“September 11, 36,115,501 B.C.E…The Oligocene Epoch began at 8:27 pm. We basically didn’t even see it coming! We spotted an astronomic anomaly and from there, we had two days to prepare for it! We were lucky. It was nothing like Chixulub, but it was bad enough. We’re going to be struggling for a little while!”

“We discovered how to make liquor, and some time ago, we discovered Cannabis. We’ve enjoyed these things a little too much, and for the last week we spent the majority of our time either drunk or engaged in the very act of biology…well, I don’t think I need to get into too many details. We even had a midnight round of golf! But this one caught us by surprise. Fortunately we’re not experiencing the fires and the acid rain, but we are getting a lot of ash fallout. This will definitely have a major impact on the food chain. Hopefully, we won’t be part of what’s impacted.

“If I remember right, the majority of ocean life and about half the species of land animals meet their demise during this time. We’ll see when the dust clears. As soon as we can, we’re going to make some tracks to not only find greener pastures, but also to find out where the damn thing hit! The big flash came from the east, so it probably hit North America. Since there’s no land connection anymore, it’ll be interesting to get there. We’ve done a little seafaring, but we’re going to have to cross a stretch of water about four hundred miles wide. I’m getting pretty good at navigating by the stars, but that’s while charting the landmasses. At sea, it’ll be a little different.

“It is ironic that this would come on the anniversary…or pre-anniversary of an important yet horrific event in Human history. On this very day, thirty six million, one hundred seventeen thousand, five hundred and two years from now, terrorists will hijack four airplanes and use them as suicidal guided missiles to strike some of our greatest monuments in New York and Washington D.C. Is there a message in there or something? Or is it just chance? Sometimes I think God has a somewhat warped sense of humor.

Over half of the species of land animals had perished in the events that happened that night, and the numbers of those which did survive were greatly diminished. After fighting rough seas over nearly four hundred miles of ocean, they arrived in North America and located the impact near the deltas of two large rivers in present day Virginia, the future Chesapeake Bay to be exact. Until now, neither of them were aware of this event in the fossil record.

The ash and dust in the air reflected enough material to block sunlight and set up another string of ice ages. For the next million years, there were four glacial episodes. After the last one, the ice sheets left behind a windswept landscape that was replaced mostly with grasslands in parts of North America and Western Asia. As the grasses grew to replace the forests, so did the large herds of hoofed mammals. The open plains were filled with pony-sized creatures that resembled deer, cattle, camels and horses.

“More volcanoes!” she said as they came upon the rolling landscape along the western edge of modern day Utah.

“We must be edging over the Pacific Ridge,” he said.

As they traveled westward, they came upon row upon row of beautiful cone shaped volcanoes. One of them he estimated to have a summit about sixteen thousand feet above sea level.

The volcanoes formed four parallel ranges across the three hundred mile expanse between the western basins of Utah and the coastal ridges of Northern California. Much of the terrain was like that of western Washington and Oregon, as there had been no periods of uplifting or mountain building except for the volcanic activity.

An open beach near the delta of a broad, shallow river offered a pleasant respite. They were greeted with a pleasant climate reminiscent of that near Maryland or New Jersey, and they spent much of their spare time swimming in the cool ocean waters.

“It’s not quite like Fort Lauderdale,” he said. “But it’s pretty nice.”

“Where is this?” she said.

“This delta is just outside of a city called Roseville,” he said. “Sacramento is out there, about fifteen miles out in the water. I grew up here! In fact, I went to High School a couple miles east of where our house is!”

“A bit different, I guess,” she said.

“Well, where these rivers are now will actually be high ridges in the twentieth century.”

After a day in the water, they headed inland to the low rolling hills amid the oaks and hardwoods. On their way they stalked a small herd of buffalo like creatures. Walt had constructed a crude gun from a piece of pipe, a wood stock and a piece of chert as a flint. His weapon was a little slow to load, but it was relatively effective.

“Hungry?” he asked as he singled out a smaller animal grazing in a meadow.

“I could go for a big slab of Prime Rib!” she said.

“I’ll see if I can get a shot off!” he whispered. He took aim, pulled the flimsy trigger, and the animal dropped like a stone.

“Good shot!” she said. “You never get those damn things on the first shot!”

“Remember when I was aiming for these things with a bow and arrow?”

“Yeah, and I thought we’d both starve to death!”

“I’ve got the knife,” he said. “Go get the truck and let’s get this bad boy home!”

He handed her the gun, and headed out to the carcass. No sooner was he in the clearing when a large creature almost the size of a deer struck him from the side. The beast, a large cat with two huge canine teeth had him pinned beneath its front paws. He reached for his knife, and managed to take a swipe at it, but it was no use. The animal’s thick loose skin softened the stabbing blow.

