Helen's Hi-jinks Part IV
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Chapter IV – The Eocene
After several days of wanderings, Helen began to have doubts that her luck had gone completely rotten. True, it did look like that she ended in the Eocene, but as far as those things went, it appeared to be a completely different part of the Eocene from which she landed during her last sojourn: back then, on her second visit – she didn't really dwell about the first, it was only for a day and a night – she ended up in the prehistoric Egypt, back when it was not a desert but a great expanse of mangrove swamps, and barely made out of there, almost crazed from hunger and thirst. However, this time, the settings were completely different.
The first sign, though, that her luck may have changed, was back in the Triassic. Back then, the time anomaly opened against the movement of the waves, thus avoiding the interaction of the Triassic and Eocene time continuums, as it did with the Triassic and the Carboniferous. Thus, Helen could once again say good-by and good riddance to the Mesozoic dinosaurs and other reptiles of that age, and fully embrace the Eocene, the opening act of the Age of Beasts, the Cainozoic, instead – and there were pleasant sights and wonders to embrace.
Helen had spent her first night back in the Cainozoic alongside a spring of crystal-clear water, growing amongst green ferns and low-slung horsetails. Its waters tinkled down the narrow bed down the mountainside into a wide lake, hemmed from all sides by the tall mountainsides.
For her part, Helen Cutter liked the tall mountainsides as well. They tended to provide excellent points of viewing the neighbourhood from a safe distance, as well as a partial concealment from other prying eyes at least.
Furthermore, the mountainsides that hemmed-in the lake and the luxuriant, brightly green plants that grew on the lake's shores, rose high into the sky their tops, grey and immobile, still and dead. They pierced the sky in a gloomy silence, like calm and petrified witnesses of ages past, which vanished in the endless and eternal sea of oblivion. Sometimes these mountaintops were the scenes of horrifying storms, when thunderclaps would ring around them, followed by the terrifying echoes repeatedly. During strong rainstorms, the mountains would ring from the torrents of water emerging on them from above, or groan from the icy pellets of frozen hail. During these periods, the unshakable silence, so currently familiar to Helen Cutter, would be replaced by the rumbling and similar noises of storms and whirlwinds.
The mountain ridges were centuries old, and often earthquakes would crack their cliffs, breaking them down, turning them into boulders, which rolled down the steep sides into valleys. Here they created immense rocky obstacles that reflected the destruction wrought by the earthquakes and the wind erosion, as because of these forces the feet of the mountains were covered in innumerable boulders, looking like an abandoned battlefield of gods and titans that had warred here in times past.
However, Helen Cutter had noticed something else: between the ordinary mountaintops, the clear blue sky was also pierced by the open craters of multiple volcanoes. Red-hot lava would boil in them like as in the huge cauldrons, and during the volcanic eruptions it would burst from out of these deep craters and pour down the volcanic slopes, spreading through the neighbourhood, through the huge boulders lying at the feet of the ridges, and reaching the lake, where it would burn down the shrubs and the bigger part of the local woods. All that the lava touched and grasped in its burning embrace was almost instantly reduced to ashes. These deadly floods of red-hot lava stopped only in the swamps and quagmires, raising clouds of whitish steam.
Sometimes, alongside the lava, clouds of deadly gases would emerge from the craters as well. They would spread around and choke every living thing. Alternatively, the craters would also emit pillars of thick black smoke, which briefly revealed red tongues of the living flame and swarms of sparks. Clouds of red-hot ashes rose into the sky alongside these black with reddish tint pillars. The ashes would swirl in the air for a while and then fall down to earth. The heaps of ash destroyed the low-lying shrubs alongside the small animals that lived in them, heaping up in the every-growing layers.
During such times, all animals that could, fled from the areas marked by black smoke, where tongues of flame of incredible size pierced the smoke, and red-hot ashes covered the ground in great numbers. The layers of ash destroyed everything; the very air above them shimmered as if it was over an open flame.
When the rambunctious volcanoes would stop and go back to sleep, everything around them was essentially a single huge grave. Death lay beneath the layers of ash. Yet, after such catastrophes, out quiet and dark retreats, from lairs and holes in the primeval forests, emerged various creatures that survived the lava and the volcanic ashes and the deadly gases. The steppes of burned-down plants grew green once again and the cheery sounds of various insects sounded again in the new and dewy morning. They created a deafening chorus, in which every member poured everything it had into its own song and tried to overpower the others.
Right away starting at the very edge of the volcanic tomb, the life would start to come back, just as jolly and careless as if the horrors of the eruption never took place. The sun once again would shine among the clear, azure sky. The lakesides would be green and full of life anew.
