MIZ Time Tripping With Amazing Females

By Scooter Duff

The largest cat ever, the Great American Lion, hasn’t walked the Earth for more than 11,000 years. No human since has ever seen its terrifying magnificence.
That is until a smart young engineer, Daryl Streeter, is in an industrial accident that sends him hurtling back in time to the Pleistocene, where he is quickly found by a female Great American, a mega-predator. Happily, he doesn’t get eaten. His wit (he thinks) saves him.
These lions (Panthera atrox) aren’t your ordinary supercats. The female Great Americans have talents no creatures, before or since, ever had. Lucky for Streeter, it turns out. He is adopted into a Great American family. He names the female Miz.
In the course of his mind-boggling adventures with Miz, Streeter begins to suspect that when it comes to time travel, nothing is set in stone, especially the extinction of a great animal. He goes from fighting for his own survival to the survival of the Great Americans.
It is quite a fight.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scooter Duff
• Release date: May 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370684656

Scooter Duff

Behind the Mutant Greens Scooter Duff's bio can be expressed alphabetically – For his 23 years as a radio guy: KFYN, KSET, WAKY, KDSX, WPRO,KLAC, KMET, WHDH, KSAN and KSDO. For his 33 years as an entrepreneur: ERA, AR&D, ASIE, MAI and DuffWorx. His 5 years of education: USAFA, UT, UTEP and UofL. A sci-fi reader since childhood, Duff was warped by the radio series Dimension X. So sci-fi and radio evolved into media consulting, explaining several aspects of Scooter's techniques. He lives with psychologist wife Dorothy, four Airedale Terriers, three cats and a herd of birds on twenty acres in the Land of Enchantment.

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CONTENTS

BOOK ONE

Prologue

Chapter 1 The Big Laugh at the Beginning

Chapter 2 Reaching the Trees

Chapter 3 Megafauna

Chapter 4 Fisher

Chapter 5 The Tree

Chapter 6 First Contact

Chapter 7 Derecho

Chapter 8 Face Off

Chapter 9 Food Chain

Chapter 10 Meet the Neighbors

Chapter 11 Alarm Tongue

Chapter 12 Coming to My Senses

Chapter 13 Hiding Out With the Great Lions

Chapter 14 Operating Theater

Chapter 15 Live In

Chapter 16 Face It

Chapter 17 Peers

Chapter 18 Day Eight

Chapter 19 Another Encounter

Chapter 20 Quick Cure

Chapter 21 Just Another Prehistoric Monster

Chapter 22 My Fellow Men

BOOK TWO

300 Years Before

Chapter 23 Fleet

Chapter 24 In the Cave of the Folk

Chapter 25 Spirit Woman

Chapter 26 Ritual

Chapter 27 Tracked

Chapter 28 Ambassador

Chapter 29 Three Hundred Years On

BOOK ONE

(Continued)

Chapter 30 Southerly Move

Chapter 31 Flagrante

Chapter 32 On Board

Chapter 33 Planning

Chapter 34 Deep Reconnaissance

Chapter 35 Opening Gambit

Chapter 36 Full Contact Sport

Chapter 37 OFFICIAL NOTES OF THE HISTORICAL COUNCIL, WESTERN HEMISPHERE, YEAR 108,000 P.S.A. (Post Second Alliance)

Chapter 38 The Trip Back

PROLOGUE

People have been all over me to write this. It’s interesting when writing a factual account of an event to know that it will be received as either fiction or the ravings of a mind scrambled by an industrial accident. - Daryl Streeter

An Overview (Arrived at after five or six days)

Let's start with a useful fact. I have stumbled onto a way for an ordinary human person to travel through time. Or through dimensions, perhaps. Whether one or the other has not been clear to me. If what has happened to me is time travel, then I have to say (for my sanity, what there is of it) just how much time hath been traversed.

A thousand centuries is my guess.

For the sake of having something to hang onto, I have decided to think that I am now about a hundred and ten thousand years ago. As in 108,000 B.C. As in over a thousand centuries earlier than what I am normally used to calling the present. I picked this number because I happen to have many random facts in my engineer brain, and I seem to remember the last interglacial was about that far back.

Oh, and I saw an animal on my first day that I remember - probably from The Science Channel - was from the last interglacial. Either it time traveled, or I did.