When he thought he was done for, there was a loud BANG! The cat dropped, and groaned as it expelled its last breath of life.

Bloodied and bruised, he rose to his feet. Two deep lacerations crossed his shoulder and arm. He put his hand over the gushing wound.

“If you hadn’t been there…” he said.

“If you hadn’t taken the time to load the gun before you handed it to me…”

“Let’s get this back to the house where we can cut it up!” he said. “We might as well get the cat too. We can probably make pretty good jerky out of him.”

“After we cook it down real good,” she said. “Predators usually are crawling with parasites.”

“Where the hell did that thing come from?”

“What the hell was it?” she said. “Smilodon?”

“Smilodon won’t be around until the Pliocene,” he said. “Most likely Hoplophoneus. I still wasn’t expecting him for at least another five million years.”

“And I wasn’t expecting grassy meadows and meteorites during the Eocene, either!” she said. “We’re finding out that we’re coming upon everything about five to as much as twenty million years prior to our understanding of the fossil record! We’ve both got to be careful!”

“How much do you know about modern medicine?” he asked. “I know that one on my shoulder is going to need some sutures, and I can’t reach back there to do it myself!”

When they got back to the cabin, she took some thin thread she fashioned from the fibers from some coarse grasses and sewed up the four inch long wound. She then wiped the injuries down with some of their homemade liquor.

“We finally found a practical use for that stuff!” he said.

“I haven’t been keeping it around for the taste!” she said. “It sure ain’t no bottle of Single Malt Glenlivet!”

“Why do we keep mixing it with fruit pulp?”

“Well, you’d best just sit back and relax for a bit! That bastard’s claws got down into the muscle tissue. You’re down for the count for the next couple weeks!”

They decided to have a chunk out of the sabertoothed cat for dinner, and they came to the same conclusion.

“That was the most deplorable thing I have ever eaten!” said Sarah.

“I went digging for fossils around there when I was a Junior,” he said as he described the area around John Day, Oregon. “It was absolutely incredible! These beds were about this time in geology, so I know we’re going to find plenty of animals!”

“We can be there in about a week,” she said. “What are we looking for?”

“A big rhinoceros and a couple of elephant like critters,” he said. “And probably a lot of good fresh meat!”

“I don’t want to knock your home town,” she said. “But there aren’t quite as many good animals down here, and what is here is barely keeping the tigers alive.”

He pointed to the large scar on his arm. “I know all about the cats!” he replied.

They began their wandering northward, but were stopped a day later by a very fluid lava flow.

“Basalt lavas,” he said. “I know right where we are. I thought this would have been done by now.”

“Little off on your dates too?”

“I could have sworn that this stuff was thirty six million years old,” he said. “I’m about two million years off.”

“How did you determine that?”

“Krypton-Argon dating,” he said. I tore a chunk of it off and watched them do the test myself at UC Davis!”

“Sometimes radiometric dating doesn’t work,” she said. “This is basalt lava, right?”

“If I’m as good at dead reckoning as I think I am, then we’d be right at the edge of Bidwell Park near Chico. This would be the Lovejoy Basalt formation.”

“Depending on it’s origin within the earth, the balance of radioactive isotopes can be different, and that’s enough to throw off everything.”

They followed the flow of lava upstream to a series of fissures in Northwestern Nevada. They followed the edges of the volcanic area, and found to their surprise it was immense. These fissures involved an area about thirty miles across and one hundred miles in circumference.

“It’s almost as if there’s a hole in the crust!” she said. “This isn’t quite like the volcanism we’re used to. It’s more like the lavas left over after an impact. Just when was there an impact?”

“There wasn’t,” he said. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say this is a hot spot. For some reason, there’s occasional molten plumes from deep in the mantle, and they melt holes in the crust. Kind of like what happens in Hawaii.”

“I’ve heard of those,” she said. “Isn’t that what Yellowstone is?”

“We’re traveling westward,” he said. “But the hotspot plume is stationary. This could be the leading edge of the Yellowstone plume.”

He took a chunk of cooled lava and examined the crystalline structure. Although the lava was very fluid, there were some larger crystals of Olivine and white feldspars visible.

“These large crystals are result of one batch of magma invading another older chamber. That would explain why the radiometric dating is off by a few million years.”

They found their way around the broad igneous region and continued into the area that would in about thirty million years become eastern Oregon. As they continued through the rolling forested hills, they passed several active fissures and small volcanic mountains.