And the landscape once more would be truly beautiful. Helen Cutter, however, was not fooled by this beauty. She had a very good idea of what a volcano could do and fervently hoped that the anomaly would open without her having to go through a volcanic eruption – that kind of glory she wanted to save to Nick.
"No, I think I'll drown him instead," Helen's mouth formed a vicious smile. "I'll save the volcanoes for Australia or maybe for a certain obnoxious Yankee and his homeland..."
As Helen muttered, she left the mountainsides far behind and reached the lake itself, which shone like a grand silver mirror. Around it grew huge, centuries-oak oaks and maples, hazelnuts, mulberries and ginkgo, as well as the cypress and yew tree alongside the gargantuan sequoias, which grew beyond what Helen could see without binoculars. Alternatively, they could have been different plants: of all the natural sciences, botany was the least interesting to Helen. She could, after an effort, distinguish a fir tree from a pine but not from a spruce; she could distinguish a birch from an oak or a maple from an elm, but that was about it – and currently she was actually avoiding looking at the plant life, because for some reason the glimpses she took made her nervous: were there cycads amongst these semi-tropical broad-leaf forests after all? Were Eocene ferns supposed to be so big and horsetails so numerous? What if her actions in the Carboniferous and the Triassic ensured that some reptiles survived the initial K/T extinction event and now flourished in the Eocene's tropical climate?
Then Helen remembered something else. The dinosaurs were gone, but for a while Eocene was home for huge land-dwelling 'panzercrocs' like pristichampsus that was more than a match for any mammal of these times. In the later Eocene, this niche had been partially taken by a giant carnivorous mammal andrewsarchus, a creature, which during Helen's last visit to the Eocene attempted to eat her – and it was substantially bigger than either the therapsids or the raisuchians of the previous time periods.
As Helen's initially careless stride became more cautious, the copses around her began to merge into bigger coppices, dominated by cinnamon and laurel trees, as well as by the palms, whose tops of fan-shaped leaves shone with a blindingly green colour in the golden sunrays. They looked even better that the cycads, whose leaves fluttered in the winds as feathery fans made from green ribbons high above the growths of pussy willow, oleander and hazel.
The cycads?! Helen stopped still as soon as the realization hit. They – they did survive the K/T extinction, right, but were there supposed to be so many of them by the Eocene. Furthermore, what time of the Eocene was it? Having visited both the Early and Late Eocene on two different occasions, Helen knew that not unlike the Permian or the Triassic, the beginning and the end of this time period were quite different from each other, warranting two individual approaches instead of just one generalized.
The tall and powerful trunks of old trees (not lepidodendrons or sigillarias or giant horsetails, Helen Cutter noticed with relief) were covered in innumerable lianas (not liana-like ferns) that reached the very tops of the great trees and once there, they spread open their own green leaves. Bunches of equally green parasitic and epiphytic plants grew on old branches covered in mosses and lichens, dominated primarily by magnificent orchids, whose beautiful and tender flowers combined and embodied pink sunrises and burning sunsets, rainbows and lightning bolts.
Sometimes, a regular wind would blow by. The centuries-old giants would ignore it, and its leaves would only barely flutter, almost silently in the darkness of the old forest. Yet Helen knew, that should a whirlwind come along, it would grab as many of these giants as it could, tear them from the ground without pity, and then smash them back into the ground with such a force, that the heavy trunks would break like thin wood planks. And the whirlwind would continue to sing its song of devastation.
However, as soon as the destructive power of the squalls and whirlwinds would come to an end, the ancient forests would once more know peace. The downed plant giants would gradually decompose, their bodies fertilizing the growth of new, green and mossy plants, and their branches would line the floors of lairs of many forest animals.
However, Helen ignored this circle of life. On a certain level, this sylvan cycle had went on since the Late Jurassic, or, in lieu of her latest time journeys, in the Carboniferous, or perhaps even the Devonian, with the ancestors of the first conifers, and had no interest other than the occasional aesthetic one to her. Finding the time anomaly, however, was much more important and requiring a great deal of attention, as her inner sense just could not pick on a definite location lock.
This development was disturbing. Last time that happened... it was on her second trip to the Eocene, when, as Helen preferred to think, she had to walk around a great deal of swamped coastline of the ancient Tethys Sea almost without any food or water, and with several giant carnivores trying to eat her...
Suddenly, Helen stopped. She had reached the lake that lay between the mountains, fed by various rivers and streams. Numerous prehistoric fishes, terrapins and waterfowl dwelled along its shore. Currently, many of these birds were rising into the air, creating a noise that sounded through the sylvan silence as loudly as a waterfall.
