Helen's Hi-jinks Part I
All characters, unless noted otherwise, belong to Primeval™ and Impossible Pictures. No copyright infringement is intended
Chapter 1 – the Carboniferous
The night was as a black dome dotted with the fiery pinpricks of the stars that covered the land as far as the eye could see.
Helen Cutter was moving as quickly and quietly as she could, just in case that her relentless pursuer, who had chased her into this era through a convenient time anomaly, had followed her here as well. After all, like the other members of its species, this animal was more brawn than brain. Around her, the impenetrable blackness of the night was slowly lightening out into a grey dawn, and, as the sun came out, the still blurry outlines of the ancient land of the Carboniferous period of the Palaeozoic era.
In a short while, the sun's rays were scattering the remaining pieces of darkness into the dense growth of local plants, which grew in abundance on the silt of the local swampland. Helen took this as her cue to also stop and look around – she has never been before in the Carboniferous, preferring the relatively safer Devonian as her usual resting stop in the Palaeozoic era. Of course, there was also the Permian, but Helen hated the Permian – almost as much as the Triassic and the Eocene. The events of last night had just re-affirmed it, and... Helen's brain caught up with its eyes and realized what an amazing view stretched-out around her – it was almost like an alien planet.
Helen beheld a countless number of islands and broken cliffs connected to each other by various straits, bays and bayous; on every side of her stretched a mix of swamps, small lakes and dry land. The air reeked with swamp stench. The cloudy sky was almost unseen through the dense growth of lepidodendrons and tree-like ferns. However, these plant giants formed separate copses amongst the swamps, moss- and lichen-covered cliffs and growth of smaller plants.
Here also grew the even bigger sigillarias, covered in ring-like scars from the fallen branches and foliage, with their tops sticking into the sky like giant lances. Below them grew the calamites and plants of similar, more modest, sizes, with roots sticking everywhere in the soft silt.
All of these plants, Helen understood, created a primeval jungle, with almost impenetrable undergrowth, especially dense in the places where the older plant giants had succumbed to the weather damage. Liana-like ferns covered the taller trunks, spreading their fan-like leaves like finely woven green lace through the damp air.
"Now I remember why I have never cared for this period," Helen muttered. "It is really unsuited for anyone, who is a landlubber; most land-dwelling vertebrates were the size of my hand or something. I got to get out of here."
As Helen moved inland, the plants changed; instead of lepidodendrons and sigillarias, here grew various primitive conifers, possibly the first true trees of planet Earth. Here, too, were some more bizarre plants, possible missing links between these primitive trees and the various ferns of Carboniferous and Devonian times. Any botanist, whether specialising in modern or ancient plants, would have been most reluctant to leave this place, opting instead to study the continuing evolution of the plant life of these times.
However, Helen was not a botanist; her preferred study was anthropology, study of human evolution, and here, in this time and space, she felt decidedly out of place. The silence of this place was oppressive, as there were not any of the modern vertebrates to sing during the daytime, and various amphibians and insects, as noisy as they were, preferred to call-out during the dark. Only when the winds would blow, would there be noise – a loud, clanging and creaking sound, created by the plants bent by the wind.
Yet, there was plenty of animal life as well – of a specific kind. As Helen once again neared a wetter part of the land, she saw multiple primitive fishes and amphibians, including the monstrous anthracosaurs, who would probably attack her in defence for territory, if not for food. More than reluctant into confronting them (she was stuck here due to a similar confrontation to begin with), Helen gave them a wide berth.
Besides the giant amphibians, there were also invertebrates of similarly giant size, including poisonous scorpions and spiders, who hid in the dense undergrowth from the sweltering sun, and did not hesitate to assume a threatening poise if Helen would invade their personal space just a little bit too much – but Helen could deal with menaces of their size without breaking stride.
Over Helen's head in the moist, warm air, giant prehistoric dragonflies were flying, hunting insects that looked like mayflies and dayflies, but of a respectively bigger size as well. The biggest of them all was the meganeura, with a wingspan of 75 cm, and a pair of jaws, capable of a very nasty bite.
For a while, Helen just appeared to be wandering pointlessly in the land of eternal swamps, looking for nothing in particular – but suddenly she stopped and climbed onto a huge, fallen lepidodendron, which was lying partly in one of the swamps. She slowly climbed onto the massive, scarred trunk and sat down, waiting. The time anomaly would open here, she knew.
