The Primeval World

THE ELEPHANT SLAYER-3

“Freeze!” barked Carter—and the mottled orange and black Utahraptor froze, its knife-shaped head only inches from my own, its breath smelling of fish and rotted meat. “Hold.”

And the Utahraptor held: snarling and growling—hissing, even, like a snake.

“There, see? There’s nothing to be afraid of,” said Carter, calmly. “Now, if we can avoid any further outbursts—let’s continue, shall we? Where was I ...”

“Call it off,” I said, shrinking away from the thing’s muzzle, staring at its yellowed teeth (between which I could see bits of decaying flesh). “Call it off, Carter.”

“Ah—well. So much for the vaunted bravery of the U.S. Armed Forces, eh?” He snapped his fingers quickly, crisply. “Kennel.” But the Utahraptor didn’t budge—indeed, I was pretty sure it only moved closer. “Genghis!” he barked. “I said, ‘Kennel!’ Now!”

At which the predator did move, although grudgingly, defying its master to the extent that it circled me quickly before breaking off and vanishing the way it had come, its tail whipping after it.

“There, you see? I can be reasonable.” He paused as though he were looking at me. “Good heavens, Mr. Hayes! You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”

I pulled myself together as my breath came and went in ragged gasps. “What was that? Your hunting dog?”

“If you like.” He paced over to the far wall— which wasn’t, in fact, even a wall, but a towering black curtain—and stood to one side of it. “I want to show you something.” To Eska he said: “Leave us. Tend to Genghis.”

And she was gone.

He drew open the curtains.

“Behold, if you will, the Terror of the North—Ursus Maritimus Tyrannus, otherwise known as the Pleistocene Polar Bear.”

My jaw dropped a little as the massive thing came into view—mounted not in a pose but as an enormous rug, which had been affixed to the wall, itself painted black.

“Magnificent—isn’t she? ‘There ‘mid grand icebergs slipping from the cliffs, or on the drifting floes that choked the tide ... gigantic Polar bears, so grim and gaunt ... in solitary majesty abide.’” He turned to face me in the semi-darkness. “Isaac McLellan.”

“Look, Carter. Would you just get to the—”

“But she wasn’t solitary, Mr. Hayes—not this one. Nor did she have a sleuth of cubs. And yet she was—indisputably—a mother. No, what she had, my wayward friend, was a cub. A cub who was but an infant then but has since matured—at an accelerated rate, of course—into adulthood.”

My eyes must have grown large as awareness dawned. “Eska. You’re talking about Eska. But how could—I mean, the Flashback only happened less than—”

“Come now.” He looked at me with something like pity. “Surely you’ve encountered it; that aberration in the Flashback by which a person— seemingly at random—begins to age—rapidly, I mean, exponentially—out of all context with their surroundings? Well, that’s what happened to Eska. As for the hows and whys: such as why that process halted at her current state, or how she came to be living with prehistoric bears in the first place—who can say?”

I stared at the massive hide, at the flattened body and carefully preserved claws, and at the great head, which was big as a T. rex’s. “How much does she know?”

“As with everything, only what I have taught her, of course. That I found her mother already slaughtered—by a cold-weather predator mightier even than she.” He drew the curtains and walked toward me. “A story that was true—if not entirely factual.”

I got up slowly, shaking my head. “And that was you ... The Great White Hunter of the Wastes. How ironic.”

“Ironic, Mr. Hayes?” He paused and lifted his chin. “How so?”

“Because you seem so prissy and effeminate. I guess it’s just hard to—”

And I lunged at him—chair and Genghis be damned—before something struck me in the head (a fire poker, as it turned out; wielded by Eska herself) and rendered me unconscious, if only for an instant.

“Really, Mr. Hayes,” he said, circling me where I lay. “These outbursts will be your undoing. Irregardless, there you have it. Everything you need to know in order to help us with our hunt. You’ve even seen the bar we must surpass—the gold standard, as they say; the mount stuffed by Fidelio himself—my taxidermist, God rest his soul—before he showed Genghis an affection at the wrong time and place, and when the animal was in the wrong mood.”

He removed a coin-like medallion from beneath his shirt and studied it, wistfully. “Dear Fidelio, who fashioned this.”

He leaned close to show it to me and I saw a gold disk with an engraved bear on it—Ursus Maritimus Tyrannus. The Terror of the North. Eska’s adoptive mother. “A reminder of my greatest prize to date.”

He turned toward Eska. “Thank you, by the way. Although I must caution you; do not enter the room without my permission again, eh?”

I looked back and forth between them.

“Y-yes, Master,” she struggled to say. “Eska is s-sorry.”

He looked down at me. “Well, there, see? She learns. No need for another confrontation at the top of the stairs ... isn’t that right, Eska?”

I looked at the splint on her ankle and the single crutch she was using.

At last I said, “I’ll help you with your hunt, Carter. We—we’ll kill this ... Atatilla. From the truck, isn’t that right? Like cowards. But I’m going to kill you too, you bastard. Somehow, someway. You just watch.”

Again, he looked at me with pity—or something like it. “I’m sure you’ll try.” And then he shouted down the hall: “Genghis, my boy! Snap to, old friend! It’s time to release the hounds and hunt again!”

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