On the shores of the lake and the rivers that fed it lay numerous bogs and swamps, overgrown by interlocked mosses and cattails as well as by big clumps of other swamp vegetation, whose wide and soft leaves hid the green pillows of mosses. In other parts, the mosses themselves formed tall, rust-coloured carpets, edged by liverworts in greenish or yellowish tones. Dense outgrowths of green horsetails and colourful ferns created insurmountable obstacles on the paths and towered over mosses and swamp plants like clumps of green darkness, which sneaked low above the ground.
"I am in the Eocene," Helen spoke up in a tone that implied that she was rather in Hell. "Still, this does not look like the early Eocene or the late one. I guess that I am somewhere in the middle – the middle Eocene, that is. Hooray."
She was standing on a clear opening, with a decisively non-boggy soil, covered in an outgrowth of short plants. Among this bright green carpet she could see flowers of all kind – white, red, yellow and blue – as well as shrubs both tall and low, home to the cicadas who sang their songs even when the other insects hid to wait the stifling heat of the noon.
Helen Cutter had walked straight for four consecutive hours. She felt that she could use a bit of break especially since the time anomaly would obviously be taking its time to make its presence known to her. With a very sigh, she walked over to a tree (not a cycad) and put down her backpack. She could smell the water nearby, and she could get plenty of fuel for the fire for the night. In short, this time was more like the early Eocene than the late one, when a climatic El Nino struck, wiping out 20% of all animal life. Here, though, the animal life seemed to be flourishing, and the climate seemed to be even and smooth, and Helen did not doubt that she would be able to catch herself a meal after all.
Meanwhile, some distance away from Helen's camp a long and thin head of some primitive carnivore – a mammal – emerged from its home from underneath a tree. The short ears stood at an alert, and the moist black nose sniffed the air. The jaws opened wide and the long tongue, like a wet red snake, licked the nose and the upper lip.
The animal snarled, sounding more irritated than angry, and crawled out of its home. It was a tritemnodon, a distant relative to the hyaenodon of the Oligocene plaints, but at the same time it was an amazingly primitive mammal, carnivore or not. Its body was long and fragile, with thin limbs, and the hind limbs were longer than the fore. The thin, stretched-out head sat at the end of a long neck that was as wide as the skull itself. The reddish-brown fur, almost of the same shade as the cliffs and tree trunks of the creodont's neighbourhood was covered in dark spots that became circular rings on the animal's long tail. In short, it was a predator of an elegant and light body build, quick, mobile and bloodthirsty, but not particularly cunning or tricky...
For her part, however, Helen Cutter did not feel particularly tricky herself. Although she decided to make a camp, she did not feel comfortable on a so exposed place, where any carnivore, whether bird, beast or 'panzercroc' would be perfectly capable of a direct charge at her without any obstacles. After meeting both the andrewsarchus, the largest carnivorous land mammal that had ever walked the earth, and the gastornis, the bone-crushing terror bird of the early Eocene jungles, Helen felt that a more protected place might be in order. With a groan she got back on her feet and began to walk in the same direction, walking counter clockwise around the lake, leaving behind her a noticeable trail of trampled plant life.
Soon Helen once again was out of the woodland and back in the steppe. Before her lay a puddle, long, but almost dried out. The land around it was dotted with footprints of various animals that had used it to sate their thirst. Currently, it was used by a small animal, a distant ancestor of tapirs and rhinos, but built more like a miniature horse.
Helen did not know that she was looking at one of the progenitors of the rhinoceros line. She had, however, met similarly built creatures in the jungles of the early Eocene, and had figured, from examining the remains of one that had an unfortunate run-in with the gastornis, that that beast was somewhat like a horse, and so she assumed, that this one did as well. And why not? The hyrachyus was small and weak, less than a meter in height and about one and a half in length, with thin skin easily pierced by a predator's teeth or something equally sharp, like a knife or a blade. The thick horns of the later rhinos, capable of inflicting dangerous horns had not even began to evolve on this beast. Its only defence was the quick legs, which could carry the animal quickly away from any potential predator – a feat that had saved its life repeatedly.
Helen Cutter too was a potential predator, and the Eocene already had primates – the reason why Helen Cutter had come to this time period the first two times. However, these primates were small, tree-dwelling creatures, acting like the lemurs or the more primitive South American monkeys, having little in common with humans other than the family tree. In addition, at this day and age, the biggest mammals of all times were herbivores (something that Helen also could be, but only reluctantly), and the other herbivores were not exactly dangerous to the hyrachyus. Still, as Helen came close enough to start hoping that she will be able to come within the striking distance, a loud crash came from her left. In a blink of an eye, the hyrachyus went from zero to 40, and quickly disappeared on the horizon.
