A New Beginning Ch. 10

The hunting and foraging parties that we formed are not absolute; they are not set in stone. It's not uncommon for someone to join a group or decline to go on a hunting and foraging party, especially if someone joins the party. In fact, if our smokehouse is full of meat then no one goes out hunting. The scheduled group just goes out to collect firewood or dinosaur bone and forage for vegetables or fruit or they go fishing in the lake -- we've named it Lake Hope.

We haven't discovered any Ichthyosaurs, Mosasaurs, Pliosaurs or any other marine dinosaurs living in the lake; it's a fresh water lake. Besides, I doubt that it is deep enough for a Plesiosaur or a Megalodon Shark or any large water dwelling monster. The photos we have of it from space show that it is roughly oval, measuring about 40 kilometers by 65 kilometers. However, we have seen some rather large alligators swimming about, some measuring four or five meters long.

We formed the four groups with an eye on fire watch and garbage detail. None of us wants to go out on a hunting and foraging party when we have garbage detail. Nor does anyone who stood a late night or early morning fire watch to then have to go out on a hunting party at zero eight hundred or zero nine hundred the next morning.

We do not go out on hunting parties any earlier because most of the dinosaurs do not get moving until well after sunup, particularly the larger animals. The herbivores don't move out of their herds until they are warmed up by the sun. Doc Yves says that they are ectothermic but their large size helps them maintain a homeothermic or constant body temperature.

The endothermic theropods will not attack the herds of herbivores until after they have dispersed somewhat. I guess this is because the sauropods sleep with the adults, particularly the adult males, forming a circle around the young and the juveniles. This presents a formidable barrier to the carnivores and to our hunting parties.

Anthony goes on almost every hunting and foraging party. He loves to hunt and rarely does he miss going out. About the only time he doesn't go out on a hunting party is when he isn't feeling well or when he has some kind of duty. Although he's not the best shot with a crossbow, he is the best at finding game.

Joshua and Thomas are better shots than him. They can kill a small dinosaur or large lizard with one bolt from their crossbows; they never miss. Most of the time it only takes Anthony one shot but sometimes it takes him two shots. But he has a knack for finding dinosaurs. It is rare that he goes out hunting and does not come back with something. It has been over a month since that happened.

He was out with his team -- Joseph, Aleks Michelle, Chantelle Dawn and Veronica Anne. They were gone most of the morning when a sudden squall hit them. They got soaked and only managed to collect a basket of the cherry-berry fruit that Natalie Amiee and Aleks found.

Not to be outdone by a few drops of water, as soon as the rain stopped he, Joshua and Thomas went out and killed four BuckToothus. It only took them an hour; that's how good a hunters they are. Juan, Leonard, Natalie and I tanned the hides. We are all wearing clothes of dino hide that my group tanned. Although some of us still have some of the clothes we brought with us most of that clothing is torn so bad it is non-wearable.

Joshua, Thomas and Anthony are in kind of a hunter's competition to see who can kill the most carnivorous dinosaurs -- all other game animals are excluded. Right now Anthony is in the lead with Thomas in hot pursuit. Joshua says that the only reason why the two of them are ahead of him is because he is more careful in picking his targets. I believe it's just luck.

Neither Joshua nor Anthony is allowing Thomas to count the Marineosaurus he killed that came into our camp. That's because he wasn't hunting it at the time; it was hunting us. He jokingly says that he should be allowed to count it because it was attacking us. But they counter that he shot it with the .45, not a crossbow, which is what they all agreed would be the only other prerequisite for including the prey in their total.

I added a proviso that, except large carnivores that are within a five kilometer radius of our camp, I didn't want them killing any animal just for the sport of it. I only want them to kill for our food. So far they have stuck to that stipulation.

The rest of us look upon their competition as playful banter, which in fact it is. But one evening while we were all sitting around relaxing after a meal of baked fish and potatoes, I told them that I would give a month of no duty to the first one to kill a Marinosaurus or a Triceratops Rex with a crossbow. They all hooted at that.

Josephine Jasmine added, with a rather sexy tone in her voice, that she would give a very sensuous massage to the winner. The three of them really hooted at that.

