2: The Dinosaurus
A/N: This is where I recommend that you temporarily forget everything you happen to know about the layout of the land of Oz.
This is where I also have to rant. This has nothing to do with this story, so skip down if you want, but I've been reading critics' reviews of this performance as it travels around the USA and I'm angry. Everyone's entitled to their opinion but everyone is also entitled to bitch about other people's opinions, and in my opinion, the opinions of these critics smell like they were shipped straight out of Nastyland. Some people think the show is just pure fun, which it is. Most reviews seem to agree about a few things, among them that Scarecrow is adorable and hilarious, which he is. A few people comment that the portrayal of Tin Man is lackluster, which irks me enough as it is, but even more people say that the portrayal of Lion is downright yawn-worthy and that the actor contributes nothing. That's a load of crap. Every one of Dorothy's three Ozite companions are portrayed so wonderfully that their performances totally arrested my imagination and still haven't let it go and I'm totally cool with that. In my honest-to-Oz opinion, these three actors (and Andrew L. Webber) put more personality into their roles than did the original '39 cast, who I ALSO LOVE but not enough for me to have felt inspired into writing about them. The actors who play Tin Man and Lion in this stage adaptation are totally the bee's knees and if I had the moneybags I'd watch them perform every Sunday for the rest of the year and beyond and still enjoy the hell out of it. Maybe they'll release a DVD of the performance after it's done touring but probably not because reality can only be so excellent before no more excellence will fit. But if they did, I'd be all over it. End rant.
"Come on, come on!" Dorothy yelped, hauling Scarecrow up by the arm and dragging him into a run. "It's the dinosaurus, isn't it?" she called out to Lion.
"Yes! Run!" was Lion's reply, from out ahead of them by several leaps.
"I thought your lines about the dinosaurus were hyperbole!" Dorothy shouted to Lion through her gasps. The footsteps of the monster behind them were getting louder – the company ran harder, if possible.
"I thought you just needed something to rhyme with 'forest'!" Tin Man wheezed, a few steps to the right of Dorothy. Thankfully his joints were still working well.
"I thought you were making words up!" Scarecrow cried. Dorothy kept a hand latched securely around his wrist lest he fall again, for which he was very grateful, because his normally shaky sense of balance was being compromised by a terrible case of the willies as well as the quaking ground. He had half a mind to simply play dead – surely the dinosaurus wouldn't be interested in straw – but he'd be smashed to bits under the monster's claws or paws or flippers or whatever it had, and then it would eat Dorothy and the others, and then who would put Scarecrow back together?
It dawned distressingly upon Scarecrow that if Dorothy were to be eaten by the dinosaurus, Scarecrow would have rather more to be upset about than his own predicament. Dorothy stumbled and lost her grip on Scarecrow's wrist; Scarecrow reached out to catch her hand and pull her up, and they continued together, Toto dashing just a step ahead of them.
"Drat these shoes," Dorothy huffed, and Scarecrow would have nodded in sympathy if he hadn't been concentrating on keeping his feet under control. "Oh, what are we to do?" she gasped, breathless. "We can't keep running like this! Lion, you've… you've lived in this forest all your life! How have you… How have you escaped from the dinosaurus in the past?"
"I'll tell you all about the natural history of the dinosaurus if we live through this!" shouted Lion. "For now, run faster!"
"But where are we running?" Dorothy cried.
"I don't know! I'm following Gerty! He seems smart!"
"Well ask him –"
"Dorothy, look out!" Scarecrow shouted, for the earth-shaking steps had gotten much, much closer, and quite suddenly a foot slammed into the ground not two short strides behind them. Scarecrow despaired to notice that its claws were about the length of his own arm. Something massive blocked out the light above them, and the trees to their immediate left and right splintered. Scarecrow stopped and fell to his knees, pulling Dorothy down with him and doing his best to squeeze them both into the smallest shape possible in order to lessen their chances of getting squashed, and swiftly the thunderous thing had passed above them.
"Get down!" Dorothy screamed to her friends ahead of them, and despite the incredible rumpus that the forest king was making, Scarecrow was sure Tin Man and Lion and Gerty had heard her, and he was also sure that if he'd had ear drums, they would have ruptured; Dorothy could scream.