Slowly, Helen turned away from the escaped beast. The Eocene had no concept of ranged weapons, such as a bow or a primitive spear thrower that Helen had designed during her study of the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons during the Pleistocene. On the other hand, the Pleistocene had no creatures like the hyrachyus and its kin, and so it had not been designed to hit such small and fast moving prey. Therefore, Helen was left without a meaty meal... and possibly in a company of a creature that could consider her a meaty meal instead.
However, it looked like her good luck was still holding on, somewhat. Instead of local predators, the hyrachyus had been startled by a pair of contemporary brontotheres – but these creatures were quite different from the massive beasts Helen had encountered in the late Eocene. Back then (or yet to be) the brontotheres had become the first of the giant herbivorous mammals, easily more than two and a half meters tall in the shoulders, with massive outgrowths of horn on their noses. These, the earlier versions still were only a meter or so tall, only slightly taller than the escape hyrachyus, and without any horns, bone or keratin on their heads.
Indeed, as Helen surveyed the two animals with a rather hungry look on her face, her luck seemed to be improving the longer she stayed away from the Triassic. The brontotheres were about as tall as calves, but more strongly and powerfully built. Their heads were wide and low, but smallish in relation to their powerful bodies, and the eyes were small and dim, located far in the front of head. The bones of the skull were strong and very thick, but their brains were rather small, and so was their intelligence. By their way of life, the brontotheres were quite peaceful creatures.
However, Helen Cutter was not. The wind was blowing in her direction, and so the brontotheres could not sense her. And even if they did, Helen Cutter had never been in this place and time period before, and the humans did not exist, even theory. Therefore, even if the brontotheres did smell her, they would as likely to consider her harmless instead.
Yet... Helen Cutter did not dare to attack the pair. These brontotheres did have very impressive canines to be used as weapons, and she was not sure that she would to be able to deal with the pair, if she was to attack them simultaneously. In the later Eocene, their distant kin could face-off an andrewsarchus, a considerably more powerful predator than a human could, and send it fleeting. Therefore, after several regrets, Helen left, leaving the brontotheres to their mud baths, unharmed.
Meanwhile, the creodont was not having a better luck either. It was surveying a copse of large hazel trees that formed a part of a barrier between the coppices and the steppe. There at first it met a family of tree-dwelling insectivores with stiff fur that stuck everywhere and whose ends were already rather like needles to threaten any predator that would attack the small mammals.
The parents of the group were accompanying their children, which were scurrying around them in hope of a good meal. The kits could already find on their own tasty larvae and big worms and were trying to chase the well-armoured beetles that abounded in the plants that grew around the tree roots. Suddenly, the male insectivore noticed the creodont, released a warning howl, and fled to a prickly bush, followed by the female and the scared young. There, they crawled deep inside the vegetation and huddled into one big knot as the much bigger carnivore passed them by.
However, the tritemnodon ignored the insectivores; instead, it passed the bush and went deep into the hazel copse, where long ago a storm had torn down several trees. Their leafless twigs created a chaotic labyrinth, overgrown with mosses and lichens.
Therefore, several prehistoric squirrel-like rodents chose this place for a nice game of tag. As fast as speeding bullets, they ran up and down the tree trunks, flashed between the branches, went into the tangle of twigs, and disappeared and reappeared from there. With huge leaps, they covered the distance from one tree to another, landed on the tiniest of twigs and their elegant bodies, covered in silvery coats with dark stripes on the sides, the back and underneath the eyes, flashed through the air as little silvery darts. Their joyous and careless game sometimes resulted in surprised squeaks or whistles when the silvery beasties almost ran into one another.
A breeze began to disturb the branches of the shrubs of the wide valley and move to harass the leaves of the broadleaf plants and trees and bushes. The hungry creodont came ever and ever closer to the unsuspecting rodents.
The creodont crawled like a snake glaring with its green eyes and waiting for an appropriate moment to strike at the small beasts. It did not have to wait for long
One of the silvery rodents, escaping from the others easily jumped from one tree to another, descended down from it and disappeared. While the others whistled in surprise from the fellow's vanishing act, the clever rodent appeared among the roots of a toppled tree, where it whistled, as if laughing at its own clever joke.
However, in nature he laughs best who laughs last, as the tritemnodon proved it. It charged at the rodent with a powerful lunge, grasped it in the powerful jaws, squeezed them, and cracked the rodent's bones as in a vice of iron.
Upon swallowing the young rodent, however, the creodont did not sake its hunger, but just made it worse. In addition, the need for a better meal led it on further through coppices and bogs.