Not very engineerish of course, but I see no signs of giant glaciers in the distance, and it’s actually kind of warm, so I’m thinking I’m well before the last glacial period.

But hell, I don’t even know if I’m on the same planet. If I popped back into the past, it seems like I’d be out in space, the Earth having moved on along its orbital trip. But since I’m obviously not in space, and since I can breathe the air and the gravity feels like it always has to me, then sequitur (I was an English minor), I am on Earth. Maybe time gets pulled along with the gravity well of a planet. So I’m in north Texas of old. That’s my theory, anyway.

My name is Daryl Streeter, and this is how it happened.

BOOK ONE

Chapter 1 - The Big Laugh at the Beginning

Doing what I was paid to do - my EE degree in full use - I was down in the stator coils of a hydroelectric generator at the base of Denison Dam, Lake Texoma, Texas. The rotor assembly hung overhead from the service crane. It was a Big Daddy Westinghouse. I worked for Eagle Tech, the company with the service contract on this rather elderly hydro plant. I was the guy to make the call on whether the cast metal and the shafts were in the kind of shape to stand another superconductor upgrade. They almost certainly were. I called this job the consultant boogie, a revenue source for Eagle Tech. It had been a straight up survey. Everything looked good. I wrapped it up, washed my hands and typed all the report formalities on my tablet. Tonight’s baseball game was seeping into my mind.

Then there was a data spike in the control room instrumentation. Nothing like a completely anomalous and scary-powerful current spike to get everyone’s attention. It was sharp enough for the dam’s chief engineer to pull the pins on the test and give me a you're the expert look. It was confusing to me too, but consultants never show confusion, so I said I would go down again with my test gear and check it out.

This unexpected problem interrupted my end-of-the-job thoughts about the baseball game my company team would play against a pretty good team of young-ish MDs that night. I was our star shortstop, the position I played since junior high. Great arm, everyone said. Now I had to switch mental gears back to business.

I approved the first upgrade on this unit over a year ago, now here I was, field probes in hand, trying to figure out why the sucker made a very big millisecond surge, a fault I had never even heard of, much less had a clear idea on how to check. The stators were at full pump, about a mega amp. The rotors were still, the water from the surge tanks channeled out into the Red River. I could feel the rumble through my boots as I climbed back down into the core. I was surrounded by serious cooling tubes and lots and lots of hybrid metal loops, a typical superconducting stator core.

Suddenly I saw something like mist rising from the crevices in the stator, a totally new experience for moi. This was not in the manuals.

Mist? Looked misty but probably smoke. This was seriously not good. I thought it was all over right there. Something must be burning. If that stator dropped out of superconductivity, engineer go poof! I started climbing the ladder to the hatch, fast.

Then I was climbing nothing. The ladder was gone, and I was climbing air, like a cartoon character who realizes there is nothing to climb, but keeps trying. Only it didn't last as long as it does in the cartoons. One second, then crash! I fell in tall, green grass, smashing down on both knees and both elbows. My face whanged into the ground, the forehead taking most of the hit.

It knocked the wind and most of my senses out of me and put a strain test to the cartilage in my shoulders and hip joints. Red swirls and black slashes blasted across my eyes in place of uprushing green grass. Green grass? was a faint query behind all the oof and pain. I’m dead, I thought, and the grass is the terminal hallucination.

I rolled over, gasping to reinflate my slammed lungs. After some few but endless seconds, breathing finally felt possible. Not happening yet, but possible. Through all this my brain was galloping along like a startled rabbit, unsure where to run but dashing at full tilt in random sprints.

How far do you fall in one point something seconds? I worked on that some. Thirty two feet per second per second, right? A man gets used to having smart phones and computers. I am thinking maybe fourteen feet. Wham, from fourteen feet it felt like. With breath returning and mind scrambling, I rolled over on my back. Stark nude.

The fact that I was naked came through slowly as the crazed feeling of being knocked out faded. Grass all over your body, long blades wrapping around you, some sticking in all your places, is definitely not a common sensation for a fully dressed person examining a generator with a field probe. Even so, it took a little while for me to figure it out. That was probably when the first, What the shit is going on? came out as I rolled over. I felt a certain satisfaction that my mouth was still working, although I tasted blood. There was a kind of comfort at hearing my own voice.

