LURE

This one is in large measure my wife Laura’s fault. She gave me the ending. Of course, I’m partly to blame, too, because I’m the one who went and wrote a story around it.

Miocene Italy. To be precise, a swamp in Miocene Italy, in what would be Tuscany ten million years from now, give or take a few thousand. It certainly smelled like a swamp, Harvey Cutter thought as he squelched through the mud to check his latest trap.

The smells of mud, stale water, and rotting vegetation never changed much, the hunter thought as he scraped his hip boots one after the other on a branch. Or was that never would change! Despite a hundred years of commercial time travel, English tenses remained ill-adapted to the phenomenon.

The branch on which he’d cleaned his boots was part of a myrtle shrub. Maybe an uptime botanist could tell the difference between it and its modem equivalent, but Cutter couldn’t. The mosquitoes, he thought resentfully as one bit him on the arm, also hadn’t changed much.

But he wasn’t hunting plants and he wasn’t hunting mosquitoes, even if they were hunting him. He was hunting primates for the San Diego Cenozoic Zoo, and he wasn’t having a whole lot of luck.

Things had been easier on his last run, when he’d brought back a dozen Notharctus-plenty to start a breeding colony- from Eocene North America. Notharctus looked like a lemur and wasn’t much smarter than a squirrel. He could have caught a hundred if he’d wanted them.

Now he was after larger-and smarter-game. Hominoids, even offbeat Miocene hominoids like the ones he was after now, were nobody’s fools. That wasn’t surprising; people and the great apes were the survivors of the hominoid clan.

Something squealed in pain and terror out on the firmer ground farther east. Cutter’s head whipped around. A Diceratherium was down and kicking, with several wolfish Cynodesmus scrambling over its bulky body and already beginning to feed.

Cutter was glad Cynodesmus preferred dry ground. They would have attacked him just as cheerfully as they had the big, rhinolike Diceratherium. They had no fear of man. In the Miocene, primates-any primates-were prey, not predators.

Calling Cynodesmus wolfish and Diceratherium rhinolike did not really do the beasts justice, Cutter knew. Unlike the plants and the bugs, Miocene mammals resembled their modem equivalents about as much as would clay models made by a talented ten-year-old with a little more imagination than he really needed.

As if to prove the point, a small herd of Syndyoceras daintily picked their way around the gorging pack of Cynodesmus. They looked something like deer and something like antelopes, with their striped hides resembling those of zebras, but they had two horns above their eyes and two more halfway down their noses, which made them different from anything that had gotten past the Pleistocene.

Cutter squelched on. He could see the stand of willow where he’d set this new trap. He could see the net too, undeployed and empty. He said something rude under his breath. He got up to the trap and saw footprints by the fat juicy red apple he’d set out as bait. They were the right kind of footprints. He said something rude out loud, loud enough, in fact, to scare a flock of Miocene more-or-less sparrows off their perches. They flew away, chirping angrily.

“Hell with it,” he said out loud. He looked around for a reasonably dry patch of ground, took out a ration pack, and ate lunch. He scattered paper and cellophane over the landscape with reckless abandon. All the wrappers were aggressively biodegradable; none of them would show up in the seam of lignite that would memorialize this landscape in the distant present.

Temper somewhat restored, he examined the footprints round the snare again. They were the prints of his quarry, all right: marks about half as big as his own bare feet would have made, and of the same general shape. The imprints of the beast’s opposable great toes, though, were slightly set off from those of the others, and not quite in line with them. Only men and their immediate ancestors had feet fully adapted to walking erect.

The hunter started off toward the next stand of willows, a couple of miles away. That one was bigger than this little outpost, and held his camp and three traps. None of them had caught anything, either, though one had been robbed the day before yesterday.

Several sluggish streams ran between the two copses. Cutter forded them with care. The other day, he had watched a crocodile drag a young ancestral hippo off a stream bank and into the water. He corrected himself: the little hippo hadn’t lived long enough to be ancestral to anything.

He got to the base camp without being bitten by anything more ferocious than more mosquitoes. Then he checked his traps in this strap of trees. They were all unsprung, though two of them had fresh prints nearby. No wonder the Italian hominoid had a reputation for being hard to catch, Cutter thought.

He found droppings under a big, shaggy willow and set another trap there. When he suddenly looked up in the middle of the job, he saw brown eyes watching him through the leaves. A moment later, they were gone.

He walked back to his camp. That was really too dignified a name for it, he thought. It was just a clearing where he’d pitched a light tent to keep the rain off his sleeping bag. The sun was still in the sky, but he decided to eat anyway.

He got out another radon pack. But for the degradable packaging, he knew, the packs were adapted from old military food: P-rations, T-rations, something like that. He didn’t remember the letter. If they’d made soldiers eat stuff like this all the time, he thought disparagingly, no wonder nobody’d fought a war in a long time.

He threw away the cup of what, for a lack of a suitably noxious word, was called stew. What dessert comes with this pack? he wondered, feeling rather like Little Jack Horner. Instead of a plum, however, he pulled out a cellophane package with four cookies in it.

Sighing resignedly, he started to eat one, then stopped and gave it a long look.”Be damned,” he said, and started to laugh. He glanced back toward where his traps were set, then looked at the cookie again. “Why the hell not? How could it make things go worse?”

Harvey Cutter’s nostrils twitched as he walked toward the new exhibit. “Be damned,” he said. “It even stinks like Miocene mud. Good job.”

Lucy Durr beamed at him. She was second assistant curator in the primates section of the zoo, and had designed the enclosure. “Glad you approve,” she said. “The photos you gave us helped a lot in putting it together.”

“Good. I hoped they would.”

Lucy put her hands on the rail and leaned on it as she peered across the moat at the pair of brown-furred creatures on the far side. “They’re interesting beasts, Miocene hominoids that aren’t part of the dryopithecid group that led to the great apes or the ramapithecids humans are descended from. They’re just-by themselves. I’m glad we have them. Hardly any zoos do.”

“I believe that. They’re bloody hell to catch. From the fossils, they’re supposed to have been common around there. You couldn’t prove it by me. I saw one in a tree for half a second, and I finally managed to catch these two. Other than that, forget it.”

Cutter reached into his pocket, pulled out some cream-filled chocolate sandwich cookies, and threw them across the moat to the animals he’d captured. The beasts were nimble enough on the ground. On all fours, they hurried over to the cookies. They grabbed them with hands not much different from Cutter’s and greedily gobbled them up.

Lucy clucked the horrified cluck of any zookeeper who catches a visitor feeding the animals. Then she glanced over at the hunter. “How do they know those are good to eat? They haven’t had any here, I know that, and they certainly never had any back in the Miocene.”