Bestiary by Robert Masello Read Free Book Online Page A

remember the name because it sounds like the cat is smiling.”
     
     
    “But how can you tell it’s not some other cat, like a scimitar or a western dirktooth?” Claude asked. He’d been reading up on his paleontology, and Carter knew he liked to try it out.
     
     
    “I can’t,” Carter admitted, “with any certainty.” He let his fingers probe a little deeper. “But something tells me I’m touching the hyoids, or throat bones. The fact that the saber-tooths had these is what tells us they could roar like a lion.” Along with the wolves, they were one of the most commonly excavated fossils at the site—a ruthless killer, with especially powerful forequarters for holding their prey while their massive fangs did the rest. While it had been commonly assumed that the cats attacked their prey by biting and breaking their necks, Carter believed they actually preferred to attack from below, ripping into the soft belly of their victims and then patiently waiting for the creature to expire from blood loss before devouring the remains. Over seven hundred saber-toothed skulls had been found at the La Brea site and only two of them had shown teeth broken with wear; if the cats had been lunging at other animals’ hard and strong-muscled necks, Carter reasoned, there’d be more missing and broken teeth.
     
     
    But his was the minority view so far, and he hoped soon to finish the paper that would lay out his case in full.
     
     
    “What about mine?” Rosalie asked. “What have I got?”
     
     
    There were moments, like right now, when Carter felt a bit like a grade school teacher, with a bunch of eager, brown-nosing students. But he also knew that this was part of the deal: In return for their volunteer service glopping out the pit, folks like Claude and Rosalie and Miranda were promised a sort of tutorial, with a real-live scientist.
     
     
    “I think it’s a limb of some kind,” Rosalie ventured, and not to be outdone by Claude, “maybe a femur.”
     
     
    Carter doubted she would be able to distinguish a femur from a tusk, but he would never say anything to deflate their enthusiasm. He got up and walked slowly over to her quadrant, studying the mottled, lumpy surface of the pit as he went. It did look unusually uneven and, though nothing was moving but the occasional bubble of methane gradually swelling up and then bursting, it looked somehow agitated. He wondered if his little crew had come to some signal event, something that had triggered a feeding frenzy of extraordinary dimensions.
     
     
    “It’s about six inches over, and the same distance down,” Rosalie said. She leaned back on her haunches, in a dirty madras shirt and what looked like green slacks that had been cut off at midthigh. “You can’t miss it.”
     
     
    Carter knelt down again—he was tall, with long arms, which gave him greater reach but sometimes left him precariously balanced, like a crane hovering over a construction site—and slipped his hand into the pit. The tar parted with an audible glug, and he slipped his hand farther down. He felt nothing so far.
     
     
    “More to the left,” Rosalie said.
     
     
    Turning his wrist to the left, he stretched his fingers out. Still nothing. A series of methane bubbles rose, iridescent in the sunlight, and broke with an especially gassy pungency. And then he felt it—and moved his fingers slowly, against the protesting sludge, along its length. Rosalie was right—it probably was a leg bone of some kind, and possibly from what was known as a short-faced bear, a precursor of the grizzly, who had entered the contiguous United States, and departed it forever, sometime toward the end of the last ice age. Though they stood even taller than grizzly bears—eleven feet when rearing up, and weighing up to eighteen hundred pounds—their legs were surprisingly long and slender, giving them the ability to break into a fast run for short distances and, presumably, catch inattentive