Helen's Hi-jinks Part II
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Chapter 2 – the Triassic (part 1)
The time was the Late Triassic of the Mesozoic Era. The place was a rocky highland plateau overlooking a great desert. In some places, steep sides of scattered hills rose above the sea of reddish dust, whereas in the other places the hills and the desert gradually merged into each other via wide and smooth valleys. The plateau was cutting-off the desert's advance as a wide and unbreakable wall, while on the other side the desert was edged by a green green-water sea.
Helen Cutter knew that there were days when the desert would be quiet, restful, and barely alive. During these times, it will be a completely dehydrated strip of land with an uncountable number of long rows among the red-hot, reddish dust – an abandoned empty place, edged-in by the plateau and the sea.
However, there were other times, when the desert began to move. It would start after long times of rest, when furious winds would blow and carry with them masses of reddish dust which was created by the breaking apart clay, sand and stone shards that littered the bottoms and the sides of the mountain valleys. Thus the surface of the desert would constantly change, as thin layers of dust accumulated into hills, covered the wide and flat valleys or the green oases of the seashore.
Then Helen Cutter came here via a time anomaly from the Carboniferous time period, and everything changed. Masses of silty and debris-choked waters burst into the deserted land like the Old Testament's Great Deluge, saturating the reddish sands to the limits with blackish muds, and fallen trunks of plants long gone, and corpses of various beasts, long extinct before this time.
If Nick Cutter was the one travelling through time via the anomalies, he would have probably been shaken by this large change to the local prehistoric environment. Helen Cutter, however, was far less sentimental as Nick on the whole, and the recent events reduced her sentimentality even more. Furthermore, she had been to Triassic before, albeit a different piece of this forbearing land, and this had been the worst 9 months of her life, forcing to fight of marauding Coelophysis and similar predators over the ever-dwindling amount of water. Therefore, the sight of even a part of the normally water-sparse Triassic begin swamped with water brought a smile to her lips; but there was little joy in the smile; certainly not the kind of joy that you want to see in real life, even out of the dark alley.
On the other hand, Helen had paid dearly for this mirth: initially she had come to the Triassic escaping a powerful predator from the early Permian – the mammal-like reptile, dimetrodon. Though she eventually managed to kill it, the dead animal took Helen's only knife with it in the final plunge, and so Helen had to spend the following day seeking the corpse and the knife. During that day, as she had precariously balanced from one sunken trunk to the other, she developed her balancing skill more so than she ever had before, and would have gladly not go through this again. However, for all purposes, she found the corpse, recovered the knife, and was now making her tracks back up the plateau, to escape the painfully familiar stench of the Carboniferous swamp mud.
What was more was that the time anomaly, which connected the Carboniferous to the Triassic, was also there, active, albeit transfixed among the mud. Unless something changed on either side of the time anomaly, it would remain there a semi-permanent bridge between the two time periods, possibly permanently and completely altering both of them in the end. Helen, however, did not care about this: such changes no longer affected her, as they would affect, say one of Nick's co-workers, in either of the realities.
Then, of course, there was the realistic knowledge lurking behind Helen's current gloating. The desert had known periods of rain, which flooded the desert and turned the dust into sticky clay, covered by a thin layer of water. Such small lakes flourished during the rainy seasons, but they never lasted long. As soon as the rains began to stop, these lakes too began to dry-out and disappear; and when the rains were gone, so were the lakes: their clay-covered beds were covered again by the wind-blown dust. Therefore, after the rains, the desert would return to its regular appearance – but not now. Now, as far as Helen was aware, the time anomaly will alter the geographical and geological outlook of these lands for months, if not years to come, and she, hopefully, would be long gone from the Triassic, travelling through other time periods, just, hopefully, not the Permian or the Eocene ones.
Meanwhile, she reached the top of the plateau.
Here, it was greatly different from the lifeless desert that lay beneath it. Here was the Triassic flora in its full bloom. The plants were growing everywhere, as the recently passed rains have returned them to life under the sweltering sun.