Meanwhile, Helen Cutter had resolved her issue with a late breakfast (essentially a lunch) in a much more mundane manner: several energy granola bars, stored in her backpack for just such an emergency, had sated her hunger enough so that she could be free to investigate the middle Eocene's steppes and woodlands and seek the next time anomaly at the same time. This solution may not have put a spring in her step, but it made her replace her fishing/hunting spear with a parasol and put the knife back into its sheath on her belt.
Next, Helen created a new cycad-leaf parasol and took-out her binoculars as well: they were of a little use in the coppices, but out on the steppe, or even on the mountainsides they would be very useful.
Therefore, Helen continued to walk the middle Eocene lands, occasionally using her binoculars to gaze at a sufficiently suspicious cloud of dust. Consequently, she spotted the orohippus - relatively primitive early horses – first before they spotted her and moved to a nearby copse to observe them in private.
The original equine ancestors that Helen had observed were small, cat-sized herbivores that fed most only leaves and fruits of various shrubs, and served as prey to any carnivore that was bigger than them; in a single day alone Helen saw two of them fall prey to a gastornis and a creature that was either a crocodile, an otter, or some original ancestor of the whale. These, slightly later models were no longer so easy to prey upon.
They still stood no more than half a meter in height, and their feet still had four toes on the front and three on the back. Their middle fingers, however, were now stronger and bonier than the others were. When the orohippus ran, they put most of their strength on these middle fingers, which made running easier, as the stronger middle bones pushed their legs higher from the ground than the whole set of toes did. Their teeth too were beginning to shift from eating the softer sylvan leaves and similar plants to the hardier steppe vegetation. Still, they had a long way to go before they became modern horses, and, as Helen realized by watching their surroundings through her binoculars, some of them would never get that chance.
As the tiny striped horses approached a section of steppe scrubland, they abruptly changed their direction in search of a different destination. However, it was too late. The large, wolf-sized body of a creodont burst from the shrub cover in a great leap and the tritemnodon burst into the herd. The horses scattered, whining, and one of the orohippus fled in a direction opposite to the main body of the herd. The creodont followed at its heels, snapped in the vice-like jaws, but it just was unable to catch it.
The orohippus soon vanished amongst the scrublands of the wide valley; it continuously ran, stopping only briefly to smell the air. Since it was a foal, the orohippus was used to company of others of its own kind, its parents, siblings and cousins. Now it was all alone, stalked by a predator.
The orohippus continued to wander around. Sometimes it would begin to trot only to calm down and conserve its strength a little later. It was afraid of everything and would flee from it, only to calm back down. It zigzagged left and right and often took nosefulls of air to smell. Yet it did not smell anything dangerous, and so it came to a top of the hill to look around.
Its herd was nowhere in sight, but neither were any predators. The orohippus was indeed on its own.
Calming down somewhat, the orohippus began to nibble some juicy plants, even if it was still anxious. A herd animal, it was not used to get on its own; the instincts were ingrained in the orohippus and told him that the herd brought safety, while being on its own was just complicated and hard and would most likely to bring dangers and death. Moreover, the instincts were right.
"I wonder if I and Nick should have gotten a pet even if we didn't have any kids of our own," Helen Cutter wondered, as she observed the semi-final act of the natural tragedy from her vantage point. "Perhaps if we had something, if not someone, to take care of together, this wouldn't have ever happened." A pause. "And then again, this is a good thing; and, knowing Nick, he would have continued to put his career over our house."
A wicked smile illuminated suddenly the face of Helen Cutter. "Poor Nick," she chuckled, almost forgetting about the orohippus and the carnivore that was stalking it now. "He struggled so hard to become a famous person in the world of science – and now he's just another government worker of Her Majesty!.. Wait, it is Her Majesty's, right? Maybe that entire Carboniferous-Triassic hullabaloo resulted in Edward keeping his throne after all... Oh wait, he was a Nazi sympathiser. Never mind."
By chance or by accident Helen looked once again at the lost orohippus through the binoculars and gasped. The tragic drama had reached its climaxing conclusion. Like an arrow form a longbow, the predator's mottled body flew through the air and smashed into the orohippus back. The toothy jaws locked on the neck, and the heavy paws smashed into the sides. The miniature stallion cried out in deadly pain – and fell down, completely dead. The carnivore, rumbling in satisfaction, continued to grasp the prey by the neck and proceeded to pull it towards its layer. And Helen Cutter, looking at the scene through her binoculars, began to slowly register two factors.
The first was that she needed to go to the lake – it was there that the time anomaly was going to open after all. The second was that the slayer of the orohippus was not the creodont that had startled the herd earlier today. Though of the same lupine size, the new predator was built quite different from the creodont, but the most telltale signs were its feet – they had hooves.
