Dianna and I (Carlos) are walking from the plane toward the nest when we run into one of the silliest-looking dinosaurs that ever lived: the Carnotaurus. A carnotaur is set apart from other dinosaurs by several features. For one thing, they have a broad, flat horn overhanging each eye. No one knows what they’re for. They’re too small and fragile to be of any use in combat. They can’t be sexual display features, because we’ve found them on both males and females. Who knows? Maybe they’re an evolutionary adaptation for keeping the sun out of their eyes. Another thing is that they have unusually short, deep skulls. Finally, the upper jaw is significantly longer and a lot more heavily built than the lower one. The net result is a babyish, buck-toothed, bunny-eared caricature of a dinosaur. Even their teeth look fragile, and hard to take seriously. The only thing that might keep you from laughing is the fact that they weigh one metric ton each.

“No worries, mate,” says I. “We can take down this guy easy. But we aren’t gonna shoot unless we have to. For every carnosaur we kill, the smell of blood could attract five more.” The carnotaur hisses, and changed its skin color to fluorescent orange. I fire the Eliminator into the air, which makes it take a few steps back. I work the bolt and load a new round. I’m playing it cool, but then Dianna loses hers and shoots the thing through the eye. A head shot with a dinosaur is always an iffy proposition, but it worked well enough this time. The dinosaur falls right over, for all intents and purposes dead on impact. Di’s drilled the brain practically front to back. Much to our dismay, the sound of our guns gets answered by the roar of an argentinosaur.
I lead the retreat to the Thing—or, rather, where we had parked the Thing. We get there just in time to see Diego driving away. “Sweet Mother!!” I say, “what are we gonna do now?”
Di looks over her shoulder. Then she says, like, deadpan, “I think we can rule out climbing trees.” I look, too, and I see a couple argentinosaurs coming straight for us. They aren’t running, in the technical sense; as far as we know, the big sauropods don’t even do that. But with those long legs, what’s a brisk walk for them is 20 k per hour. Something that big moving in that way messes with one’s sense of perspective. The first thing you think is that they’re half as big, half as close and moving at half the speed that they really are. When they’re maybe half a klick away, I fire. “You missed,” Di says.

“You think you can do better, you try shooting this thing!” says I. I reload, real fast. Di fires a couple shots with her gun, which is kinda like gunning for bear with a BB gun. I keep shooting. After three shots, the leading sauropod goes down, and the one behind it stops. But the one still standing rears up on its hind legs, and it wails. I fire my last shot into the argentinosaur’s chest, and it staggers back and falls over. It roars one more time and dies. That’s when we hear the answering calls. Dozens. Hundreds.

“Great,” Di says. “Now it’s calling reinforcements. Do you have a backup plan?”
“I’m thinking,” I say. Right then, three more sauropods come out of the forest. The sensible thing to do is run, but why bother? There’s no place to run to, and the sauropods have endurance on its side. Dianna starts firing two-shot bursts at the closest sauropod, first at the legs, then at the chest. It staggers and falls, but it’s clearly still alive. Another comes at us from a different direction, and it gets within biting range. It takes a snap at me, and believe me, those heads only look small compared to the rest of them. Then Di fires her last three shots at it, and Sweet Mother! She blows the thing’s brains out. Not that it makes much difference. The dinosaur keeps coming, with what’s left of the head hanging down like dead weight. We try to avoid it by going right, but it goes right too. For one horrible moment, I think it’s still trying to get us. Then I realize, it’s simply yawing off course. I lunge left, and knock Di right off her feet. The sauropod misses us, barely, and keeps going for maybe 300 meters before it falls over.

I point to a stand of bushes. “Let’s get in there and keep a low profile,” I say. “With any luck, the sauropods will look around a bit, decide the trouble’s over and go away.”
“And if we’re unlucky?”
“Then it’s not gonna matter much whether we’re hiding there or standing here, will it?”

*********************

The sounds of shooting drew two argentinosaurs away from the nest, but the rest only grew more suspicious. I (Ted) pulled Dino down when one of them came too close. The head came down so close I could have reached out and touched it. It seemed to be looking right at me. It twitched an almost pig-like nose, apparently sniffing me. The lips pulled back, making that horrid sneer. I was sure it was going to attack. But, for some unfathomable reason, the head pulled back, and the giant walked away. I looked at Dino and Perez. They were trembling.

