In Situ Read Free Page B

mortally wounded, and disappeared screaming into the forest.
    The other two beasts , momentarily confused, quickly recovered and charged, anxious to disembowel Mot with their razor sharp claws. His hunting stick gone, Mot’s only option was to retreat. He turned and sprang for the cave, but as he did so, he tripped and fell headlong through the entrance, almost impaling himself on one of the eight or nine hunting sticks that were poised and waiting just inside. His remaining attackers, now in a rage and having lost all sense of caution, plunged through after him.
    *
    Mot, dazed and exhausted, rolled to the side and watched with a sense of awe as a group of Arzat Hunters who had positioned themselves just inside the entrance skillfully dispatched his pursuers —each of them very quickly and methodically receiving three or four vicious stabs to the chest and one through the head. Even so, the creatures did not die right away, and the floor of the cave became treacherous and slippery with their bowels and blood, as the Hunters held them down and watched the beasts scream and squirm until there was no longer any sign of life in them. When it was over, the Hunters gathered their weapons, stood over their kills, and gave a collective howl of victory that resonated through the cave and shook the walls. The barricade was carefully rolled back into place, two new sentries were assigned, and the Hunters began to disperse to the Main Chamber of the cave.
    Mot eventually got to his feet and silently watched as each of the Hunters passed him, their bodies covered in the blood of their victims . In their eyes, a mixture of anger and pride. Anger at Mot for having risked the lives of the entire clan; pride in themselves for having successfully settled the problem that Mot had created. The Arzat Hunters knew they were extremely fortunate that no one had been injured or killed due to Mot’s indiscretion. Mot’s own father had been the last to walk past, but he had done so without looking at his son.
    It was then that Mot had a revelation . He suddenly and clearly understood what was meant by “atrocity,” and that he had just committed one.
     

 
    C hapter 2
    I n Situ
     
    “Yeeeeesssss!”
    Alex screamed at the top of her lungs as she stretched her arms into the sky in triumph. The sound of her voice reverberated around the high desert canyon and eventually came back as a mere whisper, gently reminding her that there was no one around for miles to hear. The thought made her smile. She liked being alone.
    “Yes, yes, yes,” she repeated to herself in a lower tone as she looked eagerly back down at the rocky swatch of earth she had been bent over for most of the last two days. To the layman, the obscure lines on the ground might not have meant much, but to Dr. Alexandria S. Moss, they were a revelation.
    Finally, after days of searching, a dinosaur, a real honest-to-god dinosaur. Not just any dinosaur either. Finding one out here was easy. They are all over the place. Jurassic, no problem. Stegosaur, Allosaur, Brachiosaur? What do you want? This whole area was a veritable dinosaur hunter’s heaven for Jurassic era fossils, and Alex had found more than her fair share over the years. Even a Cretaceous specimen wasn’t all that tough. They were all over the place if your eyes were open. Mostly though, the discoveries came in bits and pieces: a bone fragment here, a tooth there. But finding a near perfect and totally complete skeleton from the late Cretaceous was like hitting the jackpot, the mother lode of paleontology. The animal’s bones appeared to be perfectly in situ, exactly as they had since it had died so many millennia ago. Far better than that, as near as she could tell, Alex had just discovered an entirely new species. If that were true, she would ultimately have the pleasure of naming her new find, a goal she had been dreaming of her entire career. Alex and her father had spent many years in these hills looking for this