But I did not dwell on the shock of the “KK” attack, or on Carlos’s mysterious comments. There was too much work to be done, preparing for the trip to Mauritius. It was an unusually modest expedition, except in terms of the number of people involved. Forty people came along, with wildly varying degrees of knowledge and experience. About half of them were trained and experienced scientists and outdoorsmen. But the other half were little better than tourists, chosen as representatives of the public and private conservation groups sponsoring the expedition. Even then, I knew that many field workers were woefully inexperienced in the handling of firearms. This had led to our one fatality, a man I had judged more competent than most, who one day started to field-strip a Tactical with a round still in the chamber. The personnel on the Mauritius expedition seemed to strive to sink below my expectations. The lowest point was a running fire drill in which a man managed to shoot himself in the back. Fortunately, it was loaded only with harmless dye pellets. I ordered him removed from the expedition.

I was glad for one familiar face: George Carradine. “I work with the UNCOST Ecological Preservation Commission,” he explained. “Ichnology is important for determining which species exist in an area.” His cool head and dignified manner helped me to stay sane during the agonizing drills—a little.

Of course, the focus of our expedition was to find and study Mauritius’ most famous former inhabitant, the dodo bird. We first saw them within moments of our arrival. The time bell landed in a coastal lowland plain; further from shore, the plains quickly gave way to heavily forested hills and mountains. I scanned the landscape, and saw three gray, turkey-sized birds looking down on us from a hill. One was smaller and more lightly-colored than the others. At first, I did not think much of them. “What are those?” I said casually. Most of the staff looked, and froze. Then they spoke unanimously, some in awed whispers and others in nearly hysterical shouts: They were dodo birds. I got out a .17 assault rifle and shot the largest of the dodos. The other two ran away. Everyone fell silent, not so much in disapproval as in shock and disbelief.

“I know you’re used to trying to study animals while disturbing them as little as possible,” I said. “And with unlimited time and resources, maybe that’s the best way. But one of our expeditions has neither. We need to collect as much data as possible in a very limited amount of time, and that often means killing as many specimens as possible. Get used to it.”

Dodo birds appeared regularly around our camps. By the third day, we had 27 of them, including 10 captured alive. I was greatly surprised by how lean they usually were. As the conservationists explained passionately, the image of the dodo bird as known to the general public was derived from the work of a Dutch painter named Roelandt Savory, who had never set foot on Mauritius and might never have seen a live dodo bird. “It was a combination of bad art, bad science and bad taxidermy,” one person said.

We were also surprised by their temperament. They usually did not flee us, but this seemed to be more out of boldness than docility. The males, larger and armed with a heavier and more curved beak, were particularly aggressive. On several occasions, dodos actually charged us. One luckless man was seriously injured when a dodo pounced on him from an outcropping almost 2 meters above his head.

We had an even more unwelcome surprise when we discovered a rat in one of our live traps. According to biologists, rats had not reached the islands of Mauritius until as late as the 1500s, when European sailors began visiting the island regularly. Rats and other introduced species were universally blamed for the deterioration of Mauritius’s ecology thereafter. Did the rat represent an unexpected early arrival? Or had we unknowingly brought it back with us? The best scientists on the expedition set aside other duties to find out.

Carradine delivered the final diagnosis. “This rat has all the recognized characteristics of the common brown rat, Rattus rattus rattus. This subspecies is not known to have occurred in the Afro-Polynesian regions until after recent European settlement. It also bears several parasites of the genus Ctenocephalides, also of Eurasian origin. But the conclusive evidence lies in its biochemistry. Its tissues contain relatively high concentrations of heavy metals and chemicals found in insecticides. Most significantly, it has enzymes associated with resistance to warfarin, a man-made rat poison. There can be no question: We brought this rat with us.”

I was very troubled, remembering Dr. Werner’s discussions of possibly changing the past. “What if this isn’t the only one?” I said. “Could others form a breeding population?”

“That’s unlikely,” Carradine said. “Mauritius has plenty of native birds of prey. Our own expedition has already uncovered at least three raptorial species that had never been formally described from adequate material in modern times. Even here, rats could not multiply unchecked. But that is fairly moot. Warfarin resistance is characterized by rapid blood clotting. In an environment free of the pesticide, this quickly becomes a disadvantage. This rat already shows the beginnings of congestion in the blood vessels. If we had not caught it first, it would have soon died of arteriosclerosis.”

I watched Dianna out of concern, but soon decided that there was no reason to worry. She was quite talkative, though she seemed to take care to avoid discussing anything other than technical or intellectual issues. She took to the captive dodo birds; especially a young dodo nicknamed Raphael. He was only slightly smaller than the adults, but had a less robust beak and dirty white down instead of gray feathers. He seemed attracted to people, and we took to letting him wander around camp. I took a candid photo of Di holding Raffy in her arms.

