first words he managed were, "Where's my father? Where's OBie?"

  "I wish I knew. We're in the wolf's wood now. The lycos are thick around here. They surprised us and we took off in three different directions."

  The three big hunters had reestablished their posts around the centrosaur family. One lyco rushed in sideways, jaws wide, and snapped at the rear of the smaller baby. The baby gave a high squall and wheeled, shoving its nose and smaller shield instinctively, though it lacked any nose horn for defense.

  The lycos sat on their haunches, mouths open, and serenely surveyed the glade. One idly snapped at a dragonfly buzzing through the bright sunlight. The mother centrosaur kept close to her babies but could not surround them. A fifth lyco rose from hiding in the high grass suddenly and lunged, taking another chunk from the baby's hide. The baby writhed and screamed. The mother bounded out and swiped her horn at this latest attacker, but the lyco scuttled out of the way and aga
in its opposites attacked the babies, bringing the mother back.

  Peter wiped sweat from his forehead and eyes with a sleeve.

  "We've been trying to get back to the maze for a day and a half now," Ray said. "We thought we'd lost you for good."

  "The lizard-dogs, dog-lizards, whatever . . ."

  "Therapsids," Ray said. "Like these guys."

  "They chased me until I scared them away. I found Billie," Peter continued. "Or rather, he found me. He's on a spirit quest. He found some food and gave me a machete."

  "Good of him," Ray said. "Where's the machete?"

  "Out there, somewhere," Peter said, pointing to where the natural drama was unfolding.

  The lyco below them maintained its station but seemed more interested in the action in the glade than in the two humans.

  "How long have you been in the forest?" Peter asked.

  "Since yesterday afternoon. We found some bananas and I snared a fish with a basket of twigs. Savage little thing, tried to nip my finger off, but it tasted good."

  "We saw snake monkeys," Peter said. They watched the drama in the glade for a few moments. Peter pointed to the centrosaur. "I thought she was Sammy."

  "Easy mistake," Ray said. He seemed relaxed and amiable on his high perch. Peter decided the limb was strong enough for both of them and climbed to sit beside him.

  "I've drawn fighting dinosaurs since I was a boy," Ray said. "But I've never actually seen it before. It's brutal."

  "They don't just attack, do they?"

  "Nope." Ray shook his head, watching the mother centrosaur run a quick circle around her babies. "They're waiting for her to tire. They don't like her horn or her feet. She could inflict real damage, and a predator is dead if it can't run fast or bite hard."

  "How long will they wait?"

  "As long as it takes, I suppose," Ray said. "Want to lay bets?"

  Peter settled on the branch and offered Ray a chunk of sweet yuca from his shirt. Ray bit into it, made a surprised face, and ate it quickly. "Not bad," he said.

  "Where did you last see my father and OBie?"