“We’re safe, for the moment,” I said. “I think maybe the smell of the manure fooled that one. Now we have to go in the direction of those shots. The others may be in trouble. Is there any way to signal them?”
“The beacon can be used as a transmitter,” Perez said. She confidently pulled it out of her pack. “Strange. The battery light’s not… Oh, no! I left the batteries on the plane!”
I looked at her in shock. “You mean the beacon’s been down the whole time?” She nodded. I wanted to swear, but words seemed to fail. “All right,” I said finally. “It’s a problem, but not insurmountable. We know where the others are from the shots, anyway. They can radio for help. They probably have already. Let’s go…”

We moved swiftly but stealthily through the trees. There was very little in the way of cover; there was little underbrush, and the trees were nearly stripped of leaves. I watched the others. Perez moved and glanced about furtively, in a subdued kind of fear. But Dino still seemed genuinely excited. He still had his camera out, and he filmed the scenery with every appearance of happiness. I made a note to watch him carefully. The bellows of the argentinosaurs could be heard in every direction. I listened for the sound of gunfire. Finally, we reached where I thought the shots had come from.

We all stopped. Perez gasped. We were in a large clearing, close to where the plane had gone down. 15 argentinosaurs were wandering around, sniffing loudly and bellowing to each other. Three more argentinosaurs lay dead. I instantly dropped to the ground, for all the good it might do. Perez did likewise. Dino hid behind a tree. The dinosaurs showed no signs of noticing us. I watched them closely. They were not making any kind of systematic search; instead, they simply milled about aimlessly. (Dinosaurs obviously aren’t very smart, and there is little in the way of actual coordination between members of a group.) But, as I watched, the dinosaurs’ limited attention seemed to shift gradually toward an unusually dense clump of vegetation.
“I think there’re some people hiding there,” I whispered. “We need a diversion, something to draw their attention away from those bushes. Dino, can you play back what you’ve recorded?” Peering around the tree, he nodded mutely. “Good. Here’s what I want you to do…”

*********************

Dianna and me (Carlos) are hiding in the bushes. It’s working well enough; the only problem is, most of the bushes are gnetophytes. Never heard of them? No surprise; all but one genus are extinct, and good riddance. These are primitive flowering plants, which lack leaves. Instead, the branches have chlorophyll all over the surface, and all of these branches end in sharp little points. No wonder the argentinosaurs didn’t eat them. The whole time we’re hiding, the bushes are poking us. Fortunately, the argentinosaurs seem to have pretty thin skins. When one of them came sniffing after us, it would get a few good pokes in the nose and then back off.

So, it looks like everything will work out all right, until a certain big fat idiot decides we need help. As we’re sitting there, taking our pokes while we wait out the dinosaurs, we hear this high-pitched whistle. Suddenly, all the dinosaurs freeze. Then they all hustle for one spot, except for one which rears up on its hind legs and lets out this incredible roar. One of them carelessly steps in the gnetophytes, but we just barely avoid getting pulped. “What was that?” Di asks.
“I’m not sure,” I say, “but it sounded recorded… Sweet Mother. Ted’s trying a trick we used in the Morrison. He’s playing back a dinosaur call to draw away the dinosaurs. That idiot.”
“Did it not work in the Jurassic?” Di asks.
“Oh, it worked real well,” I say. “We used a recorded Allosaurus roar to scare off a whole pack of ceratosaurs. Unfortunately, it attracted several real allosaurs.” Meanwhile, I see that the trick really is working now. The whistle gets played again, this time on our left. The dinosaurs keep following the sound—all except one. It paces in circles, still sniffing. Then it turns its tail toward us, and suddenly I see this mist coming out of its rear end. It’s not urine (technically, dinosaurs don’t urinate) but fluid from a pair of scent glands at the base of its tail—like a skunk’s, only much larger and even fouler. It doesn’t just stink, it makes my eyes water and my skin burn. I have to pull my shirt over my face just to keep breathing. “Sweet Mother!” I say. “We’ve always figured the tails were most dangerous—but we never counted on the anus!”

Finally, the argentinosaur lets up and walks way. Rosie Perez runs over to us, then takes a few good steps back. Dianna shouts, “Where’s Ted?”
Perez looks like she’s about to cry (though maybe it’s just the sauropod spray. “He went with Dino!” she says. “He said Dino would have to have protection… so they went together. I think they gonna die.”

