Rivers of Time

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No, I'm sorry, Mr. Seligman, but I can't take you hunting late-Mesozoic dinosaur.

Yes, I know what the advertisement says.

Why not? How much d'you weigh? Fifty-four kilos? Let's see—that's under sixty kilos, which is my lower limit.

I could take you to other periods, you know. I'll take you to any period in the Cenozoic. I'D get you a shot at an entelodont or a uintathere. They've got fine heads.

I'll even stretch a point and take you to the basal Pleistocene, where you can try for one of the mammoths or the mastodon.

I'll take you back to the Triassic, where you can shoot one of the smaller ancestral dinosaurs. But I will bloody well not take you to the Jurassic or Cretaceous. You're just too small.

What's your size got to do with it? Look here, mate, what did you think you were going to shoot your dinosaur with?

Oh, you hadn't thought, eh?

Well, sit there a minute ... Here you are: my own private gun for that work, a Continental .600. Does look like a shotgun, doesn't it? But it's rifled, as you can see by looking through the barrels. Shoots a pair of .600 Nitro Express cartridges the size of bananas; weighs nearly seven kilos and has a muzzle energy of over twenty-two hundred KGMs. Costs twenty thousand dollars. Lot of money for a gun, eh?

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