A relatively small, mottled centipede was lurking in wait for prey between a boulder and the roots of an uprooted horsetail. Suddenly it stiffened, as if sensing something dangerous through its internal tremorsense, and fled to hide between the roots. Helen, however, did not notice it, but instead began to wonder if a swim would be a good idea in all the sun. For all of her experience, she was still human, and her human senses could not forewarn her, like the centipede's senses forewarned it, of the approaching Permian pursuer, an ancient reptile of over 3 meters long, undeterred by the swampy land of the Carboniferous (after all, its Permian habitat wasn't all that much different from this one), and fully on the trail for that elusive warm-blooded prey: time travelling human.
Instead, Helen began to impatiently move back and forth the fallen plant, as the oppressive atmosphere of the Carboniferous began to truly wear down on her nerves. "No, this isn't as bad as the Permian," she muttered to herself, as her shadow startled the bottom-feeding fishes and aquatic worms, "but at least in the Devonian one knows where to put her foot without having it bitten-off by a giant leech or spider or whatever. The lobe-finned fishes on their own I can handle, but these giant reptile-like amphibians – they are as bad as that giant salamander that had ambushed me in the Cretaceous. A human-sized salamander! In the times of the dinosaurs! Fancy that!"
Helen's mutterings were interrupted as a giant, primitive insect landed next to her onto the fallen plant with a metallic sigh and closed its' wings. With a very feminine shriek of disgust, Helen lashed-out with her foot, knocking the insect into the water, where it struggled, before one of the local amphibians did not surface and snap it up with just one bite.
Helen could not help but shudder at the scene that had unfolded just before her. "How lovely," she muttered to herself. "The Devonian with extra accessories. How lovely."
Meanwhile, the amphibian, sated at last for a little while, instead of continuing to hunt for food, swam to among the water plants dotting the lake's bottom. This action was an equivalent to a butterfly flapping its wings, but Helen did not register that – she had created a great many "butterflies" in this fashion, and had no intent of tracking down each and every one of them, even if one of them had landed on her nose, figuratively speaking. Instead, she raised her binoculars and continued to lack around for signs of danger.
In the east, the sun has finally risen sufficiently far above the horizon to reach over the tops of the tallest tree-like plants, and its glowing rays has reached at last the other shore of the lake, causing Helen to sweat like a pig, unable to get into the water due to fear of catching some sort of a prehistoric disease, or attracting the attentions of a local predator – an anthracosaur or something equally as bad. However, Helen ignored this fact – she still had plenty of water in her flask to avoid dehydration, and instead she finally began to understand the fundamental differences of this time period against the Devonian.
In the Devonian, whenever she was there (or then), the land was gloomy, hostile looking, and covered only in sparse vegetation of the most primitive appearance. Here, conversely, she was confronted with the first true primeval forests, full of plants of all forms and sizes – bizarre liana-like plants, dark green patches of mosses, fine feathery fans of ferns, sigillarias sultans, brachiating tops of lepidodendrons and interlocking calamites. Put together, all this greenery created a picture out of a fairy tale, a scene of such an ancient past, that Helen could have never imagined it of her own will. It was an overwhelming scene of eternal and perpetually moving evolution of life, unseen before by human eye, unimagined by the human mind.
All of this greenery had also hid a very dangerous monster from the future. Its hide, covered in greenish and yellowish hues, was blending in very well with the overwhelming greenery of the place – for there were no plants to break the green and dark brown monotone, just as there were no birds or similar creatures to sound the alarm of its approach, as the beast followed its nose in the pursue of its warm-blooded prey. It found Helen's trail easily enough, and not unlike her, it too did not shy from any challenge in its path, as its massive bulk and teeth, much more advanced than of any Carboniferous carnivore, could deal with anything that lived on land.
In and near the water, it was somewhat different. Here dwelt various anthracosaurs and other amphibians of a similarly huge size. Some of them had heads and maws of one meter in length. Yet, their skins were soft and vulnerable, while the Permian beast had a fine armour of scales on its own hide. Furthermore, although it was not designed for the wet and hot air of the Carboniferous, this combination of moisture and heat, coupled with lack of indirect sunlight, actually empowered the massive reptile, made it feel even better and stronger than the much harsher sun of its own time. Therefore, the reptile continued its hunt, even though Helen's trail was a hard one to follow indeed.
