Currently, he was taking a breather beside an algae-choked watering hole rimmed by a few half-dead trees. A mud puddle with aspirations, he thought. But he needed some shade and he needed a safe place to hole up.
The forest was fragmented here—islands of clustered trees, scattered across a sea of tall grass. Right now it was the “tall-grass-in-broad-daylight” part that concerned MacCready most. He took a swig from his canteen. Hendry’d probably blacktop this place.
Though tired, and certainly ready for a nap, MacCready also knew that there were several pressing issues to consider. Finding the missing Rangers without getting skewered by the Xavante was currently in the lead, but for some reason he couldn’t shake the image of Yanni staring into the forest—and sounding just a little too much like the creatures he had encountered in the Brazil nut tree, the same creatures that had nearly killed him, twice.
They were actually stalking me, he thought. And in spite of the heat, he gave an involuntary shiver. And what? She was calling them?
As if interested suddenly in MacCready’s dilemma, a caiman surfaced nearby.
A big’un, he determined. Ten feet long from nose to tail tip.
A single sweep of the reptile’s tail sent it three feet closer to where MacCready sat. The zoologist knew that the caiman’s brain hadn’t changed much since the Age of Dinosaurs, and as a consequence its cerebrum was about as big as a gnat’s ass. Well, maybe a little bigger. But although the crocodile cousin couldn’t paint the Mona Lisa or start wars, its kind had survived unchanged through whatever had killed its brawnier, brainier cousins, the dinosaurs.
Maybe nature’s trying to tell us that brains and brawn don’t always count for much, MacCready thought.
He bounced a pebble off the caiman’s back, then glanced around for another bit of rock. Survivor or not, this guy’s getting too close.
“How does Yanni do that?” MacCready mumbled under his breath. He watched as the scaly body submerged below a layer of green, then gave it a dismissive wave. But another question, a more important one, had been forming since his departure from Chapada and had finally come to the fore. “In all this time, why haven’t the draculae killed her?”
The caiman’s eyes resurfaced, black and unblinking. MacCready held out a bigger, heftier pebble. Don’t make me bonk you with this, he thought.
With one eye on the reptile, his mind drifted back to Yanni and her formerly extinct pals. Well, whatever the answer is, it’s no wonder Thorne’s chipping in with the housework.
MacCready was about to carry out another preemptive pebble strike when he heard a slight rustle off to one side in the tall grass. Instinctively, he went as motionless as the caiman, but his right hand eased down toward the Colt. Feeling a presence as much as hearing it, he sensed something creeping by, keeping low to the ground and passing him on the left side less than ten feet away.
MacCready squinted, trying to identify the newly arrived visitor. But whatever it was, it had stopped—its sun-dappled profile all but invisible against the tall stalks of grass.
Then, without any warning or shyness, it stepped into a narrow clearing at the water’s edge.
The zoologist’s eyes widened. You are not there.
He resisted the urge to blink—half-fearing that if he did the tiny creature would dissolve like a mirage.
You are definitely not there, MacCready’s mind repeated, leaving him feeling uneasy this time. He was, until now, just getting used to the idea that maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t following his mother into the perpetual, uncontrollable dreamscape of insanity. Time to reevaluate.
The animal standing at the edge of the watering hole looked something like a horse. And as the animal dipped its long snout to drink, MacCready could see that it behaved something like a horse as well—gold-colored eyes scanning the surface of the water, alert for any sign of movement.
Beyond appearance and mannerisms, though, calling this species a horse was a stretch. For starters (and just for starters) it stood no more than three feet tall at the shoulder and, incredibly, instead of a single hoof, it had toes—three of them by the look of it.
MacCready concentrated on keeping his jaw from dropping open, while another part of his brain slipped easily into paleontology mode—working through everything it could dredge up about the evolution of prehistoric equids.
He knew that the granddaddy of all horses had been a short-snouted forest browser, with four toes on the front legs and three on the hind legs. As North American climates changed around twenty million years ago, humid forests gave way to grasslands, and new horse lineages developed longer legs, fewer toes, and, on one surviving offshoot—single hooves.
MacCready watched the animal paw at something near the waterline.
Mesohippus?
No, this guy’s a little larger. Parahippus.
But that was a North American species—supposedly a long-extinct intermediate between woodland and grassland horses.