Bestiary by Robert Masello Read Free Book Online

got there the afternoon crew was already at work. Claude, the retired engineer, was toiling in one corner, Rosalie in another, and Miranda had her arms up to the wrist in the goo.
     
     
    “You’re late,” she said, teasingly. “I’m telling.”
     
     
    “Who are you going to tell?”
     
     
    “Oh yeah, you’re the big cheese.”
     
     
    “A quick lesson in life,” Carter said. “There is always a bigger cheese.”
     
     
    Claude snorted as he slopped another handful of tar into his bucket. “You can say that again.”
     
     
    Rosalie mopped her brow with the back of one chubby arm and said, “I think I can feel a lot of stuff over here.”
     
     
    “Me, too,” Claude said.
     
     
    “Me three,” Miranda chimed in. Today, she was wearing a pink tube top and a necklace of little silver beads. Not exactly what Carter would have recommended for fieldwork.
     
     
    Carter glanced around; they were all working in different quadrants, carefully marked off pieces of the grid, and they were all at almost exactly the same depth.
     
     
    “It’s like I told you last time,” Miranda said. “I can still feel something really strange down here.”
     
     
    Carter began to suspect they’d hit a lateral “pipe”—a section of the pit where a particularly dense concentration of fossils had accumulated. Sometimes this could happen. A large beast, perhaps a giant ground sloth or a long-horned bison, had ventured too far into the tar—which might have been concealed beneath a layer of brush and leaves, deposited by a running stream—and become trapped; just a few inches of the tar could do the trick. The youngest and strongest animals might have been able to extricate themselves, but the older ones, or the infirm, or the ones that exhausted themselves bellowing in fear and frustration, would not. Their cries would hasten their doom, in fact, drawing predators from far and wide. Packs of wolves, or saber-toothed cats, or American lions—who, unlike their African counterparts, traveled in pairs not prides—would have leapt on the trapped beast and tried to kill and devour it.
     
     
    And many of them would have been trapped in turn.
     
     
    Carter had seen evidence of such mad scrambles before, piles of broken bones and fangs and claws, but glancing over the wide expanse of the pit, nothing quite so broad and focused as this. What was at the bottom of it? What had attracted so many creatures to the kill, and dragged so many to their own death?
     
     
    “What have you got over there, do you think?” he called to Claude.
     
     
    “Can’t say for sure,” Claude replied, “but it feels like a neck or collarbone. I can show you right where it is.”
     
     
    The surface of the pit was crisscrossed with narrow wooden walkways, perched just inches above the tar; Carter walked carefully to Claude’s corner, then knelt down beside him. He was wearing shorts today, and the wooden boards were sharp and hard on his knees.
     
     
    “It’s a few inches down,” Claude said, pointing to a spot right between them.
     
     
    Carter leaned forward and put one hand into the glistening black muck. It was warm and viscous, as always, and gave him a slight shiver as he plunged his hand deeper into it. His fingertips grazed something hard and angular, exactly where Claude had indicated.
     
     
    “You feel it?”
     
     
    “I do.” But it was still so immersed in the tar, and out of sight, that he could only guess what it was. “Right now, I’d say it’s a machairodont of some kind.”
     
     
    “A what?” Rosalie said.
     
     
    “Miranda,” Carter threw out, “can you answer that?”
     
     
    Miranda bit her lower lip. “I’m not sure they covered that at UCLA.”
     
     
    “What if I said it was probably a Smilodon fatalis ?” Carter prompted her.
     
     
    “Oh, that I know!” she piped up. “It’s a saber-toothed cat.” Claude tried to applaud with hands coated with tar, and Miranda laughed. “I