Meanwhile, Helen was recording her surroundings with a digital camera, as the explorer in her mind had pushed aside the survivor. Suddenly, she stiffened and moved off the fallen trunk through more undergrowth to a place where a rivulet flowed into the lake, connecting it to other lakes and swamps – a never-ending labyrinth of water and water-bogged soil.
A big flat boulder was lying at this spot. It was shaded by a growth of soft-stemmed ferns and a big stump of a fallen sigillaria. The stump itself was overgrown by a growth of some mysterious plants, whose thin stems sprouted wedge-shaped leaves. Around the stump grew some more unknown plants, possibly aquatic ferns, whose feathery fans were composed of big, wide and leathery leaflets with deep-set veins. However, Helen had once again stopped caring about these specifics of the local plants. Instead, she climbed onto the boulder and began to wait.
She carefully climbed onto the rock, only to see that it was already partially occupied by a keraterpeton with its long body and tail, as well as by small, lightly built prehistoric amphibians called the branchiosaurs. Upon seeing them, Helen grimaced and moved to the other side of the boulder: she had seen these salamander-like creatures back in the Permian, when her current troubles had started. Instead, she moved to the side of the stone, which was lying at the river's edge and looked down at the water with some interest.
On the river's bottom, a swarm of larvae of prehistoric insects and crustaceans were feeding on a corpse of another branchiosaurus or a similar animal. This particular amphibian already had some primitive armour on its back and belly, and so the tiny scavengers could nibble only on the sides.
Suddenly, some small prehistoric fish burst through the growth of the water plants and attacked the invertebrates instead. However, before Helen's amused eyes, a legless, snake-like amphibian – a sillerpeton - burst from underneath the rock like an arrow and grasped one of the fish in its jaws. The rest of the fishes scattered in all directions, but the amphibian was no longer interested: undulating its snake-like body, it swam away, with its meal, to eat it in peace.
As the show ended, Helen wiped away her tears of mirth and felt more at ease than before. The shade was pleasantly cool, and she had not had sleep since her previous night in the Permian period. Consequently, it became harder and harder to keep her eyes open, as the harmless small amphibians next to her seemed to be completely at ease.
The sun was almost at its highest point in the day. Its rays were reaching the surfaces of the waters, their swampy shorelines, and green primeval forests, which consisted of plants of all kinds, from the humblest to the greatest, from the still primitive, to the very advanced. And these plants, creating the first forests, were just the first of all land-dwelling vegetation that had filled-up the empty spaces of the world.
Helen yawned again. The air was hot, humid, and completely silent, as the cold-blooded creatures of this world had all but fallen asleep, their bodies accumulating the massive dose of solar heat in their cold blood. However, Helen's pursuer was of a completely different kind: though it too needed an external source of heat to function properly, its Permian physique did not need to relax as its Carboniferous counterparts did. Therefore, when the huge dimetrodon emerged from a tangle of sigillarias, it was quite awake, alert, and very hungry.
The Permian reptile's large eyes looked around almost as sharply as a mammal's would have, and its nostrils sniffed the air in a mammalian style as well. Slowly, it began to stalk Helen Cutter, who in her sleepy state seemed to have failed to notice her pursuer, lying as she was on the cool, pleasant rock.
Patiently, in a style that was a mix of a reptile and beast, the dimetrodon made its way, preparing for a final lunge at a convenient distance. However, what could be said of plans of mice and men can be said of plans of massive mammal-like reptiles: a ripe cone fell from the twenty-meter-high lepidodendron onto the dimetrodon's very head. Startled, the reptile did the only thing its primitive brain could fathom: it charged.
Instantly Helen's eyes snapped wide open, as if she has not been falling asleep for the last few hours, and she jumped off the boulder into the shallow rivulet.
Well, relatively shallow: though it reached only up to Helen's waist, Helen already had experience with such bodies of water, and so instead of wading, she began to half-swim half-propel herself off the shallow bottom – away from the boulder with the dimetrodon on it.
Only, the dimetrodon had different ideas. Though it was designed for the Permian period, the early Permian when it lived too had swamps and largish bodies of water, as opposed to the later Permian, which was dominated by a global desert. Therefore, though it was briefly stunned by the fallen cone as well as Helen's surprised actions, its instincts propelled its body forwards, into water, in which it began to swim very quickly using both its paws and the tail, unlike a crocodile.