"An andrewsarchus," Helen muttered, remembering her encounters with the huge carnivores in the later Eocene. "Or, rather, since this is a considerably smaller beast rather earlier in time than the andrewsarchus did live, this is one of its relatives or even ancestors instead. I wonder what would happen were I to slay it. Would the andrewsarchus fail to evolve, perhaps?"
The thoughts of such sort gave Helen an encouragement of some sort. She took one last look through the binoculars at the pleasant scene. Next to the lake was a crumbled cliff – a gloomier spot among the enchanting beauty of the tropical landscape. A tiny waterfall, fed by a stream, had made its course down the cliff into the bigger lake. As a result, this mobile body of water created an emerald green meadow, surrounding the water that wove all over the place like a silvery thread.
This stream, as well as the lake it flowed into, plus the abundant juicy plant growth attracted many an herbivore to this spot, and there, as they fed, the herbivores became food instead – to a young, fierce predator – a mesonychid called a synoplotherium. It was indeed a distant relative of the andrewsarchus, and was much smaller. Furthermore, unlike the andrewsarchus, who preferred carrion to live prey, this mesonychid was an active ambush predator, eager to take on any small running horse or rhinoceros or even an old or sickly brontothere, should there be a chance.
In short, this dark brown with stripes predator was the terror of its neighbourhood.
However, Helen Cutter did not care about this one bit. The time anomaly was going to open either on the shore of the lake or over the lake or even in the lake, and she was going to be here, any bloodthirsty and insatiable predators be damned.
And speaking of the predators, there was the other carnivore – the creodont that had separated the orohippus from the rest of its relatives. Therefore, this meant that it was still hungry and looking for any sort of a meal. And Helen Cutter could be considered as such a meal.
Once upon a time Helen Cutter thought that creatures outside of the Miocene/Pliocene time periods would ignore her as they had no idea what a human was. Since that time, she had learned the hard way just how wrong this statement was. Any carnivorous creature, including certain giant ants of the early Eocene period, were ready and willing to taste the human flesh if the rightful owner of that flesh wasn't prepared, ready and willing to defend it. And this time, Helen Cutter was.
Meanwhile, the tritemnodon had indeed noticed Helen's presence out in the steppe, even though she failed to notice the carnivore in the twilight air of the dusk. The sun had reached the tops of the trees, scattering flashes of gold over their leaves and wrinkled bark. The flowers were still opened wide, producing flashes of orange, yellow and red, and emanating sweet-smelling aromas. The butterflies, attracted to these smells would come to the flowers and spread pollen from one to the other. This action attracted the attention of various songbirds, unseen but clearly heard out of the treetops, who sought out insect prey – from these soft-bodied butterflies, to the much better armoured cicadas and locusts, which too made their own songs amongst the spiky and thorny scrubs of the valley.
The tritemnodon had noticed Helen walking through the twilight presence long ago, even though it had not given her presence a second time back then. Instead, it had stalked for a while a pair of amynodonts – aquatic relatives of the modern rhinoceros and the running hyrachyus that had escaped from the creodont earlier in the day.
However, the amynodonts showed no concern about being stalked by a carnivore. As aquatic by their nature as the modern hippos, they safely grazed in the shallow waters of the lake, secure in their invincibility and strength: they were too big for the creodont to tackle directly or from ambush; only if there had been any small calves, would the adults be concerned.
These facts served as no consolation to the creodont that had not eaten since the squirrel-sized rodent much earlier in the day. After a while it managed to track down several ancestors to the modern tapirs that were eaten some plants similar to modern plantains. The creodont immediately turned its attention to them, keeping carefully downwind and hiding behind the trees and the shrubs.
Slowly it began to stalk the herbivores, slipping like a snake in the tall ferns – it was intent on coming close to the tapir to bring it down with just one lunge. For a while, it seemed that it would work: the herbivore was busy with its own meal, oblivious to the danger approaching it.
The creodont went on forwards, passing shrubs and trees one after another, coming ever closer to the tapir-like beast. The eyes were focused only on it, and the attention did not waver for a second.
Therefore, the creodont reached the last tree and prepared for a lunge. The claws grasped the ground, the powerful body tensed up, and the eyes were nailed to the victim. However, as it was about to jump away...
"I don't believe it! Omymids! Just like the godinotia of the past! And active already!"
It was Helen Cutter. She had carefully taken a long route around the mesonychid feasting on the orohippus corpse and had reached the side of the lake, where a stream widened into a bigger bog. Then it saw the primitive primates of the Eocene – the omymids – and her internal anthropologist rose to the front to an unusual extent.
