“Where is it.”
“There is it. See? Y’see? Are you looking? Look at it. There it is, you see.”
Rumple squinted down into the pit trap, pea-sized eyes straining from unexpected effort, tongue flickering in and out whip-fast with poorly-masked disgruntlement.
There.
There.
….THERE. Down there, past the broken asphalt and crusted concrete and slewed gravel, something large enough that it filled the pit entirely like a hand in a glove. Bipedal, sweating, and moaning in pain.
“There! NOW you believe me?”
Rumple shrugged his broad, pebbly shoulders, making the speckly tan-and-black stripes coating his spine ripple.
“I don’t know. I mean, you’ve said you’re sure, but…”
“What! What! WHAT?! How can you doubt me?! Look at it! Look at it! It’s got the two stupid legs and the hairless, shiftless hide and the big round head and the RIDICULOUS upright posture and the flat, ugly little face! How can it be anything ELSE?”
Rumple stamped the dirt with a foreleg as he picked words like earthworms. “We-e-e-e-ll, there’s animals and animals out there. Two legs, upright? Could be a turkey or something.”
“They aren’t bald!”
“A bald turkey,” said Rumple with growing confidence. “A bald turkey with a funny back from walking around looking at the sky all the time. That’s what turkeys do, right? I heard that once.”
“It’s got too big a skull and it has no beak and not even a HINT of feathers and you don’t even know what turkeys ARE!”
“Well…”
“NO.”
Rumple subsided with a fussy snort. This seemed to mollify Thunk, at least slightly. She’d been having a lousy week – a clutch gone bad, her favourite basking rock overturned in a flash flood, the loss of one of her venomous fangs to a missed bite that clipped a stone – and the argument wasn’t helping.
“See? It’s making sounds. That’s its complex language skills creating new words for its predicament-”
“…could just be moaning,” muttered Rumple.
“-and look at the way it’s grabbing rocks and trying to chuck them out for attention, there’s its clever, adaptive tool-making-”
“…what if it’s just flailing around….”
“-and there, look at how it’s done its business in the corner instead of all over itself! That’s a sophisticated sense of hygiene adaptive to a new environment if I’ve ever seen it!”
“……..WE do that,” said Rumple loudly.
“So what? So did they!”
“No, no, no. I’m telling you, this just isn’t so. It’s just a new kind of deer from the deeper east or something, where the radiation was thicker. One that learned to walk upright to feed from the taller trees.”
“But it’s got thumbs and no hooves!”
“Radiation makes your nails come off.”
“THAT ISN’T THE SAME THING AT ALL!”
“Look, can you stop shouting? You’re making my head hurt.”
“You’re making MY head hurt! You’re being so unreasonable about this! Every single bit of evidence points to MY theory, and all you do is nitpick and fuss, fuss, fuss. You’re so skeptical you’d not believe a cliff until you fell off it, at least if I were the one telling you about it! Why don’t you ever believe me? Huh? Huh?”
“Look,” said Rumple. “Just calm down. It’s a cold day and you’re already trying to get yourself too worked up. We need to get up above and get basking while this thing wears itself out.”
“Stop telling me to CALM DOWN and start telling me why you DON’T BELIEVE ME.”
Rumple took a long, slow breath. This was the only kind he took when at rest, but this one was deliberate. “Look. We know a fair bit about them, right? From the old days.”
“Scraps and shreds and papers and books, yes.”
“Loads of them. And what do they all say about them?”
“They were smart.”
“Right. Smart and ADAPTABLE. Every book, every story, everything we’ve ever known about them sings that. Does what this thing’s doing look like adaptation to you? It’s sitting in a corner of a dank pit cowering from its own feces and moaning itself to sleep. Hell, we’d just dig out of there. If WE could get out of that situation, what could it be if it CAN’T? If it were what you claim it to be, it’d have whipped up some tools and hauled itself out of this pit before we even found it, then killed and eaten us both for sustenance. No, no, trust me. That thing’s in no way a human. Now let’s go get you some sun; we’ll need a lot of energy if we want to digest last week’s meal in time for this one.”
Rumple sighed. “Fine. Fine, you’ve got a point. I think I saw a new rock on the south side of the old highway. Let’s go.”
Four minutes later, the last remaining hominid in North America shivered itself to death in the crumbling wreckage of I-10, still cuddling its broken leg. Death came partly from the cold, partly from the loneliness, partly from shame that it hadn’t seen the cunningly camouflaged pit trap before it was too late.
But mostly, it was a failure to adapt.
Heloderma spectacular, or the Greater Western Gila Monstrosity, however, was still going strong. Thunk’s next attempt at a clutch that month was successful. She put it down to all the human in her recent diet, but quietly. THAT argument could stay dead.