The reflective surfaces of the lakes revealed the tall, palm-like cycads and the ferns growing beneath them. The cycads' palm-like fronds looked as delicate as lace and created an elaborate mosaic of light and shadows on the brownish ground. Here, too, grew the true trees – conifers, covered in either needles or gingko-like leaves. The old giants with far-spread tops stood as still as stone pillars, and between them grew their seedlings, which shivered from the least of breezes, and intently reached-out for the sun.
The damp shores of lakes and ponds, created here after every rain, where covered in carpets of green mosses and horsetails, which flourished on every surface, including various boulders. "Forget building a bridge back to the Carboniferous," Helen sniffed, remembering her own experience with a boulder in the Carboniferous. "It never left, just went out to hide."
Various beautiful ferns emerged from the waters of the lakes: their roots pierced the silt in all the directions while their leaves emerged from above the water.
From beyond them, from the deeper parts of the lakes, as well as from the damper, darker areas of the plateau, grew powerful horsetails, some easily ten meters long, resembling twisted, distorted trees without any branches and ending in a single solid cone on top. Here too, Helen now saw the echoes of the bygone Carboniferous age, and her mood grew darker and darker as time went by.
Yet the morning was beautiful in this ancient land of permanent silence. Here too were no singing birds, and considerably fewer vocal bugs than there were in the Carboniferous. The rising sun had reached even those high-growing plants, brought them light and warmth, made dew-drops shine like diamonds, and soon this hot golden rain penetrated even the darkest corners of the deep ravines from where came the darkness and the cold.
Helen Cutter was not particularly impressed. She had seen similar nature shows many times before, even if the place was different, and as a consequent knew that as the times would go by, this place would become as hot as Hades itself, and just as inviting. Therefore, using her knife, she began to slice off the fronds of the smaller cycads, using the twine in her pack to form them into a parasol of sorts, which would protect her for the next couple of days, while she waited for the next time anomaly to open. Hopefully, this time it will not be months, but weeks or even days, and she could accept that.
However, even she could not make parasols out of cycad leaves and walk at the same time, and so she sat down onto an edge of a deep ravine, from the bottom of which lay a big silvery pond, framed by luxurious outgrowths of green plants. The ravine's steep sides were made out of edged cliffs, covered in thousands of cracks. The bigger boulders lay on the bottom like the ruins of an ancient castle and between them flowed a small stream, which every once in a while formed a miniature waterfall over a particularly inconveniently lying boulder. However, ignoring these obstacles, the stream flowed on, tinkling merrily, as if it could not wait for the moment when its crystal waters would merge with the murky waters of the lake.
For some reason, Helen Cutter felt that her eyes were forming streams of their own, and it was nothing to do with any allergy: there were still millions of years between her and the first flowering plants... "Life is everywhere," she whispered quietly, as if she was afraid that there was someone else, who could hear and understand what she was saying. "Life is everywhere, ploughing on and reproducing itself, developing new shapes and forms and designs... I miss Stephen. The next time I find Nick, I'll make him pay for everything he ever owed me, and that includes PAIN!"
The last word was a shout, not a whisper, and it echoed throughout the length of the ravine, overriding for a while the stream's merry tinkling. However, eventually it vanished into silence.
Where the stream exited the ravine to cover a sandy clearing that bridged the ravine to the lake lay several more boulders. Two of them were lying very close to each other, and the third, at the very edge of the ravine, hang over them like a solid, flat roof. This formed a small cave, possibly large enough for Helen to bear-out the coming heat of the noonday sun. The cave was gated by lyre-shaped fans of ferns. The boulders themselves were covered in lichens, big tree ferns grew over them, creating more shadows as the sun's rays fractured through their fronds.