Spellbound, Helen stared at her distant forebears, who were gazing down on her with similarly curious squeaks. However, this exclamation served another important point: it interfered between the creodont and the prey. The herbivore looked up and saw the creodont slam into it. The two similarly sized creatures rolled around the edge of swampland until they fell into the seemingly impenetrable growths of wild plants.
The next moment the noises of fighting stopped, as the two animals separated, the herbivore bleeding from its torn throat, the creodont alive and well... and stuck in the bog. It flailed its limbs, attempting to get out of the sticky mud, but the legs of the carnivore were not really designed for this kind of movement, and so the creodont just wore itself out too quickly. Soon, it was unable to struggle at all, as the green and black mud bubbled around its flanks.
Helen Cutter had watched dispassionately until this point the unfolding of the natural drama before. Now, just like back in the Triassic, when the dinosaurs dined on the placodont eggs, the sight of the creodont, resigned to its death caused something to wobble inside of her – in a bad way. Back in the Triassic, she was able to ignore the sudden advancement of the placodont extinction without too much of a fuss. Now, as the creodont just sank live beneath the swamp's surface, Helen saw face-to-muzzle with it, and something stirred in her gut, something similar to the feeling that directed her to the time anomalies. Moreover, Helen was used to listening in those cases to her gut.
Slowly, she waded into the swamp and grabbing the creodont by its neck, she began to pull it out. Here, two factors came into play. Firstly, due to Helen's body shape, unique to the humans (and therefore still unseen on the earth for over thirty million years to come), gave her much longer body reach than any four-legged animal of the same body size would have had. Consequently, Helen was able to reach the creodont and begin to pull it out of the swamp without having to wade too deep into the swamp herself.
Secondly, for a creature of its size the tritemnodon was a rather gracile animal, with a lightly built body. Therefore, Helen was able to pull it out of the mud without too much trouble, for her rather outdoorsy life had given her a rather ragged physique than many women of her age would have had.
All of this interaction, starting with the moment that the omymids started their cries alarm before fleeing into the twilit treetops caught the smallish ears of the synoplotherium. It had finished-off the orohippus by now, and was busy seeking new prey. The sounds of one or more animals in trouble sounded to it like a dinner bell, and so it raced there, eager for a new meal after the relatively sinewy orohippus.
However, Helen Cutter, as she lay on the trampled down plants of unidentifiable origin, did not intend to become a new meal for any living thing, short of an allosaurus or a T-Rex, creatures so big and heavy that they were totally out of her league. Consequently, as the mesonychid lunged at her prone form, she jacked her legs up, caught the carnivore neatly around its ribs, and flipped it into the bog.
Helen's legs were not very long and the synoplotherium was not a very light creature, and therefore it fell just a bit away from the edge of the swamp. However, Helen Cutter was not finished yet. All of her recent frustrations and troubles, concerns and aggravations found themselves an outlet on the somewhat befuddled primitive carnivore, as Helen got on her feet and swung a rather professional-looking punch.
Once her blow connected, then another, and then a third. On the third or fourth blow the synoplotherium just collapsed, knocked unconscious by the blows upon its head. And as it laid unconscious at the edge of the bog, and the creodont lay unconscious near from it as well, Helen Cutter felt her anger recede back to disgust.
"As soon as I begin to think that the Eocene is fine it goes and bites right in the arse!" the woman exclaimed angrily, feeling disappointed that the omymids had escaped while she struggled with the bigger animals. "I better not end up in this same period just few millions later!"
She squared her shoulders and resolutely walked away from the bog.
Meanwhile the sky had darkened to a blackness of the color of the universe, and the silvery disk of the moon had emerged from under the horizon and began to spread whitish light everywhere.
From beneath the treetops, from underneath the shrubs and other deep undergrowths and from the tangles of other plants bizarre pictures began to emerge, created by intertwining of black and silver patches, chaotic reflections of branches and leaves that sieved the moonlight. The waters of lakes and swamps looked like a liquid mass of black paint and molten silver. The thin lines of the tiny waterfalls glowed like white threads against the blackness of the cliffs.
The birds fell silent, and so did the locusts and cicadas, the flies and the wasps and the hornets – only the wordless crooning of the flowing waters and creaking trees was carried on the winds...
Helen looked around and found a hillside complete with a boulder stuck in it. She looked at it and remembered another boulder, back in the Carboniferous. And the more she looked at it, the more she felt determined to wait for the anomaly to open at this place.
