Written by trexmaster. Posted on Jan 30, 10:16 AM.

Great Black Huntress, Chapter 1

Author’s Note: This is actually a retooling of the “Dinosaur Huntress” story I was working on earlier. I wasn’t happy with how that story was developing, particularly with regards to character development. Plus, for some reason I felt like changing my characters’ background to a near future one instead of a Paleolithic-style one.

The Great Black Huntress

Chapter One—-Chasmosaurus

It was morning in the jungle. Beams of sunlight pierced the emerald canopy, illuminating an otherwise shadowy world. Trees more than sixty feet tall reached for the sky, their gnarling branches draped with moss, lianas, and epiphytes. Strewn around the ground were many different species of ferns, cycads, and flowering plants, each engage in fierce but silent competition for the sparse sunlight. Singing in the background was a chorus of squawking birds, croaking frogs, whining cicadas, and chirping crickets.

Joanna Watson crouched and studied the forest floor carefully. A slim yet curvy African-American woman in her late twenties, she was dressed with a slouch hat, bush jacket, and shorts, all tan in color, and black boots. Attached to her belt was a scabbard carrying a machete. With two hands she held a double rifle.

Among the dead leaves scattered around the dirt, Joanna spotted a small, shallow depression mostly round in outline, but with five little points sticking out of one side. The depression’s dimensions were similar to those of the sole of an large rhinoceros’s foot. Juwanna tilted her head slightly upward and saw that there were many other depressions of similar shape and diameter, arranged in pairs of lines. She also noticed that the trails of depressions were directly on a broad path of trampled and uprooted vegetation meandering through the jungle.

The depressions were footprints.

Joanna returned to the footprint she had found earlier. She touched its bottom with one hand.

“A herd of ceratopsians passed through here at least an hour or so ago,” she whispered to herself.

She stood up and looked around at the footprint trail. None of the prints was particularly big in its dimensions for ceratopsian tracks, so they must have been laid by a medium-sized species no longer than twenty-five feet, such as Chasmosaurus or Styracosaurus. Counting the pairs of trackways that she could discern, Joanna estimated that there were about ten adults in the herd, two male and eight female, with the males’ prints being slightly larger. This sort of numerical gender imbalance was typical for dinosaur social groups, for it was common dinosaur custom for a few males to monopolize mating rights with the herd females and guard them jealously from roaming “bachelor” males. Running around the tracks of the females were very tiny footprints that were undoubtedly laid by hatchlings.

Joanna quietly walked down the trail of footprints and disturbed vegetation, the top half of her body lowered. Occasionally she would glance up at the surrounding jungle to check for predators, but the rest of the time she concentrated on the trail, watching her feet to make sure she did not accidentally step on a stick. After an hour, she noticed that the plant life grew progressively denser as she walked; this usually happened near clearings, waterholes, or riverbanks, where plants were exposed to more sunlight. A feeling of hope grew in her, for she knew that dinosaurs tended to gather near water or around clearings to rest and browse.

Joanna sniffed the air, detecting the odor of manure. She could hear plants rustling along with deep bellowing. She was almost there. She licked one of her fingers and held it up against the wind. It blew from north to south, the opposite direction of where the trail was heading. Then she crouched and slowly continued down the trail, concealing the excitement bubbling within her.

The rustling and bellowing continued to grow louder. And louder. And louder…

Joanna came to a small glade in the jungle surrounding the mossy trunk of a fallen tree. Here the undergrowth grew very thick, completely covering the glade floor. Gathered around the glade was a small herd of four-legged dinosaurs, ten adults about twenty feet in length and at least a dozen little hatchlings running around their elders’ columnar legs. Each of the adult dinosaurs had a head almost as long as a grown man was tall, with a roughly square-shaped bony frill sticking out of the head’s back end. The dinosaurs’ faces each had three horns, two above the eyes and one on the nose. With hooked, parrot-like beaks, the dinosaurs cropped jungle plants.

