VIII
On the Cliffs of Time
The belugas were intelligent creatures.
They knew the meaning of fear.
What was more, they understood, in detail, the cause of their fear.
They knew that if they were caught, the killers would finish them off piece by jagged piece. That was what Orcs did. Theirs would not be a razor swift death, for the Orcs would tear the small white whales into quarters. Not so horrible a fate as faced by larger whales attacked by the Orcs, remaining alive while being eaten bite by bloody bite until the heart had practically no body left to pump blood to. Still, the belugas' extinction would be unpleasant and certain. They knew this because they'd heard others of their kind killed this way.
So they fled.
The Orcs hunted in packs. They were smarter and more agile than the belugas and they were hungry. They knew what steps the belugas were taking to evade them, so they formed a picket against the shoreline and began slapping the ocean with their flukes. The belugas heard the drumming and sensed they were being herded and there was a brief minute when they could have slipped out of the trap. But they were frightened and they hesitated.
The killers had their own speech. The belugas did not understand the exact meaning of the sounds--only their import. And they knew the range was closing. The Orcs certainly did not bother disguising their intention. They continued drumming the waves.
The belugas went right. Racing--every jog to the surface a frantic explosion of air. Their terror was written in the ironic rainbows etched in the mist of their exhalations.
To the left. The Orcs closed in.
Another jink to the right.
Then straight to sea.
Nothing. The killer whales had closed all exits. More and more, a rainbow mist. If only they could extend the surface. If only they could fly. But they couldn't fly. They knew they were not gulls. They were, after all, intelligent.
Intelligent enough to know they were about to die. Intelligent enough to also know they had a choice as to mode of death.
They turned towards the bay.
The killers closed ranks at the mouth of the bay and there was no escape.
Coming in, the belugas could feel the sharp bottom cut their stomachs, but there was no worse pain than the teeth of the killers, so they kept coming. They sounded to each other. They looked at each other for one last time in a place where they could live.
Then they could go no further.
They were beached.
The humans who discovered them stretched and dying on the shore were perplexed by their suicidal behavior.
"I've seen pilot whales do this back east."
The day wore on. The whales were mammals, but they'd long since lost the ability to survive on land. Gravity drew their internal organs down upon their lungs. The fifteen white whales were being crushed to death by their own bodies. It was a terrible, lingering death. The sun was harsh and the belugas, through their agony, saw the humans hold their noses.
"Don't they stink, though!"
"They're dying, son. They're dying."
But the killers offshore did not know this. They patrolled the entrance to the bay, expecting at any moment the belugas to emerge.
And then they heard their own death knell.
Evolution is the hidden wish list of every species--not a banal series of flukes or chance mutations. Every wish is a facet of what the species needs to survive in a changing environment. If the wishes are granted, the species endures. Since 99.99% of all species that have ever lived are extinct, it can be concluded that most wishes are denied.
The most noticeable feature of the Tu-nel, their colossal size, was the result of a specific threat. Forty-five million years ago the deadliest marine creature of the Eocene Epoch made its debut. Early paleontologists would dub it 'Basilosaurus'--'King of the Reptiles.' A few years after discovering its fossils, they realized their mistake. The Basilosaurus was not a reptile at all, but an archaeocete.
The first great whale.
A recent émigré from the land, the Basilosaurus sported two vestigial rear legs. Its two front legs were transformed into giant rudders that guided it along as it swept its flukes up and down. Eighty feet in length, it looked like a huge, obese eel with flippers. Using its widely separated but formidable teeth, it could tear any animal that got in its way to shreds, including the Tu-nel.
While deadly, the Tu-nel of the Eocene were a mere fifty feet long. They had an imposing dental armory, but their strong apsid formation (the skull having an 'arched' design, with a temporal opening that allowed the jaw to swing open at a wide angle) had been weakened by the nasal hollows that allowed them to sing. During the Eocene, the Tu-nel traveled in large herds and it was song that bonded the members of each school. The availability of so much 'meat-on-the-flipper' made the Tu-nel appealing targets for the Basilosaurus. Entire herds were wiped out by the voracious giant whales and the Tu-nel were driven from the ocean. Had it not been for the fact that their ancestors were land-dwellers, they would have been unable to readapt to a semi-aquatic, riparian existence.
