Helen's Hi-jinks Part V
All characters, unless noted otherwise, belong to Primeval™ and Impossible Pictures. No copyright infringement is intended
Chapter V – The Miocene
Deep darkness and silence reigned in the vast primeval forest of the Miocene time period. Not a single leaf moved in the tops of the mighty trees as the weak wind, which had risen in the forest during the previous evening, have died out long before this hour. Only thousands of bright stars twinkled on the dark sky that merged perfectly with the darkened earth.
Somewhere, far to the east, the sky began to lighten up. A small strip of the sky began to glow gold. Another moment in time – and the complete eastern part of the sky was burning with golden and red sunlight.
These first rays of the rising sun woke-up some songbird that was sleeping in the top of powerful walnut tree. The bird first trilling in jubilation, then sang somewhat shorter, but equally joyous notes, and then it merged the two into a full, merry song. The bird was just responding to the rise of the sun. Its song, however, woke-up the whole forest.
For her part, Helen Cutter never really cared for sleeping late. In the beginning of her marriage with Nick she did that occasionally, but that was usually because their bedtime exercises kept them up for the better part of the night... However, now this was very obviously not the case, and so Helen woke up as her animal neighbours did, at the rise of the sun.
As she looked around, concern began to be evident on her face, as she realized that she had no idea as to where she ended up.
On the most obvious level, of course, she found herself in a huge forest that seemed to have no end. In parts, it was composed from broadleaf trees: various oaks, elms, maples, walnuts, willows, plantains, chestnuts – and in parts from the conifers: various pines, firs, spruces and yews. Helen's knowledge of plants, including trees, whether modern or prehistoric, was rather profane for someone who had been so much throughout different time periods, but despite her overall sense of pride, she had more than enough common sense to admit – at least to herself – that she was not omnipotent and furthermore, she had no idea where she ended up. Still, she could see only a few palms or cycads, and that was good. That was good.
This lack of openly tropical vegetation signified to Helen that she was still in the Cainozoic, that she hadn't gone back in time like she did on a couple of occasions in the Triassic (here Helen knocked on the wood so not to jinx herself) and the Pliocene, and that this wasn't the Eocene time period any more. However, outside of this, Helen admitted, she could have come to any time, from the last half of the Oligocene to the pre-Ice Age Pleistocene, and that covered over twenty million years of earth's history.
Still, Helen Cutter was never the one to be overly concerns with lofty and ignore the down-to-earth, and down-to-earth, the situation was as follows: she was in a vast forest, true, but rather than sitting in its green depth, she was on a clearing, covered in tall ferns and various shrubs with beautiful flowers. Not far from her was either a lake or a swamp, overgrown with various aquatic plants.
Helen frowned. Her inner sense suggested to her that the next time anomaly would open somewhere around the lake, and therefore she should not leave from the area too far. This, in turn, meant that she was not likely to experience a natural disaster beyond, say, a localized forest flood or, conversely, a forest fire.
"So what?" Helen asked herself, as she washed her face in the lake's water. "I have survived both kinds of catastrophes – and at the time of the fire in late Jurassic there even weren't any convenient time anomalies – not for another 9 years at any rate. Ergo, unless something totally unexpected will take place – like an alien invasion or...or something, I'll be able to handle it with ease."
With those thoughts echoing in her heads, Helen began to walk around her new neighbourhood, trying to figure out just where she was. The still absent grass and similar plants was a big clue – this meant that Helen still was not in the Pleistocene, or even Pliocene time periods, by then the grasses had finally established themselves as an important part of the plant kingdom. Therefore, the absence of plants and the presence of many modern (or modern-looking) plants of other kind meant either Oligocene or Miocene.
Helen sighed and shook her head to clear it. She didn't have much experience with either time period – not even the bad kind like the one she had with the Eocene, and thus she were to expect anything – anything at all.
However, so far all seemed peaceful. The shores of the lake around which Helen was walking were overgrown with water-shields as well as water lilies that were much more fragrant and impressive than the ones Helen had once seen in a botanic garden (it was a school-scheduled trip). From beneath the lilies occasionally surfaced large local frogs, resembling the African clawed toad, easily more than 8 centimetres in length.