I kept my distance from her, but she started seeking me out. Soon, we were talking often, sometimes long after everyone else had gone to their tents. She preferred discussing the Bible. Even to me, she rarely even mentioned her broken engagement—except one night, when I prayed with her, and put an arm around her while she cried.

Halfway through the second week of the expedition, we made another unnerving discovery. Carradine and I were exploring the island in a Thing with a boat-like amphibious hull. On one side of the island, we discovered a swath of injured, uprooted and dead trees, with shredded bark and roots that looked chewed. “A mammal did this,” Carradine said. “A big mammal—200 kilograms at least.” He pointed to an unmistakable brown mass. “And that proves it. Somehow, a large mammal made its way to this island.”

“Why wouldn’t it show up in the fossil record?”

“The fossil record can never provide more than a fraction of a percentile of the biota, and the record in Mauritius is exceptionally spotty. All the dodo skeletons previously known to science were collected from a single bog.”

“I’m radioing this back.” I tried to call, but there was no signal. We had frequently lost radio contact, but never had it been so worrisome. “We steer for camp, then!”

We had reached the point driving through the mountains, but to save time, I drove into the sea. Our propulsion came from the tires, which had been fitted with special hydrodynamic cleats. A retractable rudder aided in steering. Still, the amphibious Thing was not intended for the open sea (that role had been reserved for full-sized Amphibians with a heavier chassis, like the one we had left in Mongolia), and quickly proved dangerously ungainly. I had to constantly correct for yaw, but the tires at least kept it from pitching side to side as much as one might expect. After 15 hair-raising minutes, we rolled onto the shore 100 meters from base camp. As we rolled to a stop at the camp, Dianna greeted us sardonically:

“What were you thinking taking this away from shore?” We hurriedly gasped out a garbled explanation. She frowned, but became clearly concerned when Carradine showed her photos of the trees. “It looks like the damage a pig might do,” she said. “If it were twice the usual size…”

“I’ve been thinking over this,” Carradine said minutes later, as all present gathered in the center of camp, “and I believe the most probable explanation is that this is some sort of elephant. I noticed that the gouges in the bark and the earth appear to have been made entirely with downward strokes. This is not consistent with the range of motion of a pig, or an elephant for that matter. But it would be plausible from this.” He pushed a key on his data pod, and brought up an image of a strange skull. It looked like that of an elephant, except that instead of long and curved tusks like an ordinary elephant, it had a pair of short, stout tusks that projected downward from its chin like plowshares. “This is Deinotherium, once widespread in Europe, Asia and Africa, but apparently extinct no later than 1 million years ago. It would probably have weighed ten tons or more. The creature that did the damage we saw, on the other hand, weighed no more than one.” He looked at me. “Can we kill it?”

I shook my head. “We didn’t bring along any weapons heavier than a 12-gauge shotgun. Even that would do the job with the right loads, but all we brought is birdshot. The assault rifle could probably kill even a full-sized elephant if you aimed at the right place, but it wouldn’t be quick.”

“What about flares?” Di said. Our shotgun ammunition included pyrotechnic rounds, intended strictly for signaling. I nodded.

“Good thinking. Those would work on big game, at close ranges, and the noise and heat could scare an animal off.”

“As far as that goes,” Carradine said, “I still have my .44.” He handed it to me. “I’ve practiced a lot more in the last year, but you could probably still use it better than I could.”

I did a quick head count. Eight people were gone. I checked my watch. “The other party is 45 minutes overdue. Have you heard from them?”

“The last radio contact was an hour ago,” Di said. “They were held up by rough terrain. They mentioned fallen trees… and they’re overdue for a report.”

“That settles it. We’re going after them,” I said.

Dianna examined her signal logs. “The range-finding function hasn’t been working well, and I didn’t try to verify, but now that I look at the readings, I think they were at least two kilometers closer to camp than they thought. If they thought they were here, then they were probably really here. Alright, I have the location of their last transmission. We check here first.” We went out, just Dr. Carradine, Dianna and I. I gave strict orders that no one was to leave camp.

I silently fumed. The group’s navigation exercises had been even more appalling than the weapons drills. (At one point, one of them had asked me why we couldn’t use GPS in the past…) But I had to admit that the area was genuinely hard to navigate. Dianna and I had to correct each other several times, and once, we nearly got into a full-blown argument. After almost an hour of searching, we found the spot Dianna pointed to. Not 200 meters away, we found the lost party.

