By me with art by Sam Messerly.
Click here to read from the beginning.
Of course, there are complications when a fellow like me wants to determine whether a dinosaur is speaking dinosaur talk to someone late at night. As mentioned before, at first I had just thought he was snoring. It’s true that Warbell’s “snores” were unusually complicated with an astonishing multiplicity of grunts, growls, woots, and warbles. But then again, I have met some folks with some pretty strange snores (the perils of dorm life back in college), so I didn’t want to jump to conclusions too quickly. And I didn’t actually hear anyone respond to Warbell’s nocturnal monologues. Which could just mean Warbell had some kind of walkie-talkie, maybe built into one of his teeth.
Or he was just talking in his sleep.
Warbell and I were not talking to each other a great deal anyway at that point. In fact an eavesdropper might assume I was attempting to learn dino-speak given how often I would grunt or snort or otherwise make unpleasant noises when Warbell tried to engage me in conversation. The conversations might go something like this:
“How was your breakfast today?” asked Warbell
“Rowf,” I replied.
“Did you have a bowl of cereal?”
“Snort!”
And so on, with Warbell sometimes pretending to understand what I said until I was just quiet, lips zipped.
But for all my grumping and grouching, my sub-neanderthal conversations did not crush Warbell’s zeal for tracking down the truth of… whatever it was he was searching for. And in fact the dinosaur seemed to have been gathering a lot of great data for his project even before officially becoming a t-rex masseur.
I realized I’m really not a very clever person. I couldn’t seem to figure out what was really going on.
Of course, it also didn’t help that one day I just dumped the rocks I found underneath the house into the bushes at the front of the house. Sure enough, the next day I found Warb standing near the shrubbery.
“This is really interesting, Wal,” Warbell said. “Never thought I’d actually see one of these.”
“Ugh,” I said. “Grunt.”
Warb plucked out one of the rocks—the one that was still intact. He laughed as he turned it over.
“What’s so funny?” I asked testily.
“Oh, well,” said Warbell, the huge grin returning to his face. “You probably don’t want to hear this, but apparently at some point dinosaurs were using the space where your house is as a restroom.”
“Come again?”
“You have several pieces of fossilized dinosaur poop in your bushes,” said Warbell.