But a wish had been granted.
Again compelled to spend much of their time on land, the Tu-nel relearned some of the old habits they'd lost eighty million years ago. Their numerous ventral supports fused into a dozen huge ribs between the shoulders and pelvic girdle, and the cervical vertebrae thickened and arched--thus protecting the internal organs as the Tu-nel roamed the beaches. They were already as large as the biggest of the plesiosaurs. The enhanced skeletal structure was to promote a new spurt of growth when they made their second great entry into the ocean.
Other benefits accrued during their last major sojourn on land. Along with the vertebrae, the rest of the bones became less flattened. This caused the Tu-nel to look less like a giant turtle with a long neck and more like the now-extinct sauropods, the largest land creatures that had ever lived. Unlike Brontosaurus and Diplodocus, however, the Tu-nel were not vegetarians. To hunt in shallow waters, and on the land itself, their limbs had to become stronger. Yet they could not forsake the wide paddles that had propelled them at sea--because they could never leave the water entirely.
At the time of their defeat by the dinosaurs, therapsids were divided between those that hatched eggs and those who gave birth to live young. The proto-Tu-nel had become viviparous. Not only did the young develop inside of the mothers' bodies, but the newborns emerged tail-first. This way the birthing was nearly completed before the newborn needed its first breath of air. And (also like whales) the mother had to push the baby to the surface for that life-giving breath. It was an exceptionally clumsy process, because the Tu-nel never developed raised nostrils, like the old Brachiosaurs, or blow-holes, like porpoises and whales. Also, the necks of the newborns were not particularly dexterous, and a mother could not always nudge an infant's head above water. Next to old age and the casualties caused by the Basilosaurus, the greatest source of mortality among Tu-nel was drowning at birth. Yet babies remained too fragile to survive the crush of gravity on land. The Tu-nel never developed the ability to give birth to live young on land. As a consequence, they could never completely forswear their pelagic ways. Ever on the search for compromises (even while, for no good reason, denying others), evolution made some odd adaptations.
Among the most important concerned their four paddle-like limbs.
Carnivorous, the Tu-nel could never find enough food in the shallows to satisfy their enormous appetites. They dared not venture after larger sea game because of the toothed whales patrolling offshore. At first, they compensated by moving into the fresh water of the rivers and catching the animals that came down to drink. But the mammals had keen instincts and excellent olfactory abilities, and they soon learned which water holes to avoid.
Leaving the Tu-nel no choice but invasion.
Their first attempts at hunting on land were stupendously clumsy and usually futile. Their population dwindled and extinction lurked close for a million years.
The chief modification which allowed them to survive was a strengthening of their limbs. Tens of millions of years earlier the brontosaurs had maneuvered their tremendous ninety-ton bodies on stout, columnar legs. They had short, hooved feet, with stubs for distal bones and claws on their inner toes. They complied with the typical digital sequence of the terrestrial dinosaurs, the formula usually being either 2,3,4,5,3 or 2,3,4,5,4--the numbers indicating the segments in each digit.
The pelagic dinosaurs made nonsense of this arrangement. The ichthyosaur could have as many as a hundred segments in its transmogrified leg. In decay, its leg-fins looked like broken necklaces. On the other hand, the mesosaurus, the first land reptile to run back to a life in the sea, had a standard arrangement of fingers and toes, except they were webbed.
Life in the ocean shortened the limbs of the plesiosaurs. It also lengthened their fingers to an exceptional degree, making an excellent framework for its webbed skin. Like the ichthyosaur, it developed extra segments--in the longest fingers there could be as many as nine divisions. Yet the bones were not flattened like the ichthyosaur's.
The Tu-nel were not descended from the plesiosaurs, which had been cold-blooded reptiles. They had come from warm-blooded therapsid stock. The ancient phalangeal formula of cynognathus--2,3,4,4,3--could still be discerned. But they had made oceanic adaptations virtually identical to those of the plesiosaurs. Their bones, too, had remained somewhat rounded. Had this not been so, their skeletons would have been too weak for a return to land.