Clinging to each other, Dorothy and Scarecrow got to their feet and hastened forward cautiously, listening to the dinosaurus's footsteps going farther and farther. They nearly collided with Tin Man and Lion and Gerty and Toto, who had all come rushing back towards Scarecrow and Dorothy. For a moment there was a confusion of breathless gasping and wild disbelief that the dinosaurus had passed over them without having even seen them, but then a roar shook the morning dew off of the canopy above them. Dorothy frantically wiped away at the drops that landed on Tin Man.
"Damnation, now he's really angry," puffed Gerty. "Lion, I know there's a big canyon around here somewhere, where is it? I'm all turned around."
"That way," said Lion, pointing north with a shaking paw, "but it's not a canyon, it's a crevasse of despair."
"Surely it's not – "
"Seriously. It's called The Crevasse of Despair. Believe it or not, I've never gone to see it."
"Go," said Gerty, urging them all in a northerly direction. "Go, go, everybody run! The thing will find us! There's a chance we can trick it and it'll fall into the crevasse!"
"What? What kind of brainless plan is that?" puffed Tin Man.
"It's a plan! What else do you want? Run!"
Scarecrow wasn't sure how he felt about trapping himself between The Crevasse of Despair and a rampaging dinosaurus but there was something inexplicably alluring about running towards a plan, however brainless it was. For long minutes they ran, and Dorothy's breath became ragged and Toto was wheezing and it almost seemed as if they could slow down, because the sound of a pursuing dinosaurus was not following them, but Gerty wouldn't let them slow.
The forest did not do them a favor when it came to showing them the crevasse; at first they could see nothing suggesting a crevasse, and then they were upon it so suddenly that it was almost too much to ask of them to stop in their tracks before careening over the edge.
Lion stood near the rim for a moment before turning around and calmly making his way back towards the forest.
"Woa, where are you going? Dinosaurus, remember?" said Tin Man.
"I'd rather take my chances with the dinosaurus," Lion whimpered. "I just learned that I'm terrified of heights." Dorothy and Scarecrow reached out to grab Lion's shoulders.
"Are you surprised?" asked Tin Man, who was carefully peering over the edge of the crevasse. Dorothy didn't seem to want to get any closer to the edge, and Scarecrow felt no need whatsoever to be judging the distance to the bottom, so stayed next to Dorothy at the edge of the wood.
"So what's the plan, Gerty?" Scarecrow asked hopefully. "How are we going to trick it into falling?"
"I haven't… haven't quite gotten that far yet," the man said, catching his breath and resting his hands on his knees.
"Oh, I know, I know!" exclaimed Scarecrow. "Lion, you could jump and carry us across one by one on your back! I'll go first because we don't know if you can jump that far and if we fall at least I won't die or get super dented."
"Ha," said Lion, weakly. "Ha ha."
"How brave of you to offer, Scarecrow. That's a fair idea and it may have worked," said Dorothy gently, "if the crevasse was, you know, not so wide… maybe a quarter or a fifth as wide as it is."
"Not even the dinosaurus could jump the crevasse," said Tin Man, shaking his head. "Not even a mega-colossal-behemoth dinosaurus could jump that."
"That doesn't exist, does it?" squeaked Lion.
"Of course not," said Tin Man.
"Oh good. I was going to have a heart attack."
"Well let's build a bridge!" said Scarecrow. "You have an axe, Tin Man, you can cut the trees down and we can nail them together!"
"We don't have any nails," said Tin Man.
"We haven't the time either," said Gerty, and pointed at the woods. They held their breath and felt, rather than heard, another furious roar shaking the air and earth. A boom boom boom shook the ground, far away now but after a few seconds of listening it became obvious that they were footsteps, and they were coming closer.
"Oh, now what?" cried Dorothy, scooping Toto up into her arms and holding him close. Gerty leaned carefully over the crevasse and peered down, coloring slightly green.
"I'd been hoping we could wait till the beast came upon us and then hang ourselves over the edge by a stray root or something – perhaps the beast would go over too, thinking to chase us. Its brain is quite small."
"I don't even have a brain and I wouldn't be stupid enough to fall for that one," said Scarecrow.
"Just as well," lamented Gerty. "There's not much to grab onto to keep from falling to our deaths."
With that statement, Lion let out a despairing wail, took a tight hold of his tail, and began to wring it.
"Oh, oh, oh! Plan!" shouted Scarecrow, and everybody turned to him, though not with much expectation. "This one will work! This one will work!"