Then Doc Yves said that he would give a month of free medical service to the winner. They all booed him. The rest of us just laughed.

Really though, when the three of them go out together they always come back with something. In fact, all four hunting and foraging parties almost always come back with something. There is so much game here that it is unusual for a party to go out and not come back with something to eat.

Seventy million BC is a real hunter's paradise. There are some of the strangest and most beautiful animals I have ever seen in my life.

There is this bird that is a little larger than as a chicken. It sings and looks just like a yellow canary except that it has a small red spot just to the rear of its eyes. We called it BigCanary; I'm not sure who originally name it. When it walks it bobs its head just like a pigeon.

Every morning about ten to fifteen fly into our camp singing and looking for food. Some even come back during the day and pick up scraps of food. Their chirping is beautiful and when someone plays some of the music I downloaded on Natalie's laptop they join in to keep the camp filled with music.

The male of another bird that occasionally frequents our camp has the most beautiful plume of green, blue, maroon and red feathers on its head and down the back of its neck. The rest of its body is covered with shiny black feathers. Joseph named them RainbowHeads, although the female's head has white feathers.

It is about the same size as a quail. It screeches like a hawk until it is given something to eat. It then flies off to eat its treat but then comes back for more. Our cooks, David, Yves and Josephine, don't hesitate to feed them or the BigCanaries.

Then there are the DailyCommuters -- Veronica named them. Every morning just after sunrise we see a couple hundred of them flying north, presumably for food. Then every evening just before sunset they fly back south, presumably to return to their nests. A person could almost set their clock by these birds. They fly in the V formation that migratory birds fly in. We don't know where they come from or where they go. But, with their long necks, they are reminiscent of geese flying south for the winter.

After the sun sets, there are a pair of nocturnal mammals that come into our camp looking for scraps of food that have fallen under and around the dinning tables. Regina Aurora named them Chip and Dale because they look something like chip monks. They scamper around under the tables picking up scraps of food and carrying it off to their nest, which is somewhere in the nearby shrubbery. The entrance is hidden real well because none of us have been able to locate it yet.

Chip and Dale make numerous trips back and forth from our camp area to their nest, always keeping an eye on whoever is on fire watch. They are very shy and easily frightened. If whoever has fire watch disturbs them in the least they will run away and not come back for twenty or thirty minutes. Yes, we always leave small bits of food under the table for them to find.

We have some nocturnal birds that are about the same size as a pigeon and eat insects. We don't bother them at all because they help keep the insect population down, particularly roaches which they seem to favor eating.

They stay perched on a branch looking for prey. When they spot an insect they will swoop down on it, grab it with their talons and carry it back to their perch and eat it. They have light tan feathers with black speckles and two enormous yellow eyes. Their eyes are on the sides of their heads but face forward. Also, they don't have typical bird beaks; their beaks have teeth.

Elizabeth Dee, calls them Hooters because they hoot just like an owl, although some of us jokingly question her real motive behind such a name -- she has very large breasts.

She hates roaches and says that she will personally put a strong laxative in the food of anyone she catches killing or molesting in any way her Hooters. She then shakes her shoulders back and forth, causing her large breasts to jiggle and bounce.

We all laugh but we also all concur with her outlook toward Hooters. We would all like to see the area free of roaches. These Cretaceous pests are huge.

We also have a Cheshire Cat. That's what Akira Carissa named this strange behaving dinosaur. Louis originally named him Banditosaurus because he stole our hearts when he came into camp begging for food one day. He is a small sauropod about 30 centimeters high and about a meter long from his head to his long tail. He has a dark blue almost indigo body with a greenish-yellow stomach; the insides of his legs are also greenish-yellow. He has five toes on each of his feet.

Akira started calling him Cheshire because of the way he rubs his body against our legs -- just like a cat -- whenever he wants to be fed, and because he appears and then disappears at odd hours of the day -- usually when he's hungry.

We don't know where he is from or where he goes after he is fed. He just mysteriously shows up and then just as mysteriously disappears into the bushes. There is a standing joke among the more sarcastic of the crew that it lives with Chip and Dale. Regina hates the joke.