After following a broad, lazy river they arrived at a broad valley. It was a patchwork of open grasslands interlaced with birch, maple and pine forests reminiscent of the upper Midwest during the Holocene. Among the grasslands, a quantity of animal life almost rivaled that of the plains of the Serengeti.

“Wow!” he said. “We’ll have years of stuff for our observation pleasure!”

“Food, glorious food!” she said. “We’ll be eating good!”

“This area will become the John Day Fossil Beds,” he said. “We’re near what I knew as the town of Sinclair, along US 395.”

“Think this will be a good home base for a while?”

“For a little while,” he said. “But there’s going to be quite a bit of volcanism in these parts in the future. Hell, there’s already quite a bit going on now! We’re in the direct path for a lot of ash fallout, and in a few million more years, we’ll be hit with a lot of lava flows.”

“January 7, 30,774,633 B.C.E. We’ve invested good effort and time in constructing ourselves quite a spread here in the John Day Valley, and I’ve concluded that it wasn’t that wise! We’ve been here only couple millenium, and we’re now moving southward! We just got nailed by a massive ash fallout…again… from a massive eruption of a vent about sixty miles west of here near the future town of Madras. We go through this almost every six months! It’s getting old.

“At one time, we shared this valley with some huge creatures including an absolutely horrifying thing that looked like it was part pig, giraffe, elephant and bear all rolled into one. I think it was a Baluchiterem, but I could be wrong. All I know is that it’s the biggest damn thing I’ve seen since the Dinosaurs, and this monster was damn near the size of some of them! We also had a few run ins with small Gompotherums too. I mean ’small’ by meaning only the size of an adolescent elephant of modern time. These beasts have two huge shovel shaped lower tusks on the lower jaw, and they eat entire logs and trees, down to the roots!

“We’ve had to continuously update our weapon inventory, as the predators are getting larger and faster, and have thicker skulls. I almost got attacked again by a saber tooth, and Sarah had two encounters with the large bear like creatures that live during these times. We also found we’ve been followed by packs of what look like hyenas. Like their Holocene counterparts, these creatures roam in packs and make their living not as much by hunting but by stealing the kills made by other predators. We have been constantly battling this problem. The best method I found was to kill something just for the sake of the hyenas, and when they’re all busy being the greedy little shits that they are, I’d make a separate kill for us. So far, that strategy works. We have the advantage that we can kill something very fast, and it’s quick and easy to make subsequent kills. Other predators just don’t have the resources.

“This place was so nice for a while, but with everything covered with ash, the animals have migrated out for the time being. I’m sure they’ll be back, but that’ll be after that volcano quits dumping six feet of ash every few months. Right now, everything’s gray and pretty much unusable.

“The entire area of Oregon, Washington, Nevada and Northern California is experiencing an increasing level of volcanism. There’s a lot of messy basaltic activity that is flooding about half the river valleys around here. I am most surprised by the ashy stratovolcanoes that are just about everywhere around here. Neither of us knew there were this many in the Western United States. They erupt quite frequently, and there is quite a deposit of ash developing. The sunsets around here are quite spectacular, but there’s a definite cooling of the climate set in motion due to the particulate matter and sulphur in the air.

For a while they found a nice home along one of the large lakes that occupied the area near the Utah Colorado border. This warm, temperate region had ample rainfall and a relatively good selection of wildlife. To the east, the Rocky Mountains were gradually taking a more familiar shape.

The large lakes were very well endowed with fish, and they enjoyed almost nightly meals of trout and bass. The surrounding forests and meadows supplied rich crops of fruits, nuts and grains. In all, this was one of the better places they had chosen. Unfortunately, as time went on, the lakes grew smaller as the climates in this region became drier. The mountains and volcanoes to the west were starting to cause a ‘rain shadow’ that was eventually turning parts of these rolling hills into a savannah.

Upon arriving in the forests near what would eventually become Cape Town, they came upon a group of tree dwelling creatures. These primates were about the size of a chimpanzee. They spent most of their time in the trees, but they still did a lot of their hunting and foraging on the ground. They did so in ways different than any other creatures at the time. They had a distinct communication system between them, which consisted of verbal and hand gestures. They carried sticks that they had made great effort to sharpen the end. They coordinated their hunting efforts with their rudimentary language. When not gathering food or repairing their simple shelters they had built in the treetops, they spent much time looking up into the sky at the clouds or the birds, or they made the efforts of examining leaves, stems, rocks, and other items in their environment. Most of the primates in this region of Southern Africa were developing some basic tool making skills, and with each generation, the tools and weapons were becoming more intricate and more effective.

All Earth’s creatures were proving themselves effective in meeting the challenges of nature. Nature was preparing to provide even more challenges.