“Chasmosaurus belli”, Joanna whispered.

She hid herself within the brush and examined the herd. She observed that two of the adult chasmosaurs each had on their frills a pair of red spots not found the others. These were almost certainly the herd’s two adult males. One of the males was slightly larger than the other and had longer horns with more worn tips; it was probably the older of the two.

Joanna shifted to a prone position and slithered through the vegetation towards the males. Whenever any of the chasmosaurs stopped feeding to look around for danger, she would press herself against the ground so that the plants would better obscure her. The chasmosaur would then go back to eating, and she back to stalking.

When she was about five yards away from the male chasmosaurs, she raised her gun and aimed it at the head of the younger male. With her index finger, she pressed the gun’s trigger.

The loud crack of the gunshot echoed through the jungle. Flocks of birds flocked out of the forest canopy, squawking chaotically. Two bloody holes were punctured into the younger male chasmosaur’s head. He moaned, then fell onto its flank with a loud thud.

Immediately, the female chasmosaurs hurried to organize themselves into a protective ring around their hatchlings. The remaining male chasmosaur, on the other hand, charged towards Joanna, his huge head lowered so that his nose horn was pointed towards her. Before he could reach her, she quickly sidestepped out of the way, then sprinted to the edge of the glade. When she got there she slung her gun over her shoulder, grabbed an overhanging liana, and hastily ascended it.

Suddenly, before she had climbed halfway up, she felt something tug hard on the liana. Looking down, she saw that the chasmosaur had caught up with her and was now pulling on the liana with his beak. Soon the liana started to tear above her. As it was ripping, Joanna surveyed around her for another liana that could support her. She could find none close to her. The liana continued to be pulled apart.

Joanna turned to face the tree from whence the liana has hanging, and leapt towards it, wrapping her arms around the trunk. She then scrambled up the tree, grabbed a branch, and perched herself onto it. She watched the chasmosaur stand underneath, looking up at her as if waiting for her to come down. Instead she sat on the branch, hoping that if she stayed there for long enough, the dinosaur would give up the chase.

Five minutes passed, the chasmosaur patiently waiting the whole time. Finally he backed away, turned around, and walked towards his herd, issuing a loud bellow. When he returned the whole herd left the glade and marched into the jungle, leaving the corpse of the younger male behind. Joanna then moved towards the trunk of the tree, embraced it, and slowly climbed down.

When her feet finally reached the spongy jungle floor, Joanna pulled out her machete and walked towards the chasmosaur carcass.

***

Joanna lounged on the sofa in the living room of her manor, chewing on barbecued chasmosaur strips while watching the news on her TV. Mounted on the living room wall were the heads of the many dinosaurs she had hunted, including the chasmosaur she had bagged earlier that morning.

Suddenly she heard the phone rang. She got off her sofa, walked towards it and picked it up.

“Joanna Watson at your service,” she spoke into the phone.

“Senorita Watson,” answered a male voice with a thick Mexican accent, “this is Miguel over at Cretaceous Safaris. We have a new client, a Senor Austin Ackman, who wants to organize a safari with us tomorrow. He wishes to hunt several species, but has his eyes set on T. Rex. He has heard of your exploits and would like you as one of his guides.”

“T. Rex? Are you serious?”

“Si, senorita. He is determined to get one for his living room. He says it is his ultimate goal in life.”

Joanna paused. Eight months had passed since she last guided a T. Rex-hunting expedition, yet she remembered its details vividly. The yellow eyes glowing like embers. The hot breath stinking of decayed flesh. The deafening roar. The screams of her client as he was being torn apart by those six-inch teeth…

“I will be over there tomorrow. And this time, I will not fail my client.”

“Bueno. I will call him to tell him you are coming. Buenas tardes.”

Miguel hung up.

Tagged as Critique, Great Black Huntress, Trexmaster.

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