"What already?" said Tin Man.
"Axe! Tree! You could axe and the tree and then over," Scarecrow babbled, a bit too anxious to form a proper sentence, but thankfully the others seemed to get it. Tin Man cast his gaze about for the tallest tree around, but Gerty looked concerned.
"Well… I've heard it said that the tallest trees in Oz are to be found growing only along the rim of the great crevasse… But a tree tall enough to reach across will take time to chop down – time we don't have!" The group listened for another moment; indeed, the beast seemed to be making a neat beeline for them. How many minutes did they have? Five? Two? Mere seconds?
"Chop," said Lion in an unfamiliar, dazed voice. "You with your axe," he said, pointing to Tin Man, "and you with your rapier," he said to Gerty.
"What are you doing?" asked Dorothy.
"I'm the fastest runner among us, I'm going to go distract the d-d-d-d-dinosaurus."
Scarecrow did a double-take to make sure that this lion was the same lion they'd been spending time with, though the stutter should have assured him that it was indeed their lion.
"You've found your courage!" cried Dorothy, with a smile.
"No I haven't," said Lion as he bounded into the forest. "This is just creative stupidity! I'm sure I'll regret this! I already do regret this!"
After he'd left, Tin Man and Gerty immediately got to work arguing over which tree was the tallest and most likely to reach across The Crevasse of Despair. They settled on one quickly, though not as quickly as the party would have liked. Gerty had been told the truth – there were several breathtakingly tall trees in the vicinity, the likes of which Scarecrow had never seen before. Scarecrow and Dorothy watched anxiously as the two people set to chopping, each on opposite sides of the trunk.
"How do you know the tree won't fall into the forest instead of over the crevasse?" asked Scarecrow.
"Trust me, I'm a woodsman," said Tin Man. "Professional tree-chopper. If Gerty makes a notch below and on the opposite side as my notch, we'll control which way it falls."
Chips flew as Tin Man hacked away at the giant tree and Gerty did his best to hew away on his side (the more precarious side, as it was alarmingly near the edge of the crevasse). Scarecrow had been listening anxiously to the terrifying noises of an approaching dinosaurus, and now, quite suddenly, they seemed to have stopped getting any closer. It was as if the dinosaurus was now traveling parallel to the crevasse. Or even away from them.
"Lion," Dorothy gasped, and latched onto Scarecrow's arm. "Oh, I hope he's being careful."
"Oh, probably not," replied Scarecrow, trying to smile. "I mean he's distracting a dinosaurus."
"What will we do when the tree falls and we cross over?" asked Dorothy. "What will keep the dinosaurus from following us?"
"Did you see the size of that beast's feet?" asked Gerty.
"Yes, quite clearly," said Dorothy.
"It'd break this tree if it tried to cross."
"Eh…" said Tin Man, standing back to consider the girth of the tree's trunk. "I don't know, this trunk is fat."
"Keep chopping!" hissed Scarecrow. Tin Man complied, but now that Dorothy had brought up the point, and that Tin Man had brought up the possibility that perhaps the monster could follow them over, a new shine of terror was layered upon the situation. Gerty was huffing mightily, putting a considerable dent into the tree. Tin Man had hacked through nearly half of the tree by the time Scarecrow realized with a peculiar sinking sensation that the ruckus of the dinosaurus was once again approaching.
"Guys," he said uneasily, "I think I'm getting that despair they were talking about when they named this place The Crevasse of Despair."
"The dinosaurus!" Dorothy gasped. "It's coming closer again! Oh no, what's happened to Lion? Chop! Come on, come on, you can do it!" Tin Man hadn't needed to be told, and chopped with a fervor that Scarecrow found to be quite frightening, though not as frightening as the oncoming disaster. Scarecrow couldn't bear to simply stand around, and knew that if he didn't do something with himself he'd end up hopping about in his hysteria, which would, with his luck, send him over the cliff; instead he sat down, forgetting to let go of Dorothy's hand, which brought her to a sit as well.
"How can you sit at a time like this?" hissed Gerty.