Suddenly, there was movement from within the small cave. Two bipedal reptiles – Triassic dinosaurs – emerged from the cave where they had waited for the cold night to end. But now the warm sun had brought them out of their torpor; the pair opened their eyes, covered with the third, brown eyelid, and crawled outside, enjoying the sunlight, warm-blooded beasts or not.
These dinosaurs, if Helen Cutter would have cared to know, were procompsognathus, small theropod dinosaurs, distant cousins of the Coelophysis that had given her such a hard time on her previous visit to the Triassic age. But Helen never had much enthusiasm for dinosaurs, and after several misadventures with the carnivores of the Late Jurassic age, she developed a solemn respect for the smaller meat-eating species, and thus kept a good distance away from the pair, even though both of them were just 80 cm in length and only half a meter in height – real midgets compared to their gigantic descendants that would appear in this world in later ages. However, even at this small size, the theropods were formidable hunters of beetles and earthworms, and even the amphibians, which had considerably shrunk since their Carboniferous glory days, had no chance against these midget killers.
As Helen watched, the dinosaurs reached the edge of the lake, covered in deep green ferns and began to seek out a meal from beneath them. They smelled out worms, big cockroaches, and long-bodied centipedes. After a while, when only few cockroaches and centipedes were caught, they continued their trek, seeking out more sustenance for their bellies.
For her part, Helen was at a loss of what to do. Her parasol was complete, but she had no intention of taking-over an occupied cave. The dinosaurs were small, but after fleeing and fighting a dimetrodon for 48 hours in a row, Helen was in no mood to fight anything else. All she cared about was going to sleep, but until she was absolutely sure of her neighbourhood, she did not dare to. These dinosaurs were small, but there were bigger dinosaurs around, like the plateosaurus, whose dung she had smelled last night. In addition, wherever there were big herbivores, there were sure to be big predators.
Even as she was thinking this, Helen slowly followed the dinosaurs at a safe distance. This arrangement brought her to a sandbank, devoid of vegetation, but occupied by a prehistoric tortoise of some kind, which was busy eating a dead fish.
Upon seeing this event, the eyes of the two dinosaurs lit-up with greed, and they rushed over to the tortoise. However, the other animal was unshaken, confident even as the spiky bony plates defended its body and head from the teeth of the small dinosaurs, and its tail formed a small club to defend itself again such aggressors. With its beak, the tortoise snipped-off pieces of dead fish from the carcass and swallowed them whole.
And so it went. The dinosaurs jumped around the tortoise, swished their long tails, snapped their toothy jaws, but did not dare to confront the tortoise directly. The tortoise, for its part, ignored the couple, swallowing one piece after another, ignoring the dinos' determination to have this fish for breakfast.
Abruptly, the tortoise stopped eating and began to move away. Perhaps it had enough of the cold fish and it opted to finish its meal with the juicy plants that grew around the sandbank. In a slow and laborious way it made its' path through the sandbar, as its' heavy shell, which protected the tortoise from its enemies, also made it slow to move.
The small dinosaurs immediately attacked the remains of the fish. They tore off the last pieces of flesh from the bones, chirped at each other and swished their long tails; but everything seemed to be peaceful. Only the sun burned hotter and brighter than before from the blue sky, and the various insects that did make noise during the day fell silent.
Helen gulped. She knew what caused this silence in almost any land (except perhaps for the Devonian), and it was not the time anomalies. This sudden lull in the background meant only one thing: a predator was on the prowl, and in this time of the Triassic age, it meant only one thing: a dinosaur. A bigger carnivorous dinosaur was on the hunt once again.
Since her first walking into a time anomaly, Helen Cutter had seen many times and lands, plants and animals, natural disasters and man-made ones. To this date, she had survived encounter with each one of them, and this success rate was dependent on several factors, including her inner instinct, which suggested loud and clear whenever there was a danger in the neighbourhood.