The lake itself was quite large, as it was fed by several montane streams that occasionally flooded and receded, creating scrubland meadows. The flowers were especially abundant on such clearings, attracting big and beautiful butterflies, while numerous other arthropods crawled closer to the ground. Among these invertebrates were weevils and woodborer beetles, ants, whose anthills stood prominently against the roots of the local magnolias, cinnamon trees and oleanders, as well as of the azaleas, rhododendrons and various berries.
Bumblebees would scare away the sylvan shield bugs from particularly productive plants. The flies were everywhere, investigating every attractive smell that reached their brains. The mosquitoes too were around, usually resting on various shrubs, but if a locust or a katydid would land nearby, the more gracile insect would immediately leave.
Over the waters of the lake, proper flew various dragonflies; though they had shrunk considerably since their Carboniferous glory days, Helen still gave them a thoughtful eye: had they remained the same since she had seen them back in the Carboniferous few days ago, or had changed after all?
"Still," she muttered to herself once again, "the domination of the broadleaf trees does mean that I have changed the face of the world too much, not even by establishing a semi-permanent time anomaly between the Carboniferous and the Triassic. That is a relief. I do not want to meet another dimetrodon or any other prehistoric reptile any time soon."
Suddenly, Helen stiffened and stopped walking. She had come onto another sandbank, where several prehistoric crocodiles were basking in the warm sun – or were they phytosaurs? Unlike Nick, Helen had never specialized in prehistoric reptiles, and these particular ones were especially ugly. The flat heads of these crocodiles ended in narrow and short jaws, armed with multiple sharp teeth – perfect traps for anything caught in them. The crocodiles themselves were protected by very thick, bony skin on their backs and bellies, further reinforced by bony plates of square shape and deeply pitted surface. These plates formed four parallel rows and protected the crocodiles like suits of armour.
Fortunately for Helen, the crocodiles were resting after a morning hunt. They had found a corpse of a giant salamander brought down from the mountains by a stream, and spent most of the morning fighting out for its flesh. Just before the woman had come onto the scene, though, the last of the salamander's meat had vanished in the maw of one of their number, which had vanished deep in the depths of the lake with its prize. The rest of the reptiles had slowly climbed onto the sandbar, searching for threats. Once they found out that there was nothing to be concerned about, though, they finally left the waters and went to lie on the warmed sands, with their heads in the direction of the overgrown lakeshore, and their tails still in the water. Lying close to one another, or occasionally on top of one another, they began to yawn, revealing their homely maws. Soon, they all lay immobile, resembling greenish tree trunks, carried over to the sandbar and scattered around it by the movements of waves and wind.
Yet Helen was not fooled. She had seen crocodilian reptiles of all kinds move on land or in the waters, and knew that pound for pound, after the dinosaurs these were the most dangerous ones, able to move on land fast enough to be a threat to her if she were to go to that sandbar – but fortunately for her, she did not. On land, the crocodiles could behave meekly, but in the water, they would be almost unstoppable – brave, fierce, and unbelievably cunning, true water demons, which would attack their victims, overpower them, and vanish in the dark waters of the lakes like spectres.
While Helen continued to meet the local wildlife, some distance away from her in the forest lived a herd of deer-like ruminants, the palaeomeryx. These animals were already the size of a roe deer, but still they lacked the antlers that their distant relatives would be so famous for. Their bodies were covered in short, smooth and thick wool of a yellowish-brown colour that turned to chestnut on their backs, almost purely brown on their necks and to white on their bellies and lower sides of the same necks. Their short tails too were covered in long tuffs of brownish hairs.
Usually, those ancient ruminants wandered at the feet of hills and mountains, whose tall ridges and peaks reached beyond the range of even Helen's binoculars. Those tall bones of the earth protected this area from storms and winds.
Now this herd had at least two small fawns, which had been born recently in a copse of tall hazel. Their brown wool was covered white dots everywhere on their bodies.
