Rivers of Time

We watched; but all the ground sloth did was just eat, eat, eat. From what I've seen of large plant eaters, especially those who live on leaves or grass, that is what they mostly do. They have to spend their time eating, because grass and leaves have a bloody low nutritional value.

Soon the Mylodon had cleaned that sapling of every last leaf. It dropped the trunk, came down on all fours, and ambled into the grove, looking for another sapling. It walked on the knuckles of its forefeet, somewhat as a gorilla does, and paid us no more heed.

In looking for animals to shoot, photograph, or just gawk at, one must be prepared for the unpredictability of their appearance. During the following days we saw other Pleistocene mammals—deer, bear, ground sloth, horse, a bear-sized beaver, and a glimpse of a Hon at long distance—but no mastodon. Hockersmith explained:

"It's the same with elephants. They are always migratory, because they have such enormous appetites that a herd soon strips all the greenery from any place they inhabit, even the bark of the trees. So they have to move on, leaving the area they have devastated to recover. That may take years, and this fact complicates trying to preserve them."

More time passed without sight of mastodons. One of Hockersmith's men shot a deer, so the camp had fresh meat for a while. One day Hockersmith and the Raja came in from a hike in considerable excitement.

"There's something of the elephant kind near here!" said Hockersmith. "We passed a fine pile of elephant turds; no mistake!"

We got up a safari to look into the matter. After some hours of tracking, we heard a rumble ahead.

"We're getting close!" said Delarue. "That's the proboscidean borborygmus."

"The what?" said Blackelk, turning his coppery face to me. "What does he mean?"

I said: "That's technical for the rumble that gases make in an elephant's guts."

We went ahead cautiously until we could hear the sound of breaking branches. At last we sighted our quarry, about seventy meters off and pulling the branches from a basswood tree to eat the twigs and leaves.

It proved a big mammoth, a good four meters at the shoulder. It was rather short in the body but longlegged, covered with reddish-brown fur, nowhere near so long as that of the smaller true or woolly mammoth further north. It also bore a fine pair of long, spirally curved tusks, crossing at the tips, which would have driven any of my trophy-hunting sahibs into ecstasies. There was once a lot of argument over what use such crossed tusks could be, since the points could not be applied to anything. Then it was figured out that the bulls used them as snow shovels to get at food in winter, the cows and young following behind. Time travel has confirmed the theory.

"Columbian mammoth," I said. "Paraloxodon jeffersoni, if I remember the textbooks."

"Oh, that terminology's obsolete," said young Delarue in his irritating way. "Nowadays most specialists lump it in with the woolly mammoth as Mammuthus. Some even want to cram them all back in Linnaeus's Elephas, but I wouldn't go that far."

We watched the mammoth; but just looking at an animal eat, eat, eat gets pretty bloody boring after a while. Hockersmith asked:

"Shall we try to capture it, Reggie?"

I shook my head. "He's too tall to fit into the chamber, unless we could get him to go down on knees and elbows and crawl in. I don't see much prospect of that."

"You could shoot him with a tranquilizer charge," said Delarue. "He'd fit in lying down, I'm sure."

"Yes? And suppose I did give him a tranquilizer shot. He'd just fie down and doze; and then how should we get him to the chamber? We must be a kilometer from the camp, and almost as far from the pallet." That was what we called the canvas sheet attached to the chamber. "Besides, he must weigh at least five or six tons. Anybody want those tusks for trophies?"

"Not I," said Blackelk. "My ancestors did enough of that."

"Then let's return to camp."

"Hey, wait!" said Delarue, fiddling with his camera. "I want a close-up shot."

Off he trotted, right towards that bull mammoth. I had read that lone males of the elephant tribe are likely to be short-tempered; lack of regular sexual outlets, I suppose. I called:

"Hey, come back here!" But Delarue just gave a vague wave and kept on towards the mammoth.

When he had covered half the distance, the mammoth noticed him with its rather dim eyesight, I suppose; or perhaps it caught his smell. It dropped the ranch it was eating and started towards Delarue with its trunk up and waving about, sniffing. Delarue, who had no gun, kept his eyes glued to the camera finder.

The mammoth gave a squealing grunt and kept coming. I got ready to shoot. Delarue at last caught on to what was happening and rose to his feet. As he turned to run back to us, with the mammoth looming over him, the silly galah tripped over his own feet and fell sprawling. Now I dared not shoot for fear that the mammoth would fall on Delarue and squash him.