Except for his coloring, he looks just like a miniature Apatosaurus. In fact, when he first came into our camp we thought he might be a lost baby Apatosaurus -- their coloring is similar. But Anthony examined him and assured us that he is a full grown adult herbivorous dinosaur.

He has an extremely long whip-like tail. While he is rubbing his body against someone's leg, he will also wrap his long tail around their leg, giving that person the feeling that there is a snake around their leg. I don't like the feeling one bit. Its tail is a very effective weapon and when it is annoyed it will not hesitate to smack whoever or whatever is bothering it.

With the exception of Fur Ball, it stays away from the PrimusPrimates, especially Boss Hog and the other adult males. There seems to be a something of cat and dog relationship between Cheshire and the other PrimusPrimates. Whenever one of them comes near him, he will whip its tail at it.

Akira is worried that one of the adult males will kill it. But I don't think that will happen. I believe that if Cheshire and any PrimusPrimate got to fighting, then the sauropod would just whip its tail at whichever one was bothering him and either kill it or do serious damage to it.

One of the strangest creatures we've encountered so far looks like a cross between a warthog and an alligator. It is dark green in color and it has five sharp clawed toes on its feet. When it swims through the water it looks just like an alligator with the ridges on its back and its tail swishing back and forth, although its tail is not nearly as long as an alligator's tail.

It has the body, legs and snout of a warthog. But its snout is longer than a normal warthog, more like that of an alligator, and it doesn't have tusks. It lives near the lake and can often be seen sloshing in the water near the shore, snapping its jaws up and down. Its principal food appears to be fish but I saw one eating a pigmy hippopotamus the other day.

Chantelle shot one with a crossbow after naming it a Gatorhog. It tastes like liver and was tough as shoe leather to chew. None of us liked it and David ended up throwing it on the trash heap.

Of course, several of the crew jokingly asked me if it taste like alligator. I joined in the joke and answered them that they wouldn't know good Cajun food if it were served to them on a silver platter and that alligator is considered a delicacy in New Orleans. Then we all laughed.

The twenty of us have a great relationship with each other. It's not like the typical office where several of the employees just tolerate each other in order to keep peace in the workplace.

Fourteen of us were officers or junior officers aboard the James Cook and most of us senior officers have flown together on other missions at one time or another. Butler selected all the officers and junior officers very carefully with an eye on the fact that we would all be cooped up, working together on an overcrowded spaceship for several years.

Other than Chantelle and George, he meticulously picked each of us -- I asked him to let Chantelle come onboard and George was forced on him by politics. The fourteen of us all became immediate friends while still millions of kilometers from Jupiter.

As for the other six who were chosen by the UNESA personnel office -- Laci Bianca, Veronica, Regina, Josephine, Leonard and Thomas -- they fit in just right. We have all grown to love and appreciate each other. We look upon ourselves as an extended family.

Louis and his team -- Victoria Rose, Akira and David -- killed what they thought was a Velociraptor. Anthony didn't go with them; he was sick with a fever. The dinosaur was about the same size as a Velociraptor. It had white, dark brown and light brown feathers on its body, upper arms, upper legs and tail. Its lower arms, lower legs and face were featherless and yellow. It didn't have the sickle-shaped claw on its feet just some rather mean looking claws. It also had three claws on its hands.

The team had been out hunting and foraging for several hours when they all sat down to rest under a shade tree. Suddenly it jumped out of the nearby bushed and attacked Akira. It kicked at her just as Velociraptors do. Then it attempted to bite her on her neck but she fought it off. However, it did bite her on her arm. Luckily it wasn't a serious bite, requiring only a few stitches. She managed to kick it off her. Then she and Louis commenced to beating it with their clubs. It was dead before David or Vickie had time to react to help out.

When they got the dead carnivore back to camp, Anthony examined it and told them that it was not a Velociraptor but was probably a distant relative of one. Josephine made a stew out of it. It tastes just like chicken. No one gave it a name and we haven't seen another of its kind since then.