A huge, almost gigantic – compared to the procompsognathus – theropod dinosaur burst from the copse of cycad trees, where it had spent the night. It was a halticosaurus, a bigger, less sociable cousin of Coelophysis, and it was hungry. A procompsognathus, and not even a fully-grown one, or two, would hardly fill its stomach at all; the taller, meatier shape of Helen Cutter was more to its liking. With a howl, the halticosaurus sent the much smaller theropods fleeing across the sandbar from the giant.
To an inexperienced time traveller, a halticosaurus was an intimidating sight. More than three meters tall and five meters long, its head was high above the cycad copse, and the smallish eyes were twinkling with a malignant glow. However, Helen Cutter was not impressed. Back in the Late Jurassic, she had similar encounters with ceratosaurs and young allosaurs repeatedly, and these dinosaurs were much faster and relatively smarter than their Triassic counterpart was. Furthermore, the halticosaurus was very similar to the Coelophysis, and Helen had dealt with those dinosaurs in the past and intended to deal with their bigger cousin as well.
The halticosaurus charged. Several long, leaping strides, and it was upon Helen, with its jaws wide-open and sharp teeth ready to crush muscles and bones. Instead, it was met with empty space, as Helen had jumped away, into the copse of the cycads, leaving the theropod with nothing.
This tactic, usually effective on its own when dealing with the even bigger and taller theropods of the Late Jurassic and Cretaceous time periods was not working that well against the less ponderous halticosaurus. Snarling, it followed Helen, its long black tongue flickering between the teeth, eyes burning with determination to eat this tasty creature for breakfast.
Compared to a dinosaur, even such a relatively simple one, the human is still the inferior physical model: it is smaller, slower, weaker, and lacks the impressive jaws and teeth of the reptile. Helen's own weapon, a knife, effective in the end against the more primitive dimetrodon, would have been unable to score a sufficient wound on the dinosaur's hide, even if Helen was not so tired.
However, as a human, Helen Cutter had advantages of her own – the foremost of which was her brain, not so much bigger as better developed than the dinosaur's. The dinosaurs, especially the more primitive Triassic species, functioned almost completely on instinct, following a set of behavioural programs, predetermined by their ancestors – and none of these programs was designed to be able to deal with humans. Humans, on the other hand, tend to follow their personal experience as opposed to ancestral instincts, and in this case, Helen Cutter had plenty of experience of dealing with bigger and stronger opponents.
Another difference between human and dinosaur brains was the much greater adaptability of the humans. As a human, Helen Cutter could alter her plans much faster than the halticosaurus did, especially if it was able to even understand the concept of 'plan' beyond the instinctive hunting strategies input into its skull by the ancestral instincts. Normally, when dealing with such prey as other dinosaurs and archosaurs native to this time period, these instincts would have been enough. However, the halticosaurus was hunting a completely different prey, one not foreseen by the ancestors and their instincts – a human.
Still, at this point in time it would be hard to believe that the dinosaur was at the poor end of the evolutionary development, for despite all of Helen's twists and turns amongst the cycads, it still followed her at a fast enough speed, earning true the full meaning of its name – the nimble lizard. But Helen was not running aimlessly among the plants – earlier in the day she had noticed more of the tell-tale spoor that belonged to the plateosaurs, and was currently running in that direction.
The halticosaurus too might have noticed, or rather smelt the presence of the plateosaurs, but its brain was currently busy chasing down Helen to make any sort of a connection, and then it was too late: Helen jumped to aside, the nimble dinosaur managed to pick-up too much speed to repeat her manoeuvre in time, and suddenly found itself in a clearing, alongside several huge animals the side of a double-decker bus with powerful tails, long necks, and broad claws on the forelegs. These were the plateosaurs, the largest and perhaps the most advanced of the prosauropods, distant cousins to such giants as the seismosaurus. However, even at this distant relationship, they were still at least half as big as the halticosaurus, with the smallest of them reaching eight meters in length, and the biggest almost twelve.