"Trust me, it's for the better," Scarecrow replied, his voice week. "I wish I could help you! It's just I'm not very strong and I haven't got a blade and anyways I'd probably cut my own leg off, not that it matters since it's just going to get ripped off by a dinosaurus anyways – "
"Don't say that!" said Dorothy, and bravely squeezed his gloved hand. Scarecrow looked at Dorothy and listened to the approach of the dinosaurus – surely now mere seconds away – and time seemed to slow and he felt a wave of what must have been awe. Here was a mere human girl, future lunchmeat for a dinosaurus, smiling at him and not minding a bit that the beast was about to spring out of the woods and end everything.
Well, she must have minded somewhat, at least, for her hands were shaking terribly.
"You have," Scarecrow said to her, "courage enough for all eight of us."
"There's five of us. Six plus Toto," she said, and sniffed, glancing down at the dog in her lap.
"If there were eight of us, you'd have courage enough for all eight of us."
"That's very sweet of you to say that," Dorothy said, but lowered her head. Scarecrow may not have had much of an intelligence quotient but he could tell as well as the next person when somebody was trying not to cry. The crashing in the woods finally overpowered the thud, thud, thud of Tin Man's axe upon the tree. Scarecrow put both arms about Dorothy's shoulders and watched the forest, wondering whether it would be better to spring up and face the beast when it emerged, or if he should stay here, wrapped around Dorothy, and get eaten along with her. It wouldn't matter much, in the end.
"TIMBER!" yelled Tin Man, and Scarecrow jumped a bit.
"What?" He had to shout to be heard above the roaring and stomping.
"The tree!"
Scarecrow looked up and couldn't believe what he was seeing – the tree appeared to be falling. Towards the crevasse. In a timely fashion.
Dorothy and Gerty pulled him to his feet and, after several attempts, he was standing without their help. He'd been doubting they'd get this far, but in his imagination, they would have watched as the tree fell in slow-motion towards the other side, watched as it just barely reached its top neatly across the far rim, and then cheered because the plan had worked. In reality, they couldn't hear the crash of foliage and branches as the top hit the other side, nor did anybody have the wits to notice when the top hit the other side. Almost before the trunk had stopped moving, Tin Man had hefted Dorothy up onto the trunk, pushed Scarecrow after her, and shouted for them to go. They could no longer make out what he was saying, so loud was the crashing from the forest, but it was easy enough to assume.
Scarecrow took one step out onto the trunk and blanched. Below the trunk lay complete and utter oblivion. Was that a ribbon of mist down there or was that just what infinite space looked like? How many hours would it take to fall that far? How many birds would pick him apart for their nests before he even reached the bottom? He was still damp from the night's rain; perhaps he'd rot away completely before he ever hit bottom –
"Come on!" shrilled Dorothy from one step in front of him. "Don't look down!"
"Way too late," wailed Scarecrow, but Dorothy pointed across his chest, back towards Tin Man and Gerty, and Scarecrow saw that the beast had emerged from the forest, affording them all the first good look at it they'd been able to catch, and Scarecrow was suddenly much more inclined to take his chances with The Crevasse of Despair. He immediately set to work forgetting what he'd just seen behind him – the green bristled scales and the arms that reached forth like great fire pokers and the house-sized teeth that glistened sourly in the brilliance of the sun.
"Wait, was that Lion?" he cried, and whirled around again. Sure enough, there Lion was, bounding rapidly towards the tree, a look of sheer terror plastered across his face. Surely he would bowl them over if they stood in his way, so Scarecrow, purely out of necessity, decided that making this crossing was entirely possible, and maybe even highly probable. He took Dorothy's proffered hand, gripped it as tight as he possibly could, and followed her lead across the trunk. It had looked like the longest walk he would ever take but he kept his eyes fastened onto Dorothy's ruby slippers and approximately one blink later he was stepping onto blessed solid ground from amongst the tangle of the canopy branches.
"Oh, Lion! Come on, you can do it!" shouted Dorothy, clinging fiercely to Toto. Scarecrow turned to see that Lion had indeed bounded out onto the trunk, but then seemed to have realized what he'd done, and was now frozen, his attention completely arrested by the immense crevasse. Gerty walked into him from behind, and Tin Man was last in line, looking curiously at peace walking out over The Crevasse of Despair but definitely preoccupied with the dinosaurus. The beast couldn't quite reach Tin Man with its claws but it looked as if it was working on an idea.
"I'm going to go help him," said Dorothy, and took a step back onto the tree.
"No! No no, you stay here, you'll die if you fall," Scarecrow said, and before he knew what he was doing he was back on the tree. As if you'd fare much better if you fell, he told himself, but he dragged his gaze up from the trunk to concentrate on his destination, which was Lion, who still hadn't moved.