The day after that incident Joshua, Thomas and Anthony went out hunting by themselves. They came upon an Ankylosaurus, the heavily armored plant eater with a club on its tail. They are tan in color except for their stomachs and the insides of their legs, which are yellowish brown.

They said that they smelled it long before they found it. Joshua said that it was its putrid smell that helped them find it. He said that at first they thought they were approaching the carcass of a dead dinosaur. They figured they would find some Daffyducktus vulture-type birds feasting on it. If so, it would be easy to kill a few of them with their crossbows.

When they came into a clearing what they discovered was not the carcass of a dead dinosaur but a three meter high by nine meter long tank of a creature fighting with a tree root. It was clawing at the ground around the tree and digging it up, grunting and snorting the whole time. They figured its putrid smell must have been released while it was digging up the tree, the same way skunks do for defense.

More importantly, they also figured that it would not be in their best interest to disturb the three and a half ton, temperamental beast. None of them knew whether or not the .45 could pierce its armor and they did not want to risk finding out. They knew they couldn't outrun the cantankerous monster.

They sat quietly in the tall grass and watched it fight with the tree; the tree didn't have a chance. According to them, it took the Ankylosaurus about 30 minutes but in the end the four meter high tree was uprooted. Then it began to eat the roots. When it finished, it just wandered off.

The Ankylosaurus will lay a clutch of eggs, cover them with grass and stay nearby watching and protecting the nest, just as alligators do. But once the baby Ankylosauruses hatch they are on their own. Anthony said from the looks of the animal, it was probably immune from attack by predators once it reached adolescence. Neither he nor Thomas or Joshua could see how a carnivore could overpower the heavily armored dinosaur.

Joshua, Thomas and Anthony resumed their hunt after the beast left. A few minutes later they came upon a small flock of Daffyducktus picking on the corpse of some type of large sauropod. They couldn't tell what kind of dinosaur it was as there was not enough of it left to discern. All they could tell was that it had a big body with a long neck and even longer tail. They each picked a target bird and shot it with their crossbows.

On another hunting and foraging outing, Joshua's team -- that's my hunting party -- came upon what looked like a small heard of about fifteen or twenty aquamarine Stegosaur-type dinosaurs. But these didn't have the spikes on their tails. Instead they had a large knob similar to the Ankylosaurus and the dark green plates on their backs were larger than a typical Stegosaur. They also had a small knob on their head similar to a Pachycephalosaurus.

We had decided to go around them and were in the process of doing so when one of the larger ones charged at us. On Joshua's advice, Leonard and Natalie took refuge in a nearby tree off to our right while Laci climbed upon a large boulder to the left. Chantelle happened to be with us that day; she and I tried to distract the dinosaur while Joshua took aim with the .45 pistol.

He shot it in its right shoulder. It fell over but got right back up again. It snorted once and started to come after him again. It was coming straight for Joshua. Both Chantelle and I shot it with our crossbows. I hit it just behind its left shoulder and Chantelle hit it in its neck.

It paused and looked in our direction. It swung its tail at Chantelle, who was closer to it than I was. She ducked and the knob, which was about as big as a large exercise ball, just missed hitting her. She was lucky. Had the Stegoknob -- that's what Joshua named it -- hit her with the knob on its tail, it would surely have broken every bone in her body.

Then the beast, which had greenish yellow dots on its forelegs, shoulders and neck, continued its pursuit of Joshua. Our crossbow bolts had virtually no effect on the huge dinosaur, which stood about two meters high at the shoulder. Joshua took careful aim and put a second bullet in its head, right below the knob. It fell over dead just a few meters from him.

Joshua is really an excellent shot. The animal's head is just shy of a meter long and a little over a half of a meter wide. Yet he managed to put a bullet right above its left eye and into its brain. I was proud of him.

The sound of the .45 going off frightened the rest of the small heard and they all ran away. We cut off some of the skin of the Stegoknob for later tanning and carved out some stakes from it.

When we cut the dinosaur open, we discovered that the reason Joshua's first shot didn't hit it in its heart was because the bullet was deflected by a bone. We also discovered that my bolt was only about three centimeters from its heart. Joshua said that had I hit it in its heart I would have killed it.