For their parts, the plateosaurs had not intended to confront a predator in this part of the plateau. They had been moving towards the lake to sate their thirst and to feed on tender five-fronded ferns that grew in abundance around the body of water. Their striped bodies blended almost perfectly into the vegetation, and their yellowish-green eyes were relatively small for their size, but keen, nonetheless.
Helen kept a respectable distance from the prosauropod dinosaurs. Though the plateosaurs were vegetarians, their digestive systems were still sufficiently generalized to eat large worms and crustaceans, small amphibians and carrion. They were not designed to compete with the theropods like the halticosaurus for live prey, but they would attempt to steal its meal, if the theropod's prey was already dead. They were usually successful, too: they were not bigger and taller than the halticosaurus, but also considerably heavier, and the claws on their smaller forelimbs were as hard as steel, primarily designed for digging for water or tender roots and bulbs during the dry season, but capable of delivering a nasty blow to the predator as well.
The plateosaurs other weapon was the tail, which, though smaller than the tails of their sauropod cousins too was capable of slamming a predator to the ground. Finally, the plateosaurs could charge as one, trampling the halticosaurus to the ground. In short, though their brainpower made modern sheep look like geniuses, the plateosaurs completely made it up with their brawn.
While Helen Cutter kept her distance away from the plateosaurs, the halticosaurus unexpectedly found itself nose-to-nose with the lead bull of the herd. Both dinosaurs were driven by instinct, but the plateosaurus felt more confident than the carnivore – it was bigger, stronger, backed-up by the fellows of its herd, while the halticosaurus was a solitary predator, unlike its smaller cousins.
As the halticosaurus began to back away, the plateosaurus rose on its hind legs, freeing its forelegs for combat, and emitted a battle cry. It sounded like a turning rusty door hinge – not a very intimidating sound – but the halticosaurus had had enough. The theropod turned around and fled back into the cycads, forgetting about Helen Cutter and its earlier pursuit.
As soon as the carnivore had vanished in the distance, the plateosaurs relaxed and continued on their journey – a copse of tree-like ferns and giant horsetails that grew in the silty lake and the damp sandy shore of it.
Helen re-evaluated her options. She knew now that the carnivore considered the cycads and the nearby territory as its hunting domain and would hunt her repeatedly for as long as she stayed there. The more herbivorous plateosaurs were generally harmless, as long as there were not any young and smaller dinosaurs with them, and she kept her distance. Shrugging to herself and picking-up her cycad-leaf parasol, Helen Cutter followed the herd into the horsetail copse.
At this moment in time and space, following the herd was an easy thing to do. The giant club-shaped plants had been completely destroyed by the passing dinosaurs. The mighty animals just tore down the tall, but hollow plants. Their paws cracked the toppled plants into smaller pieces, mixed with the sandy soil into a yellowish-green gunk. In short, the plateosaurs had torn a road of chaos and destruction right through the horsetail copse.
As Helen walked through the horsetails, she caught herself thinking about the Carboniferous once more. The similarities were present once again, with silence being the most obvious one. Just like the earlier times, the Triassic was completely devoid of birds and their songs – it would be millions of years in the future, in the Late Jurassic and Early Cretaceous, that they would appear. The few insects that did sing during the days had been scared away and into silence by the plateosaurs passing, and the mammal-like cynodonts, distant descendants of the dimetrodon, were currently sleeping in their burrows, away from the heat of the sun and the eyes of the predatory dinosaurs.
Helen checked her movement a few times and looked around and behind herself. The dimetrodon was dead, killed by her, and its corpse rotting in the lowlands below her. The halticosaurus would not leave its territory to follow such a strong plateosaurus herd. In fact, there was not yet a predatory dinosaur strong enough to attack a plateosaurus herd at all. Therefore, Helen was completely safe, unless she did something stupid and caused the plateosaurs to regard her as a threat instead.
