II
On the Cliffs of Time
The Tu-nel had met many challenges throughout their long history. Older than the family of sharks and the venerable turtles, they had sniffed the fetid breath of extinction more than once....
The last man alive, other than Hart himself, lay hurt and terrified. Both of his legs were crushed and he was quickly descending into shock.
There had been eighteen men in the camp when the two beasts burst into the clearing. The men were presented briefly with the chance to run, but they did not use their opportunity soon enough. They were stupefied by the beasts, yet on first glance it appeared the creatures were too large and cumbersome for rapid movement.
A fallacy quickly and lethally disproved. The Tu-nel dropped to their stomachs, folded back their front paddles and dug their rear limbs into the ground. Large chunks of dirt and grass were thrown back as they thrust themselves forward.
The soldiers managed to fire a few shots--to no effect. Most of them were crushed in their tents. Others were trampled in the open as they tried to make a stand or attempted to run. A few were caught in huge jaws as the Tu-nel flashed their necks like scythes across the campground. The annoying yapping of the dogs was hushed with the flick of a stubby tail, leaving a heap of fur and jutting bones. The struts of Lieutenant Hart's bidarki snapped wickedly as one of the creatures whipped around to chase two men running for the woods. It flattened one man at the fringe, then followed the other into the trees.
Through his agony, the soldier with the crushed legs had a blurred image of animal frolic. These monsters were playing.
At least, that was the misty impression he had the instant before the beast snapping at the tent fires rolled to one side and finished crushing him.
The two young Tu-nel had been snacking on salmon during their entire trip upriver and they'd eaten their fill. Rather than making them lethargic, however, all that food fueled a burst of playfulness. The sounds the men heard the night before and that morning had been made by the mother, still in the river. Only one of the young Tu-nel belonged to her. The other, a male, was a tagalong. The young ones had slipped away from the Kiltik late last evening, chasing each other and knocking about in the trees. The huge adult found it uncomfortable moving on land, so she sat in the deepest part of the river and called to the errant young ones--who did not respond.
When they spotted the men in Hart's camp, they promptly charged. It was great sport treading the bipeds underfoot. They did not make the connection between the soldiers and the tiny wounds caused by their rifle bullets. Certainly the young male paid no notice, for he already bore deep scars on his right flank--inflicted by the mother Tu-nel when he swam too close during their first encounter. Next to that, the .30 caliber bullets slapping into his chest were hardly noticeable.
The burning tents were another matter. The young male had never encountered fire before. When he ducked his head into the fire, the sensation was more peculiar than painful and he snapped at the flames again and again, mystified as to why he could not move them out of the way.
Once the fires died down, however, the male forgot the strange phenomena and rushed into the woods to find the young female. He discovered her rubbing the length of her body against some trees. This action perplexed the male. The female hissed, rolled to her other side, and began rocking back and forth. Trees snapped and fell under her weight. She moved to the next rank of spruce and repeated the sequence.
The male sniffed and lifted its head above the trees. In the early morning sunlight his skin took on an olive-gold tinge.
Unlike the ancient reptiles that they superficially resembled, Tu-nel had prominent follicles of nasal hair. When the young male caught a whiff of smoke from the camp, his nose was tickled and he sneezed, revealing his teeth. Tu-nel teeth were long, sharp as coral, and socketed. They could slice through the thick shell of a giant marine turtle as easily as a boy bites into a cupcake.
A series of loud cracks and another line of trees went down under the female. As the male lowered himself, he brushed against some spruce boughs and a peculiar tingle shot through him. He lifted himself again and came down on the trees in front of him, his skin rasping against the rough network of limbs. The tingle was multiplied a thousand times.
More trees were felled as the male repeated the procedure. He began to emit little grunts of pleasure as he learned more and more about the art of scratching himself. Resting his chin against the crown of a tree, he slowly moved outward, laying himself and the spruce down in one long sliding motion as the branches scratched neck, body, cloaca and tail.
Within an hour, the two young Tu-nel flattened nearly three acres.
"Tooo... nel...."
All morning long the female had ignored her mother's calls and, now that her thick skin was satiated, she began loping towards the river. Unwilling to be left alone, the male followed. On reaching the crest of the shallow slope where Hart and Cumiskey had lain, they fell to their stomachs and slid down, kicking out like otters on a mud slide. They plunged into the water and darted to the adult. She greeted the young female with a snort.
The male was still excited from the morning's play, but he swam too close and his enthusiasm was rewarded with a sharp tail-slap from the mother. He fell behind the females and sulked, but things had improved At least now when he approached the mother did not try to tear out his throat.
This trip on the Kiltik had been special to the young ones. The fresh water felt strange and clean on their skin. But the Tu-nel rarely went upriver anymore and the mother was feeling confined by the shallows.
It had been an unintended journey, the result of a combination of misfortunes and one more consequence of the noise.
After one hundred and thirty-five million years and untold tribulations, the Tu-nel had met their match. It was not something they could touch or smell. It was not something they could fight.
It was the Age of Steam.
The ocean had always been a noisy place. For one thing, it held the world's largest collection of ill-bred diners. Fish could be stupendously noisy eaters. Some made feeding sounds that would have reminded a man of a sawmill, and the mammals who shared the seas with them were no less indelicate. Gray whales plowed up large swatches of seabed while tearing through the tiny sand-tube houses of the shrimp-like creatures they preyed upon, making the ocean thud with avalanche sounds.
And the songbook of the fish was endless. The drumfish Baridiella drummed with its swim bladder. The croaker Micropogon made frog sounds and peculiar snare-drum rolls. Leaning backward, sea horses joined the two bony projections at the back of their skulls and snap-snap-snapped.
