Departures

Cutter was glad Cynodesmus preferred dry ground. They would have attacked him just as cheerfully as they had the big, rhinolike Diceratherium. They had no fear of man. In the Miocene, primates-any primates-were prey, not predators.

Calling Cynodesmus wolfish and Diceratherium rhinolike did not really do the beasts justice, Cutter knew. Unlike the plants and the bugs, Miocene mammals resembled their modem equivalents about as much as would clay models made by a talented ten-year-old with a little more imagination than he really needed.

As if to prove the point, a small herd of Syndyoceras daintily picked their way around the gorging pack of Cynodesmus. They looked something like deer and something like antelopes, with their striped hides resembling those of zebras, but they had two horns above their eyes and two more halfway down their noses, which made them different from anything that had gotten past the Pleistocene.

Cutter squelched on. He could see the stand of willow where he’d set this new trap. He could see the net too, undeployed and empty. He said something rude under his breath. He got up to the trap and saw footprints by the fat juicy red apple he’d set out as bait. They were the right kind of footprints. He said something rude out loud, loud enough, in fact, to scare a flock of Miocene more-or-less sparrows off their perches. They flew away, chirping angrily.

“Hell with it,” he said out loud. He looked around for a reasonably dry patch of ground, took out a ration pack, and ate lunch. He scattered paper and cellophane over the landscape with reckless abandon. All the wrappers were aggressively biodegradable; none of them would show up in the seam of lignite that would memorialize this landscape in the distant present.

Temper somewhat restored, he examined the footprints round the snare again. They were the prints of his quarry, all right: marks about half as big as his own bare feet would have made, and of the same general shape. The imprints of the beast’s opposable great toes, though, were slightly set off from those of the others, and not quite in line with them. Only men and their immediate ancestors had feet fully adapted to walking erect.

The hunter started off toward the next stand of willows, a couple of miles away. That one was bigger than this little outpost, and held his camp and three traps. None of them had caught anything, either, though one had been robbed the day before yesterday.

Several sluggish streams ran between the two copses. Cutter forded them with care. The other day, he had watched a crocodile drag a young ancestral hippo off a stream bank and into the water. He corrected himself: the little hippo hadn’t lived long enough to be ancestral to anything.

He got to the base camp without being bitten by anything more ferocious than more mosquitoes. Then he checked his traps in this strap of trees. They were all unsprung, though two of them had fresh prints nearby. No wonder the Italian hominoid had a reputation for being hard to catch, Cutter thought.

He found droppings under a big, shaggy willow and set another trap there. When he suddenly looked up in the middle of the job, he saw brown eyes watching him through the leaves. A moment later, they were gone.

He walked back to his camp. That was really too dignified a name for it, he thought. It was just a clearing where he’d pitched a light tent to keep the rain off his sleeping bag. The sun was still in the sky, but he decided to eat anyway.

He got out another radon pack. But for the degradable packaging, he knew, the packs were adapted from old military food: P-rations, T-rations, something like that. He didn’t remember the letter. If they’d made soldiers eat stuff like this all the time, he thought disparagingly, no wonder nobody’d fought a war in a long time.

He threw away the cup of what, for a lack of a suitably noxious word, was called stew. What dessert comes with this pack? he wondered, feeling rather like Little Jack Horner. Instead of a plum, however, he pulled out a cellophane package with four cookies in it.

Sighing resignedly, he started to eat one, then stopped and gave it a long look.”Be damned,” he said, and started to laugh. He glanced back toward where his traps were set, then looked at the cookie again. “Why the hell not? How could it make things go worse?”

Harvey Cutter’s nostrils twitched as he walked toward the new exhibit. “Be damned,” he said. “It even stinks like Miocene mud. Good job.”

Lucy Durr beamed at him. She was second assistant curator in the primates section of the zoo, and had designed the enclosure. “Glad you approve,” she said. “The photos you gave us helped a lot in putting it together.”

“Good. I hoped they would.”