Chapter I: The Departure
"Where's Littlefoot?" cried an elderly male flathead longneck.
"I don't know!" replied his equally worried mate. "Last I saw him he was with Tina."
These two longnecks were the grandparents of a young longneck named Littlefoot, who in times to come would be famous as an adventurer--it was once my fortune to share in one of these adventures. Tina was their daughter, Littlefoot's mother. Littlefoot told me how he was with his mother when she died of her injuries after bravely protecting him from a sharptooth, and how she told him that she would always be with him.
"Daddy! Mama!" cried a young female threehorn.
"Cera!" cried her father on the other side of the gorge (my side).
"Stay right there!" I have also come to know this Cera. She reminds me so much of my mother.
That night, however, Cera slipped off to find a warmer sleeping place, or so she told me, and when she returned to her place on the gorge, her father was gone, having concluded that a sharptooth had taken her, and also gone were her mother, her two sisters Tricia and Agatha, and her only brother Sean, who had looked across at her from the gorge's other side.
One by one the adults gave up on their children on the canyon's other side, and slowly went on their way to the Great Valley with those of their children who were still with them.
First to go were the threehorns, followed by the clubtails. Then went the widebeak swimmers, the longnecks, and finally the flyers.
With them went the sharpteeth, especially the tall ones with two foreclaws. It seemed that every day the sharpteeth claimed a new victim. Even I, Robert P. Thicknose, was attacked by one, but managed to fend it off by knocking it out with a big boulder.
In the minds of the two old flathead longnecks, so many questions arose. Why did the herds invite sharpteeth by sticking with their own kinds in tiny little groups? Wouldn't it be better to join up and form one superherd?
But the other kinds were more preoccupied with immediate survival. The herds managed to cover at most two miles a day, crossing hot deserts and waterless rock wastelands, but the sharpteeth easily kept pace, and every day I heard a terrifying roar and an agonized bellow talkback across the open space.
After a week, the herds were just fourteen miles closer to the Great Valley when they were hit by a child-shake, or "aftershock" as the farwalkers call it, of the huge earthshake that had separated the families. There had been many child-shakes since, but this one was the biggest yet. A few were killed, but not many.
After the shaking had stopped, my friend Vega heard the old threehorn groaning for Cera, and (quite irrationally) blaming the longneck who had been seen rescuing her during the big earthshake and setting her on the wrong side of the big ditch. He was some distance away from his herd, and never saw the huge sharptooth sneaking up behind him.