Now, Dianna bites both lips, and I’m sure I see tears coming down from her eyes. “He must have had a plan,” she says. “What does he want us to do?”
“He found a tree that’s climbable,” she says. “We’re going to climb as high as we can. The others will join us… if they are able.”
Dianna just stands there, like she’s in shock. “Di. You OK?” I say.
She looks at me, and her face is going red. I think she’s about to scream, but she doesn’t. Instead, she just says real soft, “How could I possibly be OK?”
I put a hand on her shoulder, and I’m ready to pull it back in case she tries to bite it off. “All right, bad question,” I tell her. “Do you feel well enough to run?” She nods. “Good. Let’s go.”

*********************

I (Ted) followed Dino in a full run. It was remarkable how quickly he could move. I had trouble even keeping him in sight. He played the call over and over again. We could hear the argentinosaurs’ feet pounding behind us. I worried that they would catch up with us too soon. They moved at about 12 miles per hour, which doesn’t sound like much, but just try maintaining that speed for more than a few minutes! I was already feeling exhausted, but Dino seemed to just go faster.

“Watch out!” I shouted to Dino. He stopped just short of a suspicious dark space beneath a fallen tree. It was none too soon. A lurking noasaur erupted from the hole. It was only three feet tall, but heavily armed. It could have killed him easily, but it hesitated to attack a prey so much larger than itself. It took a cautious swipe with a clawed hand. The film maker sidestepped the attack, then I blasted the noasaur to pieces. I winced when I heard angry bellows from the sauropods.

We finally doubled back, leaving the argentinosaurs to search in confusion for the young one they had been following. We moved further into the trees, hoping to avoid being spotted by suspicious stragglers. We encountered one watchful sauropod that was keeping an eye on an opening in the tree cover. We dropped to all fours before it could see us, and crawled past under the cover of a large log. However, we found the way blocked by a six-foot crocodylian lying beside the log. I threw a rock at the croc’s nose. It grunted menacingly, but did not move.

I pondered the dilemma. Trying to crawl by a live croc was obviously not an option. Shooting it was equally out of the question; that would only draw the sauropods to us. The same held true if I tried to shoot the sauropod. With a hit to the head or neck, I had a very good chance of killing it, but the blast would attract many more. The safest option was to try to outwait the sauropod. But how long would that take?
My blood froze when the sauropod roared. I was sure we were spotted. Then something roared back. I looked toward the trees, and spotted a carnosaur that had somehow escaped my attention. It could only be a giganotosaur. It stood well over ten feet tall. It was well-camouflaged in hues of brown and green, except for a bright red crest on its snout. The sauropod thrust its head over the log and roared again. The sound was deafening. The giganotosaur stepped forward, letting out a steady hiss. I feared that we might be trampled in a clash between the giants. But then the sauropod backed off and walked away. The giganotosaur let out a triumphant roar before retreating into the trees. It might have won the battle of wills, but more sauropods would be on their way. Dino and I got up and ran like hell.

About 20 minutes later, we were all together about 30 feet up a tree. We were safe, as long as no one fell asleep and dropped out. “Didn’t you once fall out of a sequoia?” Carlos asked.
“Yes, but it was someone else’s fault,” I said defensively.
“Is this really the best plan?” Di said. “I mean, as soon as the argentinosaurs leave, this place is going to be swarming with them. Mightn’t we be safer if we tried to get somewhere else on foot?”

I shook my head. “Going on foot would be too risky,” I said. “We would have the carnosaurs and the argentinosaurs after us, especially with the sauropod spray on two of us. Besides, we need to plan for rescue, not just temporary safety. The first rule for wilderness survival is to stay in one place, and this is the first place the rest of the party will look for us.”
“You’re assuming they will look at all,” Carlos said darkly. “For all we know, Diego may have told the others we’re dead.”
“I know, but this is still our best option. What do we have in the way of ammunition?”
“I have another clip of .38 ammunition,” Di said. “Carlos used up the Eliminator rounds. How about you?”
“I have two drums of shells, one buckshot and one of slugs,” I said. “That gives us a total of 29 shots. If one dinosaur attacks, we can stop it easily enough. I don’t expect to have any trouble, at least from the carnosaurs. They won’t bother climbing a tree to get at us when there’s 400 tons of dead meat on the ground. How about communications? Is there a way to contact the Ora?”