"Move, Lion! You have to move," Gerty was shouting. "You've got the best balance of any of us! You'll be fine, just move!"
Lion only quivered. Behind the Tin Man, the dinosaurus had decided that whipping its long tail towards them was the best route. Scarecrow thought this to be a bit silly, if its end goal was to eat them. If its end goal was to have them all fall into the crevasse, then it had a pretty good thing going. Tin Man ducked and narrowly missed being creamed by the tip of the tail as it whizzed above him. The dinosaurus repositioned for another try. Scarecrow, to keep himself from looking down as he made his way towards Lion, watched the trajectory of the beast's tail; it was much lower. It would sweep Tin Man off the trunk and into the depths. He grit his teeth as the tail swung around, but Tin Man leapt into the air just as the tail whizzed beneath him, and he landed safely back onto the trunk. The trunk wobbled with the impact just as Scarecrow reached Lion.
"You've got to move!" Scarecrow shouted, taking hold of Lion's shoulder. Lion didn't look up from his crevasse-ward gaze. Scarecrow crouched low and peered up into the Lion's face.
"You're holding everyone up!" he tried, as loudly as he could to be heard over the unending bellow of the beast. "Tin Man's about to get nailed by the dinosaurus's tail!"
This caused Lion's face to crease itself into an even more extreme image of panic. Scarecrow winced and decided to change tactic.
"It was very brave, what you did," he yelled, "distracting the dinosaurus! You gave us the time we needed! Now keep being brave and come this way!"
Lion finally shouted something in return, but the beast's roaring drowned him out.
"What?" asked Scarecrow.
"The trunk gets skinnier!" Lion cried again, pointing.
"Yes, that's because we're nearing the top of the tree, which means we're almost over to the other side!" This was, of course a lie; they were still only halfway.
"Oh woe!" whimpered Lion. "I can't move, I just can't! The others can climb over me!"
"No! Come on," urged Scarecrow, yanking at Lion's arm. Unfortunately he was much too heavy and much too stubborn for Scarecrow to budge. "You can't be king of the jungle if you don't move!" he said, trying once again to budge Lion, but to no avail. Gerty had now given up trying to urge the lion forward, and instead faced back with his rapier drawn – for what reason Scarecrow couldn't say. Perhaps it was better to meet one's death with a blade drawn, useless as it would be. Dorothy, standing alone, shouted at them from the northern side but Scarecrow couldn't make out what she was saying – his ears were stuffed with panic and a certain degree of frustration.
"If you don't move," he tried, "the dinosaurus is either going to come across this trunk, smash Tin Man, eat Gerty, and then floss its teeth with your mane, or it's going to knock the trunk off the edge and you'll go falling all the way down – " Here the beast gave out a bellow that positively shook the trunk under their feet, and Scarecrow paused to let it finish before he continued: " – you'll fall all the way down there and if you don't die of terror by the time you hit the bottom you'll probably shatter every bone in your body, plus some more, into dust and make a big lion-pancake-shaped dent in the rocks below and – " Scarecrow kept talking and tugging on the resolutely immobile Lion's arm, not quite knowing or remembering what he was saying, but he had the inane hope that if he couldn't give Lion the courage to go on, perhaps he could terrify him into something more pliable. Just as Scarecrow started babbling something nonsensical about how it would take the coroners sixteen years to climb down into the crevasse to fetch the bits of lion carcass left over, because that's how deep the crevasse was, Lion seemed to give up. His tail drooped and his eyes sort of crossed and his limbs became more fluid. Scarecrow gave a mighty tug; Lion followed.
In this way, Scarecrow was able to drag Lion nearly to the northern end of the trunk, though Lion didn't seem to be paying much attention to where he was putting his paws, thus making the journey all the more sickeningly exciting. Scarecrow was just starting to pull Lion through the jungle gym of branches when the whole tree shuddered as if struck; Scarecrow looked past Lion and saw, to his utter horror, that the beast had decided to follow them. Scarecrow had been happy when the dinosaurus's tail-waving plot had failed but he wasn't sure how this new plan could possibly not end with everybody involved meeting a very bitter and very flat end.
