triangular, narrow body with flared sides like huge gills, and a long, thick neck that ends in a cylindrical head so full of spikes it reminds me of a sea urchin crossed with one of those mallets you use for playing lawn croquet. It’s an extremely weird alien dinosaur, and the cavemen call it a murong. It smells like you would expect — like a flock of elephants on the way to a mud bath.
“Which part is the chest?” I hiss.
“Aim right at the face,” Heidi replies, not concerned. “That makes it easier for him to notice he’s being shot. I think the bang and flash will scare him more than the impact. But I doubt it’ll be necessary to shoot. Give me thirty more seconds, and we’ll see.”
The dinosaur makes my skin creep. It’s not just an actual dino, which is bad enough. It’s also weird in its own, otherworldly right.
But Heidi is used to these things. She knows how to tame not-raptors and how to fly on not-dactyls. Her caveman husband taught her, and she ran with it. Now she’s been going on secret excursions to the jungle on a regular basis, sometimes returning on the back of some prehistoric monster.
I look around again. If one monster is tempted by the scent of a dead and skinned not-sheep that’s been hanging out in the open specifically so it will start to rot, maybe others are, too. Like a dragon, for instance.
They are here in their hundreds, somewhere in the jungle. The lack of gold and other valuables on this primitive planet means they can’t gather hoards to give them strength. That, in turn, prevents them from changing to dragon form, and they’re stuck in their human-ish shape. They’re still dangerous and deadly, and they have this way of sneaking up on you.
“I’ll try now,” Heidi says and picks up a long stick, made from a thin sapling and stripped of all its twigs. It looks like a fishing rod, and it even has a string with bait attached to the thin end. Except the bait is not a worm or a small fish.
She calmly walks closer to the murong, and I reposition myself and follow her so I have a clear aim at the dino without any danger of hitting Heidi.
The dino calmly comes closer, all the way up to the meat on the ground. Now three of its eyes are on Heidi and two on the meat. None on me.
Heidi extends the rod and holds it right over the murong’s head so the bait dangles in front of its eyes. And immediately the dino’s attention snaps to the bait — all five eyes focus only on that.
No wonder. The bait is a butterfly the size of a face towel, colorful and dainty. Heidi spent all of last night making it from fabric, and the colors are quite dazzling.
The dino stares at the fake butterfly as if mesmerized. That’s not because it’s beautiful — here on Xren, butterflies are usually venomous and deadly, sometimes even to dinos. The giants have no particular way to defend themselves against the fluttering horrors, except standing still and pretending to be mountains. Mysteriously smelly mountains, perhaps, but it’s all they have.
Heidi keeps the butterfly waving a couple of feet in front of the dinosaur while she makes her way to the murong’s main body. With three quick, barefooted steps she climbs up on the creature’s back and swings one leg over the side.
She’s sitting on the monster, riding it like it’s no big deal.
The dinos might be deadly. But they’re not all that smart.
“Looks like it’s working.” Heidi turns the butterfly to the right, and the murong’s head follows until it has to move its body to keep the threat within sight. She turns it the other way, and the head follows to the left, too.
Then she yanks the butterfly straight up and catches it in her hand. The dino immediately returns to its prior activity of not doing much. One eye is on me again, but I guess I’m not much of a concern.
The gun is getting heavy in my arms. “Are we safe now, or should I—”
The dinosaur opens two mouths and gives off a loud, two-toned roar that’s so deep it makes my chest shake.
Yeah, that can’t be good. With trembling hands, I take aim at the middle of the mass of spikes and leathery folds the murong has for a face.