Di shook her head. “We weren’t able to retrieve the batteries for the beacon. We don’t have any other communications gear, except what was in the Thing.”
Carlos scratched his chin. “Actually… maybe we do!” he said. “Let me see the Tactical.” Dianna handed him the rifle. After a few moments of examination, he cracked the biggest grin I’ve ever seen. “Excellent! Take a look at this. There’re three settings: One for safety, one for semi-auto… and one for taking pictures. The electronic scope was built to double as a kind of camera phone. That way, if a `tactical marksman’ sees something important, but it’s too risky to shoot, he can photograph it and send the image straight to his superiors. It’s perfect for reconnaissance work. Normally, it sends signals with microwaves, which aren’t much good without satellites, but if they kept the gun to the original specs, there should be a back-up radio transmitter.” He frowned with intense thought as he flipped through the options in the gun’s little computer. “Here it is. Good!” He handed the gun back to Di. “Try sending a signal every thirty minutes. The others should respond eventually… if they’re listening.”

“This really a wonderful opportunity!” Dino said gleefully. “My camera, it shoot in the dark. I can film carnosaurs eating kill. It not be wonderful?” I and everyone else looked at him in stunned silence. Carlos looked like he was ready to throw Caproni out of the tree.
We tied ourselves to the branches with belts, ropes and clothing. Realistically, there was no way our improvised straps could hold up anyone who started to fall, but they would at least keep us from rolling off the branches in our sleep. Di tied herself in with a long-sleeved overshirt. I felt a little uncomfortable next to her, so I moved several branches over, almost to the other side of the tree. Then we waited, and waited. Once, we heard the sound of the Ora’s cannon. “Sounds like they’re five clicks away,” Carlos commented. The sound was repeated, more faintly. The Ora was moving away.

“Care to make a change of plans?” Di said loudly.
“No, they’ll come back when the sauropods clear out,” I said, trying to sound more confident than I felt. “We’re still better off up here.”
Within a few hours, the sun was setting. As expected, the carnosaurs became bolder. Five giganotosaurs came out and started feeding on the dead sauropods. It was unclear whether they were a pack, or just individuals that converged on the same place. I’m inclined to think that the latter was true. Only two of them, apparently an adult and a juvenile, would even feed at the same carcass. Smaller carnosaurs gathered, waiting expectantly for the giganotosaurs to finish. Pterosaurs of all sizes swept down, snatching scraps of meat when the giganotosaurs weren’t looking. Gathering crocodiles were bolder. Dozens of them swarmed in like a Biblical plague of reptiles, tearing off chunks of meat with impunity. One of the gigans was driven away from its carcass by a pair of crocs even longer than itself. “Terror crocs,” Carlos whispered. “Probably genus Sarcosuchus.”

A little while later, a terrible contralto screech announced a new arrival. The gigans looked up from their feeding apprehensively. Moments later, an eight-foot-long, crocodile-like head thrust through the trees, and the scream was repeated. The noise was deafening. A gigan actually turned tail and ran. The creature advanced, revealing a bizarre body that seemed to go on indefinitely. It did not look much like a dinosaur, but it walked on two legs and was too big to be anything else. It was over 60 feet long, and stood well over twenty feet high. The arms were unusually long, and bore one long sickle claw on the largest finger of each hand. Perhaps a quarter of its height came from a tall sail on its back. I recognized it as a spinosaur, though if not for the sail, I would have been at a loss to identify it. The strangest thing about it was its bearing. It looked and acted more like a bloodhound than any carnosaur I had seen. Where an ordinary carnosaur on the hunt would stand tall, with head raised high on a curving neck, this one seemed to stoop, with the unusually long neck held straight, the claws nearly scraping the dirt, and the nose held mere inches above the ground. The spinosaur strolled through the clearing, indifferent to the roaring of the gigans and ineffectual snaps of the crocs. It began to feed on the abandoned carcass, and the gigans and crocs relaxed and resumed their feeding.

I dozed off, but was dimly aware of a rising wind that made the branches swing and creak. Most people would have found it unnerving, but I found it soothing—at least as long as I was too drowsy to give it much thought. An hour or so later, I was awakened by Dianna’s screams.