The beast didn't seem to mind that it was balancing on a comparatively thin trunk over an impossibly deep crevasse. In fact it seemed to be smiling now, as it closed the gap between itself and Tin Man. Scarecrow abandoned his fright and nearly all of his caution and set to forcibly manhandling the bulk of a lion through the branches and towards Dorothy, though he was, admittedly, a very bad manhandler. He saw the dinosaurus close, so close now, reaching down with open jaws, reaching as if to pick up the Tin Man, and then something flashed through the air and into the thing's open mouth and the dinosaurus jerked back. The trunk wobbled; Gerty fell to his knees, clinging. The beast let out a strangled roar, swiping at its mouth with its claws. Its teeth were stained crimson. Scarecrow chanced a look at Tin Man. He was still standing, though he no longer had his axe. He'd thrown it into the mouth of the dinosaurus, but he was now effectively helpless.
"Come on, come on, come on," chanted Scarecrow, mostly to himself, and didn't even protest when Dorothy came out into the branches to help him. The trunk shook again and let out a nerve-splitting crack and Scarecrow nearly fell, but his sleeve caught on a branch and he was able to haul himself back up, though he ripped a sizeable hole in the burlap behind his shoulder. Straw flew, caught by an updraft, and Scarecrow felt queasy.
They were three steps away, two, from solid ground. Dorothy leapt down from the tree first, one hand buried in Lion's mane to drag him along. Scarecrow was now behind Lion, and Gerty was bumping into Scarecrow, and Tin Man was pressed against Gerty, who seemed to be snagged on a branch, and the beast was fighting to get its jaws around the tree's arms; branches snapped and flew through the air, mingling with straw and shrieks and the bellow of the beast. Scarecrow felt the Lion stumble out onto solid ground, and Scarecrow followed closely, completely giving up on the idea of a graceful landing, trying to pull Gerty along with him but Gerty was stuck fast.
The beast cleared the branches and was reaching again, and Tin Man had nowhere to go because Gerty couldn't move. Scarecrow wondered why in the world the beast would be so intent upon eating a man made out of tin, but it didn't seem to matter much why, because either way it was about to happen –
Gerty took hold of Tin Man's tin collar and lifted him neatly up above his head before tossing him out onto solid ground, or rather onto soft ground, for Tin Man landed squarely upon Scarecrow. Briefly, Scarecrow wondered if Gerty had been holding out on them and was actually a super-strength hero, for having lifted Tin Man like he had, but as Tin Man struggled to his feet, Scarecrow remembered that tin was actually rather light and any relatively fit man would have been able to do that and that Gerty was not, in fact, endowed with super-strength, which really was too bad, because if he had been he could have just socked the dinosaurus in the nose and sent it flying, but instead the dinosaurus's jaws darted neatly down and closed over Gerty's head and one entire arm.
Dorothy screamed and Tin Man yelled and Scarecrow made a rather embarrassing high-pitched noise. Lion simply fainted. Though they all (except Lion) started forward, there was simply nothing any of them could do, though Scarecrow would not have realized it if there had been. He was too terrified to even lament the fact that he was awful at thinking up ways to save people whose heads were trapped in the maw of a monster. If the dinosaurus had chosen to stand there for a week, waving Gerty's body back and forth like it was some sort of flag, Scarecrow probably would have stood there for a week making the same embarrassing, high-pitched noise.
It came as a great surprise when Gerty's free arm swung up in a big, flashing arc, burying his rapier to the hilt, at an angle just below the beast's right eyeball.
The dinosaurus forgot that it had been chewing on someone. It forgot that it was balancing precariously on a trunk, if it had ever known as much in the first place. It forgot about its inexplicable desire to consume a man made out of tin. It let out another strangled bellow and shook its head furiously from side to side, and from its mouth flew Tin Man's axe, which hurtled down into the crevasse; a spray of bright blood, which spangled the air in every direction; and Gerty's body, which thumped onto the ground at Dorothy's feet, rolled once, and lay still.
When the company looked up from where the man had landed, they saw the dinosaurus finally tip, overbalance, and disappear beneath the lip of the crevasse in a cloud of shrieks and bellows. As if to get in a last desperate jab, one of its great hind claws latched around the trunk of the tree and took their makeshift bridge down into the abyss with it.
Nobody watched the dinosaurus go, and nobody wanted to hear the impact, but the persistent, agonized roars were suddenly and noticeably silenced several long moments after the beast had fallen.
