Dinosaur Breakout Read Free

thing, but seeing a live one in the gruesome, grey, knobbly flesh was horrifying!
    He thought then about “Scotty,” the skeleton of a T. rex found near Eastend. He’d seen the dig where it’d been retrieved. Could he have just seen Scotty in the flesh? How could he tell? There didn’t seem to be any way of distinguishing them. All he knew was that they were dreadful in real life!
    When his hands quit shaking, he removed the cloth from his head and checked his wound. Good, it had stopped bleeding. Quietly, he unzipped his backpack and pulled a bottle of water out. He rinsed the rag, and tied it around his head tightly so that the cut wasn’t exposed and wouldn’t bleed again. Then he took a good long drink of the refreshing water. Abruptly he stopped drinking. How long was the water going to have to last? Worried now, he screwed the lid on tight and tucked the bottle away.
    As he bent to check the contents of his backpack, a giant scorpion appeared on the ground beside him. He jumped aside and kicked it away with his foot. He scoured the area quickly, and then settled down again, looking nervously about the underbrush.
    Good thing he’d brought plenty of water and food. Originally he’d expected to spend the day at his hideout, sorting through his belongings and checking for other fossils. With that in mind, his mother had helped him prepare lunch, making sure he had three bottles of water and a couple of ham-and-cheese sandwiches. How long would he be holed up in these scratchy ferns? How long would the food have to last?
    Luckily, he’d also thrown in a bag of potato chips and some granola bars, besides his regular stash of chocolate bars, and some beef jerky for Dactyl. Mrs. Lindstrom, his best friend Jed’s mom, had tucked in a huge piece of her special chocolate zucchini cake. She had dropped in for morning coffee to discuss the menus for the summer tourists, and brought a sample of her latest recipe experiment. He thought of it hungrily, but decided not to attract any more attention to himself until he got his bearings in this strange world of freaky sounds and unusual animals.
    He pawed through his backpack to refresh his memory of other things he’d brought that might prove to be useful. Mentally he checked off the items: a freshly recharged flashlight – good for nighttime, if he had to stay that long. The matches were only good if he felt safe enough to use them without danger of attracting some prehistoric beast. Or maybe he could use a fire to scare them away! The dinosaur handbook would come in handy for identification, if he had time to do any research. His hooded fleece jacket was a definite bonus, but he wasn’t sure how useful his compass would be, because he didn’t have a clue which direction was home. And, since there didn’t seem to be any rocks, his rock hammer wouldn’t be useful in the normal way. These things were all he had to survive with. His other gear was at the hideout. Wherever that might be now!
    Back in his own time, his secret cave was only a few hundred yards and several hills away from Ole Pederson’s property, where Roxanne, the almost complete Edmontosaurus skeleton, with a fossilized nest of eggs, had been found. This special find had resulted in a small paleontological museum being set up in their hometown of Climax, with Pederson as the chief curator and local expert. The dinosaur dig operation had grown out of that as a way for Daniel’s family to keep their farm viable. Daniel had never been more thrilled in his life.
    A small rustling nearby quieted these happy thoughts, reminding him of his predicament. What was out there now? He tried to recall all the creatures associated with the later Cretaceous Period, for that was the time he’d identified by the flowering trees, insects, and other creatures he’d seen. He was reasonably sure he had to have travelled back about 65 to 67 million years, as the mega-vertebrates like the T. rex and Triceratops were only known