The middle of the Oligocene showed the Tu-nel with appendages nearly as effective on land as at sea. Its limbs were only a little longer, but stronger; and while half of the supernumerary bones had fused, its front digits were flexible. It could even, to a certain degree, grasp. And the Tu-nel happened upon an evolutionary discovery that gave it some speed on land. In the early stages it had flopped around like a seal. But as its muscles developed, so too did a certain sleekness. Eventually, they began to combine limb propulsion with a mild form of slithering. It was this mobile combination that allowed the young Tu-nel to overtake and crush the men in Lieutenant Hart's camp.
Most important of all--during their frightening trips to deeper waters to give birth, the larger and stronger Tu-nel were left alone, while the smaller ones were attacked and eaten by the Basilosaurs. As a result of this evolutionary attrition, in a relatively short time the Tu-nel not only doubled in length, but in strength as well.
The Basilosaurnae branch of the early great whales left no decedents. Modern whales had to take a different direction. Because, when they returned, the Tu-nel simply ripped the Basilosaurs out of the oceans.
One consequence of the increase in strength and size was a concomitant development in the Tu-nel singing organs. The oceans vibrated with new songs. This was just as well, for the Basilosaurus had scattered the larger permanent herds forever. Now, for the better part of the year, the males traveled alone. Mother and offspring had to survive on their own. As a result, even after the great whale enemy was driven to extinction, the Tu-nel continued to increase in size.
What was about to hit the killer whales was the longest wish list of all time. And nearly every important item was checked off.
The Tu-nel bore in. The mother and the two young ones had heard the killers' hunt song forty miles away (the limit of their hearing with so much noise about), as well as the threatening thud of their flukes on top of the waves. They adjusted course. The stranded belugas had barely begun to understand the true meaning of sunlight when the Tu-nel tore into the Orc pack.
When going all-out, the mother could hit twenty-eight knots. It was a speed the torpedo-shaped spearfish and sail fish could more than double. On occasion, a marlin could top seventy miles per hour. For its size, though, nothing could match a Tu-nel.
They rarely hunted in packs. The mating season was the annual exception. But they had developed a concise and clever hunting code. Using a series of glottal clicks condensed into brief bursts, they signaled the location of their prey and the formation of their attack. On this occasion, the young ones produced a few clicks and grunts instinctively, but they soon dropped back. The killer whales made their own peculiar sounds. The Tu-nel recognized them and understood the nature of their target.
An adult female Tu-nel had eighty-four vertebrae in its neck, which thickened and became less flexible as the years passed. The mother could not have scythed her neck across Lieutenant Hart's campground the way the young ones had. On the other hand, the young ones would not be able to do what the mother was about to do for a dozen years to come.
The killer whales knew there was a threat in the immediate area, but they were accustomed to attack, not defense, and they were unsure of what to do. The Tu-nel hunt song seemed to come from a half dozen different directions at once. When the mother struck the pack, they were still shifting frantically back and forth just as the belugas had done before getting trapped in the bay.
The mother's neck was thirty-nine feet long. The cervical vertebrae articulated on surfaces that were nearly flat; when contracted they had a tensile strength comparable to steel. Her head was four feet long, but narrow, hardly wider than her neck. Only by staring hard could a scientist have discerned the dog-like visage of cynognathus. Following an homogalous pattern, her teeth were much like those of the carnivorous tyrannosaurus, allosaurus and ceratosaurus. Her sharp, six-inch frontals curved backwards, as did the progressively shorter teeth running to the rear of her jaw. They were made for slashing, tearing, and holding. The "chewing" was done in the gizzard. This mode of digestion would have convinced a paleontologist of dinosaur origins. In fact, it was an evolutionary development of the riverine proto-Tu-nel and was never discarded.