Helen, meanwhile, was too busy making her way to the opposing shore covered in a growth of calamite horsetails, in which she hoped to lose the dimetrodon long enough to get back to the place of the time anomaly and escape both it and the Carboniferous era, when suddenly she noticed an odd muddling of the water – and it was moving in her direction.
Helen gulped a big mouthful of air and submerged completely – not only to avoid dimetrodon's keen senses, but also to check her suspicions, and they were true. Swimming downstream, from whatever happy hunting grounds that formerly used to haunt, were several primitive sharks of the Carboniferous – the xenacanthus. Though they were small – Helen was more than twice as big as they were, their mouths were full of sharp, trident-shaped teeth, designed to crush through hard armour of molluscs, crustaceans, smaller fish and amphibians. Helen did not doubt that these teeth would make short work of her own, unarmoured skin. She pushed away from the bottom as hard as she could and swam forwards, out of the rivulet into the bog. Between the freshwater sharks and the dimetrodon, her chances of survival had increased dramatically.
Fortunately, for Helen, though, these sharks were not on the hunt – not at the moment. Instead, they were searching for places to lay their own eggs: warm, sunlit bayous with shallow water, covered with water plants and multiple small live prey, so necessary for their multiple hatchlings to strive upon. Presences of Helen and the dimetrodon, so much bigger than their own, actually startled the sharks as much as they startled Helen, and so, instead of pursuing them, the sharks turned into a nearby strait and vanished from the bog.
However, Helen was not aware of this. Though the bog was far wider than the rivulet, it was only marginally deeper, and so Helen had to swim, wade, and propel herself off the bottom at the same time. The dimetrodon, with its relatively shorter legs, actually had an easier time swimming through the shallow waters, and with its musculature being super-charged by the conditions in the Carboniferous atmosphere, the water plants didn't bother it at all – the animal just ripped them from the bottom, as it swam with full speed ahead under its own sail, like some sort of a bizarre pirate ship. All that was missing was a crew of pirates armed to their teeth, but the dimetrodon had its own teeth, the biggest of which were longer than Helen's arms were thick.
Suddenly, the chromatic white light of the time anomaly appeared before Helen even as she jumped onto the fallen trunk with the dimetrodon all but snipping at her heels. However, fate was not done with the dimetrodon and Helen just yet.
Far, far upstream from the bog, fallen giant trunks had jumped the course of a much bigger river for quite some time now. Giant calamite horsetails, lepidodendrons and sigillarias, and the tree ferns – they all perished from the ravages of old age and fell down into the boggy soil, eventually covered by layers of silt and sand, used as fertilizer by the new plants, ferns and their kin, primitive conifers. In time, that new growth too would die and fall, as the age of the millennia would eventually compress all that plant matter into coal. This case, however, was different.
The Carboniferous was an era of storms, as the supercharged atmosphere would often release mammoth amounts of water as rainfall back into the soil, the bogs and the rivulets. During such thunderstorms, the tall calamites and lepidodendrons would shake and fall, submerging into the waters dark from silt. Somewhat more rarely, the atmosphere would produce a whirlwind as opposed to a regular thunderstorm, in which cases the plant giants would be torn out by their roots, with the dark waters filling the pits created by their wrenching. The whirlwinds would lift these plants high into the air, only to cast them back down, creating terrifying pictures of chaos and destruction.
Moreover, when the thunderclouds, brought over by the storm, would release the rain, this would complete the destruction of the neighbourhood. Rain would smash into the broken plants; its noise would hide the noise of the last plant giants falling down. However, the storm would continue to ravage the locality, burying the mosses and ferns in black mud, drowning the trapped animals in puddles of muddy water. This time, though, one difference is more substantial. The broken trunks, once they fell, formed a wall, as the following water had jammed them between large boulders, and entwined each other by their knotted roots and thick stems of liana-like ferns. This massive mess of broken trunks, large boulders and mounds of soil washed away by the rains contained corpses of beasts big and small, trapped by the thunderstorm, crushed and smashed by the fallen trunks or drowned in the torrents of rainwater.
This wall of plant and stone had jammed the river that used to flow between a pair of hills. Eventually, the level of the water rose and began to press against this natural dam with a terrible force. At first, this had no affect on the dam, but as time passes, thousands of small streams came through the dam – but it held on. Only when the rains returned and the water level increased several times once again, the dam began to give-in to the increasing pressure. Even then, as the number of the streams increased and the dam's base was weakened, the dam still held on.
However, the rainstorms came again, and filled this natural reservoir to the very top. The wall began to strain and break apart, and the former streams now came through it like great waterfalls.