Suddenly, the horsetails ended, and so did the plateosaurs track. Cautiously leaving the cover of the horsetails behind her, Helen noticed the plateosaurs feeding on the tree ferns far away to her left. To her right she noticed the reason why the plateosaurs decided to change their plans: it was a dead amphibian, a capitosaurus. A distant descendant of the anthracosaurs of the Carboniferous, it resembled a frog with a stumpy tail, length of almost three meters, and a powerful, alligator-shaped head. However, it was also very dead and partially eaten, and as Helen came over for a closer examination, she saw why.
"Crocodile teeth!" she muttered, as she saw them sticking out of the backbone and hips of the dead amphibian. "No, wait, this is the Triassic – make this phytosaur teeth!"
Everything made sense now. Helen had seen some of the phytosaurs – Triassic cousins of the crocodiles – on her previous visit, and she knew that not unlike the crocodiles, the phytosaurs would attack a dinosaur if they felt big and strong enough to handle them. From the look of the corpse, the capitosaurus had been unable to put much of a struggle to its more advanced assassin, and the phytosaurs, just like the crocodiles and alligators, tended to feed on their kills until they were done with it.
Quickly and hurriedly, Helen moved away from the corpse and the edge of lake. Just in time, too, as the greenish waters of the lake parted with a rush, and onto the shore in the direction of the dead amphibian rushed a phytosaur, the biggest one Helen had even seen – it was three or four times bigger than the amphibian. Its wrinkled and scarred hide belied the reptile's great age, but the eyes were alert and keen, and the teeth were sharp.
Helen Cutter was not a coward. She had dealt with the phytosaurs before and knew that on land they were less dangerous than the carnivorous dinosaurs or the raisuchian archosaurs. Then again, she had no intention of confronting the aquatic reptile over a dead amphibian either.
As Helen moved away, the phytosaur continued to track her movement, glaring balefully at her with one glowing green eye. Sadly, this meant that the phytosaur itself lost track of its surroundings, leaving its right side vulnerable from the attacks from the lake. And an attack came.
Like an arrow fired from a composite longbow, a second phytosaur, at most only three-quarters of the first one's length, rushed from the lake, biting the older, bigger animal in the neck. Belatedly, Helen realized that the newcomer was the true owner of the dead amphibian, and the old-timer wanted to just steal the freshly killed meat instead: the teeth in the carcass were not big enough for the older bull.
However, the younger one was not relinquishing its meal without a fight: even as the old bull rolled one way, it rolled the other, and both of the phytosaurs fell back into the greenish waters of the lake, which quickly began to be coloured red instead.
For her part, Helen had no intention of staying alongside the dead capitosaurus. Even in the murky waters, she could see the outlines of the gaping maws and swishing tails, as the phytosaurs fought out between themselves the right to eat the carrion, and had no intention of being confused for another challenger by the eventual victor. Therefore, she slowly began to move in the direction of the grazing plateosaurs – only to find out them to be long gone.
Concerned, Helen looked at the sky: it was getting late and soon it would be dark. Though Helen knew that in the Triassic the nights were safe from the dinosaurs, she decided to set-up camp instead; besides, it was always possible that some night hunters, like the therocephalians, had survived until now, and would be hunting come sunset. And so, Helen walked among the tree ferns, till she found another ravine, devoid of any bodies of water, but it was overgrown with luxuriously green ferns that hid plenty of smallish caves and cracks in the wall for Helen to make camp.
"Last time that I was in the Triassic, I would have given a tooth of mine for such a spot to spend the summer drought," Helen muttered, as she crawled into one of these caves. "And here," she paused, listening in to her internal senses and gut feelings – and then she suddenly stiffened.
The gut feeling – or perhaps even instinct – that helped her navigate from one time anomaly to the other, told her that the time anomaly would open, but not here: Helen would have to get to the seashore instead. And between the sea shore and plateau lay the desert. And the desert, as of last night, was covered in a quagmire of Carboniferous mud.