The fish had an infinite number of ways to create snorts, clacks, claps, ticks, squeaks, moans, tones, and groans. Percussive effects could be produced by hitting the ocean floor, each other, or themselves. Many fish sported sonic muscles. By burping gas from their swim bladders into their foreguts, such as the toadfish did, they could peep and burble to their hearts' content. Pufferfish ground their pharyngeal teeth as though they were undersea hurdy-gurdies. All to the accompaniment of crustacean castanets.
Then there was whale song.
There was a time when the singing whales rang the globe with their symphonies. Some could make themselves heard on the other side of the planet, setting up vibrations in the water to carry their news and intent. Those not graced with such talent could at least pass important messages along. All the whales in the world were in-the-know. Yet now, while it was a news service not yet matched by man, man had effectively scotched it. Because man had set upon the great currents engines which disrupted their long-distance communications.
The Tu-nel also had girdled the planet with their songs. One hundred and thirty-five million years of evolution had given them a matchless repertoire. Their most common transmission, "tooo-nel," was fraught with nuances and meanings, which were taught slowly and patiently to all young Tu-nel. Their long necks and lateral temporal vacuities formed, in effect, magnificent Alpine horns. On land this instrument was fed directly from the lungs, but underwater the Tu-nel first transferred air to a special compression chamber near the base of the neck, circulating it for song while losing a minimal amount of oxygen. A glottal cavity was responsible for the hollow double-vowel sound preceding Tu-nel songs and all but erased the subtle consonant at the beginning. In ages past, under the right conditions, they could make themselves heard from sea to sea.
No more.
Disastrously for the Tu-nel, steam engines intruded directly upon the frequency of their songs. Even a small auxiliary engine could deafen them. The roar and ratchets did not hurt their sensitive ears. It was the sudden isolation that threw them into turmoil. They were accustomed to the constant hum and jump of sea music. The songs had provided them with consolation and news. A song could be a night cry or joyous birth. Songs told them where the food was, the best weather was, the enemy was. And now they were gone.
Had they roamed in herds, the result would not have been so catastrophic, but the Tu-nel gathered in large groups only during the mating season. Every year they gathered around a few inconspicuous islands in the Aleutians. As they drew closer, the sounds of the engines grew less intrusive and they could hear each other with relative clarity. This was absolutely necessary, because the Tu-nel were always voracious and the surrounding sea was heavily depopulated during their gatherings. Battling males and choiring females worked up ferocious appetites. They had to stay in constant contact with the scouts who patrolled the outlying areas. On receiving a signal, a temporary truce would be sounded and the combatants would race out to the food the scouts had located. Once fed, the male rivals returned to the deadly scrimmage, while females violently jostled each other as they orbited the arena, determining status in their own particular pecking order. The scouts, old bulls who had given up the mating battles, resumed their vigil.
In the 1800's whaling ships began plying the area regularly, sailing vessels that little troubled the Tu-nel. But as the century progressed, whalers converted to steam and became even more proficient at depopulating the ocean. The massacre of the fur seals on the Pribilof Islands was a blow. The Tu-nel had pursued the seals even as the seals chased after salmon and squid. A harsher loss was that of the reddish-brown walrus that had thrived in the Arctic. They had once been easy meals as they grazed for gapers and cockles on the sea bed. Now both seals and walruses were threatened with extinction.
Infinitely worse, though, was that the whales themselves were on the verge of sharing their fate. The Tu-nel scouts had to range further and further away from the mating grounds to find sustenance. The Tu-nel were going hungry when they needed food the most, during the mating season. Occasionally they attacked lone whalers and revenue cutters that came their way, but sinking a large whaling ship expended precious energy, and drowning men were scrawny, meager repasts. There were never any survivors from these attacks because the Tu-nel had to pick out every morsel of meat they could find.
And then the planet itself turned against them.
Beginning in 1886, revenue cutters threading their way through the Aleutians began happening upon islands that appeared overnight, then just as quickly disappeared. For thirty years the island chain boiled in geologic upheaval. It was spooky enough for the sailors standing on the narrow cutter decks. For the Tu-nel it was catastrophic, because most of the activity took place in the vicinity of Bogoslof Island.
The heart of their breeding ground.
The ancient mating arenas now had a new topography. In the past, the Tu-nel would have established new arenas with an accommodating variation in song. But the grind of steam engines and the screech and blow of the earth caused males and females to miss connection. The birth rate dropped. There would be no Tu-nel left in fifty years--the average life span of the creature.
The mother Tu-nel and the two young ones made their way slowly downriver. Once again they broke through Naupaktomiut fishing seines, but this time the men did not rush out to fix them, for there had been rumors of something terrible in the river. Villagers were missing. The Tu-nel had reached Kotzbue three months ago. It was night, as it had been when they first entered the sound. There was no need to attack the human settlements, for their guts were full of salmon. Still, they attacked two men in a dinghy who were shooting seals that were preying on salmon. The young Tu-nel knocked the boat over and toyed with the men a little before playfully biting them in half. Then they slaughtered two dozen seals that were great sport because of their agility.
While lumbering over the shoals, they swallowed pebbles to aid in trituration--a bird-like habit they once shared with the plesiosaurs.
Their accidental riverine foray was over. Accidental because the mother had become lost while searching for the mating arena. There was more noise in the area than ever before, for gold prospectors were arriving by the shipload. The steam engine cacophony had reached a crescendo and the earth itself had buckled and screeched like a mad woman, throwing the mother into deaf confusion.
Already, far to the south, the prelude to this tectonic activity on the Pacific Rim had reduced a great city to fire and ruin.