However, back downstream, Helen Cutter was not aware of that phenomenon; all that she cared was that she had reached the time anomaly – and just in time, as the sun touched horizon on the west, and the formerly golden disk now looked scarlet. The sunlight reached the waters for the last time, turning them the color of molten gold – or would have, as instead the dimetrodon had burst from the waters onto the fallen trunk, scattering bits and pieces of mud, water plants, and other debris everywhere. It roared in victory, as it looked Helen straight eye-to-eye, its knife-like teeth against her single knife.
Behind Helen's back stood the anomaly, she was ready to jump into it and escape, but she was not so daring as to expose her back to the huge reptile.
And here, in this silent tableau of a sunlit evening, came a sound of a terrible crashing. Far, far upstream, the body of the dam developed a massive breach, which quickly began to grow even wider under the power of water, which began to wash away everything that was located before it. And with the water came the broken trunks, parts of the dam, now heaved forwards with the strength of multiple battering rams.
The rivulet with the boulder at its side and others quickly grew into huge rivers full of foaming waters. The trunks of the destroyed primeval forest and mounds of silt were flying through the water everywhere. They smashed into each other, were carried further on by the water's flow and eventually would reach the lowlands, covered in shallow bodies of water, where they would settle to the bottom and be covered in new layers of silt.
Helen Cutter did not care for such knowledge. In an eye blink, she saw a mass of trunks and thick branches literally flying at her, and reacted accordingly: she jumped into the breach.
Immediately, her eyes were assaulted by darkness. Once again, it was a night, and it was hot. However, the air here smelled differently, felt considerably drier, and the soil too lacked that springy quality of the Carboniferous. Helen's brain recorded these differences in the section appropriated for such data even as her eyes saw high ground of some sort before her, and her legs began to carry her there almost instinctively. Not that she had any time to think rationally – she remembered that the dimetrodon came into the anomaly almost after her, and she knew that the floodwaters too would reach the anomaly pour into this time through it. Therefore, she ran.
Behind her, the floodwaters burst through the anomaly's bottleneck with a terrifying splash, and began to spread in all the directions. With it came corpses of various Carboniferous animals and plants, mounds of soil and silt, and one very lively dimetrodon, who tore off after Helen with a very brisk gallop. Here, however, was not the Carboniferous with its semi-alien atmosphere; here the climate was much like the early Permian, for which the dimetrodon had been designed by Mother Nature, and so the mammal-like reptile began to finally tire.
On one hand, Helen understood that. On the other, she had covered as much high ground as she her tired legs could allow her, and she could not run one more step. All the options that were left for her were too: defeat the reptile or die. And Helen Cutter had no intention of dying. She was the superior being in this equation, after all. Pulling her knife out, she whirled around, only to see the dimetrodon still going strong – right at her, with its' jaws opened wide.
'When confronted with a dead edaphosaurus, a dimetrodon could 90% percent of the kill – much more so than the modern lion,' the memory helpfully supplied, as the dimetrodon came almost upon Helen. As the jaws came forwards and downwards to close on Helen's body, she jumped to the left, even as she thrust her knife to the right and the dimetrodon's jaws snapped shut millimetres away from her hips. However, her blade struck true into the reptile's short and thick neck, emitting a small fountain of black lukewarm blood, striking the spinal nerves and the spine itself. The dimetrodon's roar choked in the middle and the huge reptile collapsed, skidding back downhill into the waters that still came strong through the anomaly, carrying Helen's knife with it. For few moments, Helen thought that she saw the dead beast's body amongst the dark waters and the debris they carried, but then the corpse vanished, sinking beneath the way.
Chuckling mirthlessly, Helen sat down, preparing herself for a long night's wait. She knew that the anomaly from the Carboniferous would remain open as long as there was river water and other material coming through it, and she had no idea just for how long that will be. Therefore, looking grimly at the water, she sat down on the sand-covered rocks to relax and figure out just when and where was she.
Then she froze. Her nose, recovered from the stench of Carboniferous swamps, caught another smell, also foul, but in a familiar way. It was the stench of dung. Dinosaur dung, to be more specific, and if you wanted to get down to the details, this dung belonged to one of the first dinosaur giants, the plateosaurus.
"No," Helen painfully whispered to the emotionless and inorganic rock, sand, water and sky. "Not the late Triassic period! No!!"
To be continued...