over our heads, throwing the tableau into stark relief. We both knew the futility of attempting to outrun creatures that were mostly leg. “Let’s try backing away slowly,” said Klicks casually, presumably hoping a soothing tone wouldn’t alarm the beasts. “I think I can find the elephant gun.”
Without waiting for my answer, he took a small step backward, then another. I sure as hell didn’t want to be left there alone, so I followed suit. The troodons seemed content to watch us go, for they just stood there, shifting their weight between their left feet and their right.
We made it perhaps eight or nine meters back when the one in the middle opened its mouth. The jaw worked up and down and a raspy sound issued from the beast’s throat. Despite my urge to get out of there, I was fascinated and stopped backing. The creature produced a low grumbling, followed by a few piercing cries like those made by hawks on a hot summer’s day. I marveled at its vocal range. It then started puffing the long cheeks of its angular snout, producing explosive p sounds. Was this a mating call? Perhaps, for a ruby-colored dewlap beneath the thing’s throat inflated with each puff.
Klicks had noticed my dallying. “Come on, Brandy,” he said, a nonthreatening lilt to his voice, but still retaining a certain quiet edge conveying the message “Don’t be a fool.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
“
It was an expression from my youth. To an adult, “wait up” means to refrain from going to bed until someone returns home, but to a child, especially one who was a bit on the pudgy side, as I had been, “wait up” was the plaintive call made to friends who were running faster than he could. Only one problem here. I hadn’t said those words and neither had Klicks. They had come, hoarse and booming, as though from a person who had been deaf since birth, from the carnivorous mouth of the middle troodon.
Impossible. Coincidence. I must have heard it wrong. I mean, get real.
But Klicks had stopped backing, too, his mouth agape. “Brandy—?”
Everything I knew about troodon came rushing back in a flood of memory. First described by Leidy in 1856, based on fossil teeth from the Judith River formation of Montana. Back in 1987, Phil Currie proved that troodon was the same as
Could troodon have been more advanced by the final days of the Cretaceous than anyone had previously thought? Could an elite few dinosaurs have had spoken language? Were they on the way to civilization, only to have their tenure on the planet cut short by some catastrophe? For me, a lifelong lover of dinosaurs, the idea was compelling. I wanted it to be true, but I knew in my bones that even the best of the terrible lizards, although not as desperately stupid as once thought, was still no better endowed mentally than a shrew or a bird.
A bird! Of course! Simple mimicry. Parrots do it. So do mynahs. We knew that birds were closely related to dinosaurs. Granted, our feathered friends hadn’t shared a common ancestor with troodon since the avian line split from the coelurosaurians in the mid-Jurassic, 100 million years before the time I was in now. Still, troodon was remarkably bird-like, with its keen binocular vision, quick movements, and three-toed feet. That’s it, of course. It must have heard me call “Wait up!” to Klicks and simply imitated the sound.
Except.
Except that I hadn’t called “wait up” or anything else to Klicks. And Klicks hadn’t said anything remotely like that to me.
I must have heard wrong. I must have.
“Wait up. Stop. Stop. Wait up.”
Klicks recovered his wits faster than I did. “Yes?” he said, astonished.
“Yess. Stop. Go not. Wait up. Stop. Yess. Stop.”
What do you say to a dinosaur? “Who are you?” asked Klicks.
“Pals. We pals. You pals. Eat an ant and I’ll be your best friend. Pals. Palsy-walsy.”
“I don’t fucking believe this,” said Klicks.
That did it. The thing launched into George Carlin’s list of the seven words you never used to be able to say on TV. The troodon’s speech was still difficult to understand, though. Indeed, it would have been incomprehensible if it weren’t for the fact that it put a brief pause between each word, the obscenities coming out like the sputters of a dying muffler.
“How can a dinosaur talk?” I said at last, to Klicks really, but the damned reptile answered anyway.
“With great difficulty,” the troddon rasped, and then, as if to prove its point, it arched its neck and hawked up a ball of spit. The gob landed on some rocks at the base of a bald cypress trunk. It was shot through with blood. The effort of speaking must be tearing up the creature’s throat.
That the beast could speak made no sense, and yet the words, although not clear, were unmistakable. I shook my head in wonder, then realized what was doubly incredible was not just that the dinosaur was speaking, but that it was speaking English.
Now, in retrospect, it seems obvious that it wasn’t the dinosaur talking. Not really. It was just a marionette for the blue jelly thing inside it. I’d had a hard enough time accepting that some weird slime had crawled into my head. The thought that the stuff had been an
The talking dinosaur clucked like a chicken, then said, “Yess. Slime-thingy me. Not dinosaur. Dinosaur dumb- dumb. Slime-thingy smarty-pants.”
“That one must have learned English from you,” said Klicks.
“Huh? Why?”
“Well, for one thing, it sure didn’t get phrases like ‘palsy-walsy’ and ‘smarty-pants’ from me. And for another, it’s got your snooty Upper Canada College accent.”
I thought about that. It didn’t sound to me like it had any accent at all, but then again it certainly didn’t have a Jamaican accent, which is what Klicks spoke with.
Before I could reply, the three troodons stepped forward, not menacingly, really, but they did manage in short order to form the vertices of an equilateral triangle, with Klicks and me at the center. Klicks nodded toward the dense undergrowth, a mixture of ferns, red flowers, and cycads. There, sticking up, was the barrel of his elephant gun, quite out of reach. “Enough said by me,” rasped the reptile, now standing so close that I could feel its hot, moist breath on my face and smell the stench of its last meal. “You speak now. Who you?”
It was insanity, this being questioned by a baby-talking dinosaur. But I couldn’t think of any reason not to answer its question. I pointed at Klicks, but wondered if the hand gesture would have any meaning to the beast. “This is Professor Miles Jordan,” I said, “and my name is Dr. Brandon Thackeray.” The troodon tilted its head in a way that looked like human puzzlement. It didn’t say anything, though, so I added, “I’m Curator of Paleobiology at the Royal Ontario Museum. Miles is Curator of Dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, and he also teaches at the University of Alberta.”
The reptilian head weaved at the end of that long neck. “Some words link,” it said in its harsh voice. “Some not.” I could hear an undercurrent of clicking as it spoke, the sound of its pointed teeth touching as its mouth made the unaccustomed movements. It paused again, then asked, “What is name?”
“I just told you. Brandon Thackeray.” Then, after a moment, I added, for no good reason, “My friends call me Brandy.”
“No. No. What
“What do you mean, what is a name? You asked me what my name was.”
Klicks touched my shoulder. “No. What it asked was, ‘Who you?’ That’s not necessarily the same