The mother's upper teeth were more prominent, twice as long as the lower. To support them, a strong set of upper jaw muscles were anchored around a pair of thick, concrete-strong parietal bones, which encompassed the upper part of the head. There were no protrusions above the thin narial openings, close under the eye orbits, which mimicked the shape of the head by tapering sharply from the crown to the front of the mouth. Her head, in effect, looked like a dark, breathing rocket cone with eyes.
Backed by her stupendous one hundred and twenty-foot long body (plus a stubby sixteen-foot tail), there was only one creature alive in the ocean more massive--a bull Tu-nel. Even the sulphur-bottom whale was a mere one hundred feet and one hundred and sixty tons compared to her combined one hundred and seventy-five feet and one hundred and sixty-five tons. Far away, in the South Atlantic, the battleship Florida showed a length of four hundred and fifty-one feet and a displacement of sixteen thousand tons. But in flesh, bone and blood, she was the most effective battering ram ever devised. Not only that--bearing in at twenty-eight knots, when she hit a living target at right angles she proved nothing less than a monstrous trephine.
A screech of air was forced out of one of the Orcs when it was hit broadside and the ocean resounded with the snapping of ribs. By the time the Tu-nel opened her mouth, her head was inside the Orc's body. She forced her jaws open against the weight of internal organs, then snapped down directly on its heart.
Whale blood gushed up her nostrils and she shot for the surface. Whipping her head, she flung the Orc fifty yards and there was a red explosion as she blew whale blood from her nostrils. Then she raised the ancient cry--"tooo... nel... "--and the young ones responded.
The confusion that quickly surrounded the dead Orc was of epic proportions. The remaining killer whales in the pack knew it was dangerous to approach, but they were maddened by the smell of blood. With cannibal intensity, they bore in on the corpse of their companion. A couple managed to reach it before the adult Tu-nel and started to tear into its exposed guts. The dead Orc had been struck at such high speed that its body opened like a loaf, the two halves barely connected by a thin hinge of muscle and glistening black-white skin. An easy meal for the rest of the pack, if they could get close enough.
But the adult Tu-nel arrived. She snapped threateningly at the feeding whales and they backed off. Locking the remains between her jaws, she lifted the body to the surface so she could breathe and eat simultaneously. The Orc pack began to circle her. As the smell of blood spread, they made repeated attempts to get at the corpse and, when these failed, they made threatening moves towards the mother herself. One of them managed to bite her neck, but her tough skin was impervious to the killer's teeth. She shook off the importunate Orc and continued to feed.
The pack scattered when the two young ones arrived, but when they realized the newcomers were not as imposing as the adult, they quickly returned. Cautiously, they made a few experimental forays against them. The mother made no attempt to defend the young male. In fact, she snapped at him a few times as he reached in to nip at the dead Orc.
Then one of them made the mistake of attacking the young female. The mother bolted forward and bit off one of its flukes. As blood jetted from its side, the pack turned on it and began eating it alive, leaving the three Tu-nel to resume feeding peacefully on the first corpse.
Which they soon finished off. But they were far from satiated, for they'd traveled far. For many months the threesome had wandered the North Pacific. After passing through the Aleutian chain, they had entered the Oyashio, following its cold current to the coast of Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan's principle islands. From there, they journeyed the long arc of the Kurashio Stream and Northwest Drift Current, until the North American groundswell tickled their diamond flippers and informed them of land. They had found little to eat during their trans-oceanic peregrination.
Still half starved, the mother attacked again. Even as the killer whales fed upon each other, they were fed upon by the Tu-nel. Within an hour the pack was decimated. When they finally realized they were being worsted, the survivors made good their escape.
The Tu-nel had been lucky to find the Orc pack. This close to the Canadian coastline, the racket of Man was deafening. Dimly, the mother knew they would have to turn west again in order to find relief from the noisy coasters and auxiliary craft that crammed the waterways between Juneau and San Francisco.
They basked on the surface for awhile. When a ship approached, they dipped under water, annoyed. After it was gone, they basked some more. They listened to the Southward Current beneath them as it began its long swoop to the North Equatorial. Then the mother sounded to her offspring and began to swim towards the evening sun.
The young male followed.