A pterosaur, with a wingspan of over twenty feet, was attacking her. It hung like a bat from a branch over her, while striking with its wing-claws and its beak. She dropped her gun, which landed with a loud thud. I heard tearing fabric; the pterosaur was shredding a shirt she had used to tie herself up. I had to lean out precariously to bring my shotgun to bear, and I could still only see the pterosaur’s left wing. My first shot was a miss, and the recoil from my awkwardly-held gun nearly knocked me out of the tree. I had to grab the trunk with both hands to steady myself. Fortunately, the gun was strapped to my shoulder. I heard a loosed branch tumble to the ground. When I raised the gun again, the pterosaur was hanging on to Di’s own branch and slashing at her leg with one wing. When it heard me pump the shotgun, it came at me with wings flailing, held aloft more by occasional contact with the branches than by the lift from the wings. I fired; its body thumped against the gun barrel, and claws scratched at my legs. Then the pterosaur went crashing down through the branches, still flapping its wings. I lowered my gun in satisfaction, then froze. The pterosaur’s severed head was lodged in the trunk a few inches from my ear.

“We got trouble,” Carlos whispered. I looked down, and almost cried out. The spinosaur was heading toward us, its long nose pointing at our tree like a compass needle. When it reached the tree, it sniffed around the base. There was a nasty slurping sound as it sampled what was left of the pterosaur. Then its head jerked abruptly up. It easily reached twenty feet in the air. Grasping the trunk with its forelimbs for support, it reared up higher still. After a moment of pondering, I fired at the sail. I hoped that a painful but not life-threatening blow would drive it away. The spinosaur roared in pain, and from that close, the noise was positively painful. Rather than back off, it swung its head in my direction. Three times, it inhaled loudly. Then, for reasons known only to itself, it turned away and returned to its carcass.

“That was too close,” I said.
“It ain’t over,” Carlos said. “We gotta get that gun back. And by `we’, I mean you.”
I gave Carlos the shotgun and started down. The climb was one of the most unnerving experiences of my life. It was considerably more difficult than the climb up, thanks to the close approach of the spinosaur. The dinosaur had scratched up the bark and snapped a number of branches, making it much harder for me to find handholds and footholds. Nevertheless, I made it down without serious incident. Then, just as I was bending over to pick up the Tactical, a giganotosaur roared. It was less than twenty feet away.
I snatched up the rifle, fumbling in my desperation. Before I could even get hold of the grip, the gigan had reached me. Imagine my shock when it walked right past me! It was the adult of the pair, and the youngster was right behind it. If the adult noticed me at all, it gave no sign, but the young one glanced at me and shrieked a warning. The elder gigan roared again. This time, something—several somethings, in fact—roared back.

Carlos says that in an emergency, people stop thinking and run by instinct. That was certainly how it was for me. I was ten feet back up the tree before I had any definite, conscious impression of what was going on. I nearly fell out when something ran into the tree. I had a brief glimpse of a dinosaur with big claws and no head pressing against the trunk, its legs still moving. I did not pause from climbing. It was now clear what was going on: We were in the middle of a carnosaur turf war, and the decapitated animal below me was the first casualty. A cacophony of hideous screams and colliding bodies made the branches shake. After almost falling out again, I stopped at a stout branch about twenty-six feet off the ground and held on tight. Three dinosaurs ran past the tree, making the branch swing. I recognized one as the little gigan by its screams. Behind me, there was an unfamiliar scream that was cut off in a gruesome, soggy crunch. Another dinosaur went by, so big and loud that it could only be the adult gigan. It was moving slowly, with the halting tread of a wounded animal. It staggered at the base of the tree and slammed against the trunk. The impact nearly catapulted me off the branch. Then the gigan started moving again, gaining momentum until it was managing a slow jog.

I felt something brush my shoulder. “Grab it, Ted!” Carlos told me. They had managed to make a rope out of two carrying straps. I mutely hooked tied the gun to the straps. They hauled it up, then lowered the rope again. I climbed up the rest of the way, holding onto the rope with both hands while pressing my feet against the trunk. I started to slip when a strip of bark peeled away, but found a footing on a sufficiently sturdy branch. Carlos took my hand and pulled me the rest of the way up. I felt Di’s soft hands strap me back in. By then, my eyes were shut, and soon I was fast asleep.