My vision came gradually back through the neuron noise. Like a TV picture as the satellite dish finds the azimuth. I stared dumbly at blue, blue sky, up through a stand of waving green grass.

The sky, the grass, the whole scene became clearer, then terrifyingly distinct. The terrifying part was that the scene didn't fuzz out and become a hospital room. My good old conventional brain invented several quick fictions that this actually was a hospital for poor souls like me, only they used grass instead of sheets for the calming effect of natural greenery. And the sky was too blue to be real, so it was some special effect, exclusive to very expensive hospitals, where of course my generous employer would send a valuable guy like me after a serious industrial accident.

A ladybug, having escaped being crushed by the recently falling engineer, crawled resolutely up one of the grass stalks. Other, less familiar bugs began moving about, quite a few, on my various body parts.

Aaaurgh! I shouted and leapt up, brushing wildly at the ants covering my backside. They had begun expressing their disgruntlement at having me on their nest by stinging. The confusion and bewilderment vanished in my sudden focus on the ant problem.

I twisted and shouted, slapping, brushing, rubbing. I took short jumps through the waist high grass, first forward then backward, enlisting the grass to help rid me of the little devils. Finally I ran. The ants were probably all off, but it didn't matter. I had to run. I ran like a possessed sprinter, whipping through the grass as though I could rise above it, lift off like a gooney bird or some flying superhero.

Only instead of flying, I tumbled, twisting almost a half gainer before crashing back into the grass on my shoulder. There had been a crack and a numbing crunch on my right shin there somewhere before the tumble, and now I was back in the grass, looking at the sky again. At least, I thought, the ants got my mind off the confusion for a minute.

And so this was my embarrassing entry into this impossible new existence. Standing up again, I lifted my chin like I wasn’t embarrassed and looked around. Here for maybe two minutes and I had acted with all the grace and calm of a startled animal in the lights of a semi, running the totally wrong way. I had acquired a crop of ant bites, grass welts and a throbbing contusion on my shin. The path I had beaten through the tall grass trailed back about thirty meters, I could see. It started from a spot in the otherwise virginal meadow as though I had dropped from the cloudless sky.

As in fact you did, I told myself aloud. I might have stood there paralyzed by bemusement except that I thought of ants again. The stings from the little bastards were phasing back and forth from stinging to itching, and the thought of acquiring more was too disturbing to allow any paralysis. I started checking my feet. No ants, but several mean grass cuts. Sort of paper cuts au natural.

This takes some adapting, I said in a fairly loud voice. About as loud as one would use to address a fellow soldier a meter away in a recently gouged mortar crater. For the second time, the first being seconds before when I said, As in fact you did, I felt a mild breeze of comfort. I grabbed at the distraction like a slipping rock climber grabbing at the last good hold.

The comfort of my own voice, I said, not quite so loudly. If I talk, I feel better. Not talking is to go crazy. I grinned and humphed a kind of cough laugh. Oh shit, boy, you are standing naked in the middle of... what? A savannah? And the only thing that keeps you from completely crashing your system is the sound of your own voice?

That little monologue struck me as much funnier than it seems now. I mean very, very funny. Or I was hysterical. But it felt like funny. That was the Big Laugh at the Beginning.

It quickly grew into painful, breathless laughter like being the helpless victim of a tickle attack from larger, stronger kids. For sure I had not laughed like that since I was a kid. I actually fell over, rolling in the grass, oblivious to the store of itches I was acquiring. Maybe it was the relief at being alive that kicked over the tickle box. That had been a very intense kind of expectant anxiety when the stator started smoking.

The thought of that last second in reality as I had always known it finally broke the feedback loop of the laughing. I breathed deeply for a while, the laughs tapering off like aftershocks. I rolled to a crouch, then stood up cautiously, as though the laughter might gust up at me again from behind. Finally I could talk. Maybe I am dead. If that stator went chaotic, there would have been about a gigawatt flash with me in the epicenter. That would be dead.

This was a sobering thought. Then this is heaven, hell or purgatory, I said. Heaven with ants and cutting grass seemed unlikely in light of the generally held views on paradise. On the other hand there was something idyllic about the immensity of the plain and the virginity of the green grass. Certainly not hellish, I said, then immediately felt nervous that I had tempted fate with an optimistic pronouncement. There could be other creatures in the grass, vipers perhaps, whose bite sets off screaming, interminable pain. Cancel that, I said with a zeal I had not known since my est training as a college freshman.