As once again, after a restless day, Helen Cutter shrugged away her tiredness and prepared to wait, out of green undergrowth emerged three creatures, the biggest of which was easily the size of a fully-grown rhinoceros, with six horns protruding from its skull and a pair of sabre-like canines protruding from its mouth. The beast's mate was only marginally smaller and with shorter horns, but the calf was still hornless.
These creatures were uintatheriums, herbivorous mammals of a long-lost lineage. The adults were slightly over four meters long, around two meters in height, and weighted around twenty-two hundred kilograms. Their sabre teeth were extremely sharp, even if adapted to picking up tough plants that the uintatheriums ate rather than for defence.
However, Helen was not impressed. She was not going to hunt the massive beasts, she was merely killing time, waiting for the time anomaly to open.
However, something else was. As Helen Cutter watched, the uintatherium calf grew distracted by the silver thread, falling through the moonlight off the dark cliff into the gleaming depths.
The curious calf came closer and suddenly saw that one of the shores of the lake was covered in big emerald-green leaves that reflected, fan-like, in the moonlit waters of the lake.
Though it was still relatively young, the calf already knew that besides its mother's milk the world already had plenty of tasty treats for a hungry uintatherium. Amongst these treats that the calf had eaten or tasted, were these big and juicy leaves, found usually alongside bodies of water. Therefore, it bit-off one of these leaves with its smallish mouth and began to chew.
The leaf was soft, juicy and sweetish. The calf ate another one of the leaves, then the third, and forgot all about caution.
However, nature seldom provides something free. As Helen watched, bemused, another pair of eyes, glowing green, appeared in the darkness, staring at the calf. It was a creodont – maybe the same one that she pulled out of the swamp during the sunset – and it seemed very interested in having the calf for its late supper.
Helen rolled her eyes. Though this was her first meeting of the uintatheriums, she had seen plenty of big brontotheres in the late Eocene, and those beasts were much closer in size to the uintatheriums than to their predecessors of these times. Conversely, the andrewsarchus, which followed their herds for strugglers and scavengers, were much bigger than any of the big creodonts she had seen in these times. Therefore, should the creodont attack the uintatherium family, it would end up as a bloody pile of meat and bones on the ground.
A sudden burst of chromatically white light caught Helen's attention. The time anomaly opened at last and it was time for her to leave the Eocene and go seek her fortunes in times new. As she got to her feet and began to make her way over to the time anomaly, several things happened at the same time.
First, as Helen got on her feet and began to race downhill to the anomaly, she knocked loose a small stone and it fell into the pool with a plunk.
Second, the falling stone caused ripples on the water, which caused the calf to stop eating and look around.
Third, as the calf looked around, it saw that it was on its own – with a pair of eyes burning at it from the darkness.
All of this caused the natural reaction: the calf bellowed as loudly as it could from the terror that it felt and fled in the direction of its parents, with the creodont, clearly driven careless and overly callous by hunger, snipping at its heels.
The uintatherium mother had long since realized that the calf was missing, but she did not take it too seriously. Now, as it heard and saw its only offspring running for its life with a carnivore nipping at the heels, it raced towards the predator, ready to bite and gore. The father of the family did the same thing, just from the other side, with a deep rumble in its chest that promised nothing good. It clearly intended to intercept the creodont before is mate did.
None of the uintatheriums noticed Helen Cutter, as she stood too close to the time anomaly by the time the prehistoric animals put their show in action. She was ready to jump into it too, when something else boiled to the forefront – her own frustrated hunting on that morning, when she almost attacked two relatively small brontotheres. And she did probably pull that creodont out of the swamp...
Without further ado, Helen produced the pointed stick that she used for a handle of a parasol or a spear, and threw it at the male uintatherium. The sharpened piece of wood hit it in the shoulder blade and harmlessly fell down. This new attack, however, caused the uintatherium to pause, only to shift its position and charge at the new supposed threat, ready to trample it into the ground.
However, Helen Cutter did not intend to be trampled by the large animal's powerful charge. Instead, she jumped into the time anomaly, which immediately began to dim and close. This change of light in the clearing further disoriented the uintatherium, and the beast ran past the closing time anomaly, goring its mate instead. The two mammalian giants fell with a bone-wrenching crash, right on top of their calf, which had been huddling behind mother for protection from the creodont instead.
As the mighty beasts slowly stopped twitching and perished, one from a ripped-open ribcage, the other from a snapped neck, the creodont yowled its thanks to the sky and began to feed – better than it ever had in a long, long while. The butterfly once again had flapped its wings, and a storm would be rising in China...
However, Helen Cutter did not know all this. Instead, she crawled onto another tree and closed her eyes, hoping – and not in vain – that she was out of the Eocene woods after all...
To be continued...