Mastodonia by Clifford D. Simak Read Free Book Online Page A

silly, I told myself. The fox either was still in the chicken house or had left; he would not be hiding in the roses. But the feeling persisted that he was in the roses. Thinking this, almost knowing it, I wondered how I knew, how I could possibly know.
    And at the moment I was thinking this, all thought and wonderment were knocked out of me. Out of the rose clump, a face stared fixedly at me—a cat face, the whiskers, the owl eyes, the grin. It stared at me, unblinking, and never before had I seen it so clearly as at that moment—so clearly or for so long a time. Most of my sightings had been no more than fleeting glimpses. But now the face stayed on, hanging in the bush, the softness of the moonlight highlighting the details of the face, making each whisker stand out clearly. And this was the first time, I was sure, that I had actually seen the whiskers. Previously, I had gotten impressions of them, but had never really seen them.
    Entranced and frightened, but more entranced than frightened, and with all thoughts of a fox knocked out of my mind, I moved forward slowly, the gun at ready, although now I knew I would not use it. I was close now, closer, something told me, than I should be, but I took another step, and on that step I stumbled or seemed to stumble.
    When I recovered from the stumble, the rose bush was no longer there, and neither was the hen house. I stood on a little slope that was covered with short grass and moss, and up the hill a ways was a clump of birch. It was no longer night; the sun was shining, but with little warmth. The cat face was gone.
    From behind me I heard a shuffling, thumping sound, and I pivoted around. The thumping, shuffling thing stood ten feet tall. It had gleaming tusks, and a long trunk hanging down between the tusks was swinging slowly from side to side like a pendulum. The thing was only a matter of a dozen feet away and coming straight toward me.
    I ran. I went up that slope like a scared rabbit. If I hadn’t run, sure as hell that mastodon would have run over me. He paid no attention to me; he didn’t flick a glance at me. He just went shuffling along, for all his bulk stepping daintily and with deliberate precision.
    A mastodon, I told myself. For the love of Christ, a mastodon!
    My mind seemed to catch and stay upon the word—a mastodon, a mastodon, a mastodon —there was room for nothing else, just that one repeating word. Backed against the clump of birch, I stood transfixed, the stuck needle of my mind repeating that one word, while the beast went shuffling across the landscape, turning now to head downhill toward the river.
    First, it had been Bowser, I thought, yelping home with a Folsom in his rump, and now it was me. I had somehow traveled, ridiculous as it might seem, the selfsame trail as Bowser.
    Here I stood, I thought, a ridiculous figure dressed in pajama pants and a pair of worn slippers, clutching a shotgun in my hand.
    A time tunnel had brought me here—or a time road or a time path, whatever one might call it—and that goddamn Catface was mixed up in my predicament somehow, as, undoubtedly, he’d been mixed up in the time traveling that Bowser had done. The funny thing was that there had been no sign of the time path, nothing to warn me that I was putting a foot upon it. What kind of sign, I wondered, would a man look for—a sort of shimmer in the air, perhaps, although I was sure there had been no shimmer.
    And while I was thinking of that, I thought of something else. When I had reached this place, I should have marked it so that I’d have at least a fighting chance of getting back into my own time again. Although, I told myself, that probably wasn’t as simple as it sounded—just marking the place where you came out might not mark the path. Nonetheless any chance of marking the spot now was gone. I had run scared, and with reason, when I’d seen the mastodon. Now there was no way I could find the