Maybe it is actually Purgatory. Then the Catholics were right, unlikely as it seems. This is the place where I wait out my sentence, wait for the Jury to make up Its mind; thumbs up or thumbs down? I started to walk during this discourse. I hardly knew it, but I was aiming at a smudge on the horizon of the otherwise unbroken grass sea. The sun was warm on my shoulders.

Thank you, God, for not dropping me here in mid-winter, I said. The visualization of walking along in a foot of snow, bald naked, was vivid and multisensory. That truly would be hell. I would have walked a while, until I realized I had circled, then I would have curled up in the snow, cried, slept and frozen. Again, the breeze of comfort made me smile. I had not landed here in the winter. This must be mid spring. It was mid spring back at the Texoma Denison dam. Naked is not bad in weather like this. Maybe the night will be cool, but I'll have this figured out by night and either be out of here or at least find my clothes, I said.

This, too struck me as funny. As though my voice was this comedian, standing just behind me telling jokes I thought were hilarious. I laughed. I rolled my eyes, waved my arms, mugged.

Sure! I said, like some actor reading dumb dialogue. Find your clothes. Right. You're not even sure you're on the same planet with your clothes. More laughing, faster walking.

Somehow, the defensive numbness against this whole impossible turn of events began to fade. The tunnel vision started expanding. I straightened up, holding my head higher, realizing that I had been walking in kind a slump. The grass was really incredibly soft and fresh feeling if you weren't crashing through it in a panic. And I realized that I was walking and making noticeable progress toward the smudge, which was in all likelihood trees, on the horizon. More talking was definitely called for. The talking helped. Comforting, sanity-preserving.

Okay, Okay. Something extremely weird has happened, Streeter. Your memory is clear right up until the stator smoked. Then, bam, you fall on your face here in Veldt National Park, stark bare. Now maybe there is some blackout in there, but it doesn't seem like it. I put my hand to my forehead. No fever. No headache either, I said. So what are you going to do? Clearly you've got to do something about this. Get back home to the condo? See if my car is still parked in the visitors' lot? Check my messages? Write a story about this little side trip for The Journal of Electrical Engineering? Mother Jones? It was kind of a soliloquy.

I picked up my walking pace even more, mainly to fight off another attack of giggling. Now I was really cruising across the grass, which was getting shorter, by the way. By now it was only a couple of feet tall, and getting softer too. The smudge looked like an unlikely wall of trees.

Chapter 2 - Reaching the Trees

The walk to the trees took two hours and forty-five minutes. I would bet on it. My time sense always struck people and even me as uncanny. All my life, since the big hand/little hand mystery had been explained to me, I’ve known what time it was with impressive accuracy. I could estimate the passage of, say, three and a half minutes and hit it within a second or two. Waking in the middle of the night, I would always be within five minutes of knowing the time. Some people are even more accurate, I’ve read, but they are mostly idiot savants. Not idiot, you idiot, I spoke for my conscience. There is another name, less cruel, I know, but it escaped me.

At two hours and fifteen minutes, I was suppressing the urge to run toward the wall of trees a klick or two away. The land had started undulating, and the dead wood and rocks hidden in the grass were more common, so running was dangerous to my shins and toes. But I kept up a good pace. It was clear to me that I was getting sunburned. The signals from my skin were there, feverish under the cool breeze, prickly under the soft warmth of the sun.

The sunburn feeling was as clear if not as urgent as my thirst. Talking aloud had become an unaffordable comfort during the last hour. My mouth was dry and my brain was locked into a loop of an imaginary sound; the rip-hiss of a beer pop tab. I heard it in the breeze, in the rustling of the grass, the snapping of twigs under my raw heels. Stop it, I croaked.

I hit the shadows fifty meters before the trees. Going west, I thought, looking up from the ground for the first time since ten minutes earlier when I heard the unmistakable slither of a sizable snake near my feet. The trees were enormous, jutting out of the plain with the abruptness of a glacier face. The sun shined through the crowns, still blinding though now dappling and green tinted in alternating shafts of afternoon gold. Below the crowns to my dazzled eyes the forest seemed as dark and dense as the plain had been bright and open.

Stopping, for the first time since the last toe stubbing, I felt a new emotion for me,