These pretty fawns were still very inexperienced and foolish – they fled even from a loud bubbling of a brook or a buzz of a fly. They still walked alongside their mothers, and followed their teachings, reinforced by the awakening ancestral instincts inside their brains, the result of survival and passing of the genes by many other generations past.
Meanwhile, the small herd of the small ruminants was walking towards the lake as well. They walked calmly through the newer portions of the woods, sometimes resting in the shade of the old trees; they dexterously made their way through the dense undergrowth and the fallen trees. The leader of the herd would sometimes emit sharp, short sounds similar to a baying hound, which helped the herd stay together in the dense dark woods. The two tiny fawns kept to their mothers, walking at their sides or right behind them, to prevent from losing them in these chaotically green jungles.
It was at this moment that they met Helen, who walked a small distance away from the crocodiles to take a good rest in peace. The knowledge that she would not have to spend a great deal of time searching for her next time anomaly did wonders for her current daily schedules, and so she found a nice, unoccupied green clearing to spend the next few couple of hours, just resting and figuring out just what went wrong in her plans regarding Leek. This, however, did not blunt her attention to the point where she missed the arrival of several deer-like herbivores; aware, however, that this was not the Eocene where even the carnivores had hooves like some aberrant spawn of wolves and sheep, she proceeded to ignore them.
Meanwhile, the leader of the herd took few whiffs of Helen's smell and began to wait, only occasionally twitching its ears to chase away a particularly annoying horsefly.
A short amount of time passed. Helen continued to sit in on spot, conveying that she was no more dangerous than some of the giant tortoises the herd was used to encounter in their travels for food.
Suddenly, a herd of four or more of huge elephant-like beasts emerged from the forest in the direction of the lake. These beasts, called gomphotherium, were distant predecessors to the modern elephants, mastodons and mammoths, but had many key differences in their body builds, the most prominent being elongated skulls, shortened trunks and no less than four tusks. The giants too were walking to the lake for a drink and a bath.
Furthermore, the gomphotherium were walking to the sandbar, where the crocodiles were resting. However, upon seeing the approaching giants, the reptilians quickly turned around and vanished in the waters of the lake once again, scaring various local fishes by their passing.
As the proboscideans began to bathe and drink, the much smaller ruminants found themselves in a quandary. Helen Cutter's unfamiliar smell still scared them greatly, and the bigger herbivores had already taken over the palaeomeryx drinking spot. Therefore, reluctantly, they began to move in an opposite direction, towards the further end of the lake, to a copse of short pussy willows, where it appeared to be safer to drink. Unfortunately, the local rhino, an aceratherium, had a completely different opinion of that. Although it still lacked horns of any kind on its snout, it was already near the size of modern rhinoceros, and thus much bigger and heavier than even the palaeomeryx leader. Therefore, as the aceratherium emerged from the cattails from the shallows of the lake and screamed its challenge at the tiny herd, the palaeomeryx began to retreat, apparently giving up on slaking their thirst.
As the mismatched herbivores found themselves facing-off each other, nothing but pure mischief came into Helen's head. She picked up a large, smooth pebble and sent it skipping through the dark waters of the lake. Then, as the animal ears twitched in the direction of the noises, Helen quickly fell onto her legs and knees all but vanishing in the tall ferns, and continued to watch.
She did not have long to wait. The aceratherium, as irritable, near-sighted and short-tempered as any modern rhinoceros, charged in that direction instead, abandoning the palaeomeryx for they were not threat to it. However, the startled crocodiles, which too came in that area to investigate the goings-on, were somewhat more dangerous - suddenly, the water essentially exploded, as the reptiles' snapping jaws gnashed at the rhinoceros thick-skinned limbs.
This was enough for the palaeomeryx already skittish nerves. The gracile ruminants turned around fled, with the fawns safely inside the herd, from the dangerous watering hole. And the forests behind them resonated with Helen's laughter, as the time travelling explore stepped into the next time anomaly and disappeared.