Our Lady of the Sauropods

I’d have to call corythosaur meat an acquired taste. But the wilderness is no place for picky eaters.

23 August. 1300 hours. At midday I found myself in the southern hemisphere, along the fringes of Marsh Marsh about a hundred meters below the equator. Observing herd behavior in sauropods—five brachiosaurs, two adult and three young, moving in formation, the small ones in the center. By “small” I mean only some ten meters from nose to tail-tip. Sauropod appetites being what they are, we’ll have to thin that herd soon, too, especially if we want to introduce a female diplodocus into the colony. Two species of sauropods breeding and eating like that could devastate the island in three years. Nobody ever expected dinosaurs to reproduce like rabbits—another dividend of their being warm-blooded, I suppose. We might have guessed it, though, from the vast quantity of fossils. If that many bones survived the catastrophes of a hundred-odd million years, how enormous the living Mesozoic population must have been! An awesome race in more ways than mere physical mass.

I had a chance to do a little herd-thinning myself just now. Mysterious stirring in the spongy soil right at my feet, and I looked down to see triceratops eggs hatching! Seven brave little critters, already horny and beaky, scrabbling out of a nest, staring around defiantly. No bigger than kittens, but active and sturdy from the moment of birth.

The corythosaur meat has probably spoiled by now. A more pragmatic soul very likely would have augmented her diet with one or two little ceratopsians. I couldn’t do it.

They scuttled off in seven different directions. I thought briefly of catching one and making a pet out of it. Silly idea.

25 August. 0700 hours. Start of the fifth day. I’ve done three complete circumambulations of the island. Slinking around on foot is fifty times as risky as cruising around in a module, and fifty thousand times as rewarding. I make camp in a different place every night. I don’t mind the humidity any longer. And despite my skimpy diet, I feel pretty healthy. Raw dinosaur, I know now, is a lot tastier than raw frog. I’ve become an expert scavenger—the sound of a tyrannosaur in the forest now stimulates my salivary glands instead of my adrenals. Going naked is fun, too. And I appeciate my body much more, since the bulges that civilization puts there have begun to melt away.

Nevertheless, I keep trying to figure out some way of signaling Habitat Vronsky for help. Changing the position of the reflecting mirrors, maybe, so I can beam an SOS? Sounds nice, but I don’t even know where the island’s controls are located, let alone how to run them. Let’s hope my luck holds out another three and a half weeks.

27 August. 1700 hours. The dinosaurs know that I’m here and that I’m some extraordinary kind of animal. Does that sound weird? How can great dumb beasts know anything? They have such tiny brains. And my own brain must be softening on this protein-and-cellulose diet. Even so, I’m starting to have peculiar feelings about these animals. I see them watching me. An odd knowing look in their eyes, not stupid at all. They stare and I imagine them nodding, smiling, exchanging glances with each other, discussing me. I’m supposed to be observing them, but I think they’re observing me, too, somehow.

This is crazy. I’m tempted to erase the entry. But I’ll leave it as a record of my changing psychological state if nothing else.

28 August. 1200 hours. More fantasies about the dinosaurs. I’ve decided that the big brachiosaur—Bertha—plays a key role here. She doesn’t move around much, but there are always lesser dinosaurs in orbit around her. Much eye contact. Eye contact between dinosaurs? Let it stand. That’s my perception of what they’re doing. I get a definite sense that there’s communication going on here, modulating over some wave that I’m not capable of detecting. And Bertha seems to be a central nexus, a grand totem of some sort, a—a switchboard? What am I talking about? What’s happening to me?

30 August. 0945 hours. What a damned fool I am! Serves me right for being a filthy voyeur. Climbed a tree to watch iguanodons mating at the foot of Bakker Falls. At climactic moment the branch broke. I dropped twenty meters. Grabbed a lower limb or I’d be dead now. As it is, pretty badly smashed around. I don’t think anything’s broken, but my left leg won’t support me and my back’s in bad shape. Internal injuries too? Not sure. I’ve crawled into a little rock-shelter near the falls. Exhausted and maybe feverish. Shock, most likely. I suppose I’ll starve now. It would have been an honor to be eaten by a tyrannosaur, but to die from falling out of a tree is just plain humiliating.

The mating of iguanodons is a spectacular sight, by the way. But I hurt too much to describe it now.