For few long heartbeats, Helen just stared at the entrance of her cave, and then, abruptly, she crawled into a corner to sleep. Since her first passing through the anomaly she had learned to deal with any hardships her travels through time threw at her, and she was not about to start now, not unless she wanted to permanently stay at the plateau – and she knew that it was not an option. In a matter of weeks, or even days, the rains would stop. The local plants would gradually wither, dry out, and vanish down to the roots under the merciless sun. The lakes and the ponds would dry out, and their inhabitants would either perish or go into hibernation. In addition, that would leave her dependent on the phytosaur-infested lake or digging water holes along the courses of smaller streams, which, in the times of drought, attracted predators such as the halticosaurs. Once upon a time, Helen Cutter had spent almost a year in the Triassic. She had no intention of doing so again.
The next morning, after a full night's rest, Helen Cutter got up and walked to the edge of the plateau. At first, once again followed a trail of the plateosaurs¸ not a fresh one like yesterday, but an older, well-worn one. For a while, all was cool, but then she noticed that she had company – of dinosaurs. Fortunately, though, these were not like the meat-eating giant of yesterday's cycad copse, but the smaller ones, the procompsognathus. The smaller carnivores were trailing Helen, feasting upon various insects, startled by her passing through the plants under foot.
Suddenly, Helen stopped. "Pterosaurs," she muttered. "Last time I was in the Triassic, there were already pterosaurs. Here, there are not any. Guess this isn't the best place for them to live," – and she continued on her way.
Soon she had to stop – and this time it was not of her own volition. Instead, the reason for her stop was a chorus of plateosaurus cries – and unlike the ones, she heard yesterday, these animals sounded more distressed than confident. However, who – or what – could challenge some of the biggest beasts of this time? Concerned, Helen crept forwards – and stopped.
She had reached the end of the plateau – apparently, she had never made it too far from its edge during the previous day, and was once again confronted by the mud-covered desert. There were some differences since her yesterday's trek to bring back her knife: the surface of the quagmire had crusted itself due to the dry heat of the Triassic sun, and had been even covered by patches of new reddish dust. However, Helen was not fooled by these differences: she knew that she could be stuck in this version of mud as easily as in the yesterday's. In addition, like yesterday, she had no other option but to go right through it – not just partway, but all the way to the seashore.
The seashore... Helen did her best to look in the distance; she even considered getting out her binoculars, but the seashore was in the east, and the sun was still close enough to the ground, to blur out almost everything near the horizon, starting with the sea and its shore.
From behind Helen, in the western direction, came the sound of thunder – or rather, it was a thundering roar. With her face carefully immobile, Helen turned around, to see another halticosaurus approaching her with the intent of having her for a meal. Apparently, the plateau supported little animal life other than the plateosaurs, the small procompsognathus dinosaurs, and various water dwelling amphibians and reptiles – not an easy meal, any of them.
Plus, there was the size factor. The Triassic model or not, the halticosaurus was not a giant like the allosaurus or the T-Rex, nor a humble, small creature like the Coelophysis or the ornitholestes. Instead, with its three meters of height and five of length it was medium-sized (on the dinosaur scale) animal, like the ceratosaurus of the Late Jurassic or the utahraptor of the Early Cretaceous. Consequently, this meant that it was suited best for medium-sized, quick-moving prey, and humans, like Helen, fit that category very well.
If Helen Cutter had had any hesitations, the sight of approaching carnivore vanished in a moment. She turned around and raced down the plateau's steep sides, away from the halticosaurus.
For its part, the carnivore had hesitated, once the new smells of the mud down in the lowlands assaulted its nostrils. However, being one of the bigger Triassic carnivores, it preferred to fight, rather than flee, when meeting anything inexperienced before, and so the theropod followed Helen.