Six of them were standing at the top of a steep hill. The Thing they had been riding lay upside-down in a deep stream bed at the base of a steep and rocky hill. Another expedition member sat sheepishly on the bank of the stream bed, unable to get out. The last was trapped in the car, unhurt save for superficial cuts and bruises, but unable to get out without assistance. What came out was that, in an attempt to get back to what they thought was the trail back to camp, they had tried to go down the hill. The driver had let out all but one of his passengers on top of the hill, planning for them to climb down after him when he was halfway down. Unfortunately, the Thing had been fitted with an elongated van-like hull, which was harder to control than the standard configuration, especially if there were no passengers to add weight to the back. The driver had lost control, gone bouncing down the steepest and most obstacle-ridden part of the hill, and ended up trapped in the car where we found it.

I sent Dianna down to examine the damage. She reported over the other Thing’s radio, which proved to be functional but unreachable by either of the men in the stream bed: “This car is in good enough shape to run, except for a damaged fuel line, and anyway, we can’t just pull the driver” (I omit his name for my own protection) “out and leave it here. We have to cut him out, and we certainly don’t want to do that through the floor next to a broken fuel line. Can you drive down?”

“Not a chance. But if I back partway down, George can make it the rest of the way with the power winch.” I proceeded to do just that. I parked the car where it would be angled about 25 degrees from the horizontal, with the rear tires resting against a half-buried boulder. I started the winch going, and Carradine half-walked, half-repelled down the hill. Together, the three people in the stream hooked the cable to the van’s back bumper. I turned on the winch, and slowly, the van began to rise. My own vehicle began to slide back. I put it in low gear for more traction.

I lowered the power to the winch as the car reared up on its nose. “See if you can maneuver it so the front wheels touch the ground,” I said. “Then try rolling it forward, even restart the motor a minute, while I give you some slack. That way, we can get it right side up without dropping it.” Dianna found a log to put under one wheel, and then ran the engine for a few seconds. That was enough to get one wheel on the ground. From there, we were able to lower the whole vehicle gently to the ground. I stopped the winch while Carradine and the passenger went at the crumpled body with an axe and a pry bar. Soon he was free and they climbed up the cable and out of the ditch.

I restarted the winch, and began pulling the van up from the stream in earnest. The motor whined, and the whine was answered by a roar from among the trees. A dinothere emerged. It was about as tall as a donkey, but much heavier in build, and covered with stringy gray-brown hair. Carradine raised the shotgun, glanced at the Thing, then pumped out the flare round and replaced it with a birdshot round. He fired once over its head. The beast stopped, roared, and charged. Dianna fired two bursts from the assault rifle, striking it repeatedly in the head and chest. Carradine fired again, hitting it in the eye. It faltered, roaring in pain. Abandoning the controls, I emptied the revolver at it as it reared up on its hind legs. I hit it once in the head. It staggered, stumbled and fell into the stream bed, where it let out a steady howl of agony.

“Release the Thing!” I ordered. “We’re getting out of here now!” The van was almost out of the stream when Carradine unbuckled the cable, sending it crashing back down. The cable was tied instead about the driver’s waist. I set the winch in low gear and hauled him up, along with the passenger, who held onto his waist for mutual support. Three more dinotheres came out of the trees, roaring in answer to the other’s cries. Dianna coolly fired about twenty rounds at the first, bringing it down. Carradine shot another with a flare round. It fell over, its hairy hide in flames. The last one standing bolted blindly forward to get away from flames spreading through the brush. George and Di needed no encouragement to hurry up the hill.

The fleeing deinothere only scattered the sparks about, setting its own fur on fire. It tumbled down the bank and crashed into the Thing. Hydrogen does not burn that readily (even the Hindenburg went up slowly) but the fire and fuel created a steady jet of flame that ripped up the slope. I put the Thing into the next gear, hauling the driver along by the remaining meter or so of cable. “Get on or cut loose!” I said. He managed to haul himself up. The passenger ran along behind us. George and Di were only halfway up the hill, with the fire close behind them. I reached the top, and stared helplessly down. The fire seemed to spread in ripples, moving outward from the central jet wherever it touched a line of vegetation. Mercifully, it was already slowing down. I let the cable down to them, and hauled them up the rest of the way.

Patches of fire were still smoldering when we left, though we had done our best to put them out. Carradine had other things on his mind. “There are problems we haven’t come close to resolving,” he said as we loaded the dodos. “The deinotheres being there in the first place is odd enough, but not intractable. The whole region of the Mascarene Islands was a plateau in the Oligocene. As the sea rose, relict mammal populations could have escaped to the emerging islands, and then swum from one island to another. What is most puzzling is that I can find no evidence for a sustained breeding population on this island. All the deinothere traces I found form a continuous trail, ending where we killed those four. Could we have killed the last of a declining population? If so, then where are the signs of the ones that came before?”

“Maybe we killed the first to reach the island,” Di said. “Maybe that’s why there was never a native mammal fauna. Maybe that’s why the dodos survived so long.” She scratched the friendly dodo’s head. “But we can never answer all the questions, can we? C’mon, Raffy. Let’s go home.”