ngs. It was one of the latter which nearly
did for me while my attention was fixed upon the weird scene below.

The first intimation I had of it was the sudden blotting out of the
sunlight from above, and as I glanced quickly up, I saw a most terrific
creature swooping down upon me. It must have been fully eighty feet
long from the end of its long, hideous beak to the tip of its thick,
short tail, with an equal spread of wings. It was coming straight for
me and hissing frightfully--I could hear it above the whir of the
propeller. It was coming straight down toward the muzzle of the
machine-gun and I let it have it right in the breast; but still it came
for me, so that I had to dive and turn, though I was dangerously close
to earth.

The thing didn't miss me by a dozen feet, and when I rose, it wheeled
and followed me, but only to the cooler air close to the level of the
cliff-tops; there it turned again and dropped. Something--man's
natural love of battle and the chase, I presume--impelled me to pursue
it, and so I too circled and dived. The moment I came down into the
warm atmosphere of Caspak, the creature came for me again, rising above
me so that it might swoop down upon me. Nothing could better have
suited my armament, since my machine-gun was pointed upward at an angle
of about degrees and could not be either depressed or elevated by the
pilot. If I had brought someone along with me, we could have raked the
great reptile from almost any position, but as the creature's mode of
attack was always from above, he always found me ready with a hail of
bullets. The battle must have lasted a minute or more before the thing
suddenly turned completely over in the air and fell to the ground.

Bowen and I roomed together at college, and I learned a lot from him
outside my regular course. He was a pretty good scholar despite his
love of fun, and his particular hobby was paleontology. He used to
tell me about the various forms of animal and vegetable life which had
covered the globe during former eras, and so I was pretty well
acquainted with the fishes, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals of
paleolithic times. I knew that the thing that had attacked me was some
sort of pterodactyl which should have been extinct millions of years
ago. It was all that I needed to realize that Bowen had exaggerated
nothing in his manuscript.

Having disposed of my first foe, I set myself once more to search for a
landing-place near