However, Helen had stopped caring about the dinosaur as soon as she got over the plateau's edge and began to skid down the steep slope on the seat of her pants. Time was wasting, after all. The theropod, although it too walked on only the hind pair of legs, had a completely different body balance from her, and so, it was unable to maintain its body balance for very long, before losing its footing and rolling down the slope with a thump. Helen had seen this kind of thing before, starting with an episode when a hungry Jurassic megalosaurus had actually followed her through a time anomaly – right into the Ice Age's Swiss Alps. The too top-heavy dinosaur had hit practically every stone on its way to the bottom and never rose again. This Triassic plateau was not exactly the Swiss Alps, but the halticosaurus was built just like its distant Jurassic descendant, down to the relatively light, hollowed bones: once it hit the bottom end of the plateau, it never moved again.
However, Helen Cutter had no time to gloat, not if she wanted get across the newly formed mud plain at all. As she had realized during the previous morning's knife-searching expedition, the desert here formed one of those temporary lakes – a big and shallow indentation in the sandy ground, whose bottom was covered with a layer of solid silt that prevented the water from sinking straight into the underground water table. During the rainy season, this indentation formed a lake, but the long hot season evaporated the lake without a trace, leaving not even one stinking puddle behind.
Now, though, it got covered by viscous Carboniferous mud, and together the two soil types formed something resembling bitumen, cement and tar at the same time: Helen Cutter had spent most of her morning wrenching out the knife from the dimetrodon's corpse covered in this gunk, and she was very lucky at getting her blade out before the corpse had been pushed by her to the very bottom of the shallow lake. Now, there was no corpse, no short cut of a destination. Helen Cutter took a big breath of air and began to jump.
One hop, then another, and another. The trunks of the great Carboniferous plants were not designed for the dry heat of the Triassic, but the new type of mud held their mummifying bodies firmly in their original positions, and Helen was always careful not to stand on any one such trunk more than just few moments, to plan her next jump ahead. One jump, then a shift to the left, and then – a great leap. Helen covered the "clearing" made by the dimetrodon's corpse in a single bound to a land on another dead trunk... only to feel it begin to break apart under the force of her impact.
The time now began to run in seconds for Helen Cutter. Following her instincts and her sight alone, she hoped from one long greenish-brown shape to the other, feeling the sticky mud stick to the soles of her boots in ever-bigger clumps – and she could not take them off in the process.
Time ceased to have meaning for Helen, as did anything else – the heat, the thirst, et cetera. Driven almost only by her will and determination to live, she cleared the area of super-sticky silt in less than ten bounds... only to fall – into the decisively dry and not-stick red mud. Her crazy, if not to say delirious hopping had brought her to the end of the territory saturated by the debris- and silt-loaded waters brought over through the time anomaly, and now... it was time to drink.
Staggering on legs that screamed to take a rest after their hopping ordeal, Helen wandered forwards – toward the smell of the sea. She was determined to crawl there if she had to, because staying here, amongst the red-hot reddish desert dust was suicide: her body would desiccate and die in a matter of days, or even hours, while there, over by the seacoast...
Helen practically did not see the cycad trunk, but smacked right into it. The impact caused her to fall straight on her butt, but it also forced her to pour another handful of water and wash away the caked dust and sweat from her face, eyebrows and eyelids, to be greeted by the most welcome sight since her Permian run-in with the dimetrodon: it was the sea coast with multiple lagoons, green copses of cycads and conifers – and fresh water streamlets. It was salvation!
Meanwhile, as Helen climbed onto a tall conifer to rest in the peaceful shade of its branches, several more creatures followed her tracks. They were procompsognathus, maybe even the same ones that accompanied Helen's trek to the edge of the plateau. Unlike the other dinosaurs, they never before had to travel across the great desert – but the desert was no more, and the bright, inquisitive spark in their brain had drove them forwards, to here, to this new bright and green land, without any traces of the halticosaurs, who would hunt and eat the smaller theropods whenever the two species had met. However, here, here, amongst the cycads and the conifers, the procompsognathus were free at last from their much-larger predators.
Oblivious to the metaphorical butterfly flapping its wings below her, Helen Cutter slept on, dreaming of the ways to go to the time anomaly that will open out in the sea.
To be continued...