WHAT HAPPENED NEXT is difficult to describe, especially now, some forty years later. Best as I can describe it is that I was moving instantly: fleeing from what I saw by diving into the cold, brisk water and paddling—desperately—for the opposite shore; only in my mind alone, so that my body remained frozen—its beating heart having stopped pumping, its leaden limbs refusing to follow commands—its eyes denying the very evidence of what lay before them.
For what lay before them, there in the gurgling, eddying, golden water, was, plain and simple, a dinosaur—though not, it must be said, one such as Gwangi or the Beast of Hollow Mountain or anything else I’d seen at the drive-in or on TV. No, this was something as real and smelly (it smelled like cow; a whole truckload of cows, in the swelteri
