“Look up,” said Fernando. “It’s one of the clearest skies I’ve ever seen on the mountain. Not a cloud in sight. See that glacier I climbed with Greta? Over there, at two o’clock, probably 500 or 600 meters above us.”
Suddenly, a sharp, guttural cry of distress echoed through the valley. Fernando froze, perplexed. “Where could that have come from?” he wondered. “Emilio, did you hear that?” But there was only silence—his cousin Emilio was nowhere to be found!
Panic surged through him. Fernando quickly turned and began running, leaping from boulder to boulder down the slope to where he had last seen his cousin, a novice climber. In the distance, he spotted Emilio, motionless against the rocks in his orange parka, about a kilometre away. Fernando pushed himself to go faster, deftly navigating the uneven terrain despite the risk of injury—any mishap here could be disastrous.
“Emilio! Emilio!” he shouted, but there was no response, no movement. Only when Fernando was 50 meters away did he finally see signs of life. Emilio was bent over, deeply focused, staring at something on the ground.
“Thank God, he’s alive!” Fernando thought, his heart still racing.
“Fernando! Where have you been?” Emilio called out. “Did you not hear my calls?”
“I tried to alert you by shouting, even with the whistle, but you didn’t turn back. Look at this,” Emilio said, his voice filled with excitement. “It looks like a vertebra from some animal. It’s huge! Not from anything around here. I’ve only seen marmots, goats, and deer on this mountain. No Yetis—at least not in this part of the world,” he added with a laugh.
Fernando had never seen anything like it either. The vertebra was massive, clearly belonging to a creature several meters long and at least two to four meters tall. After brushing off the dirt and washing it carefully with some of their precious water, they decided to move it off the path. They tucked it safely under an overhanging rock near a large boulder so they could retrieve it on their way back down the mountain.
As they continued their ascent, they speculated about the strange find. Could it be from a prehistoric animal? Was it carnivorous? Could it have had wings? Where’s the rest of it? Had some ancient hunter-gatherers brought it here?
The delays meant they barely made it to the Alpine refuge by sundown, just at the foot of the glacier. They settled in for the evening with sausages, boiled potatoes, and beer, sharing a table with Friedel and Ingrid, two octogenarian climbers they had met on a previous hike. One had worked in a museum and knew quite a bit about fossils. Fernando and Emilio asked a few casual questions about prehistoric animals but avoided mentioning their find. As they left the dinner table, Friedel and Ingrid stood up giving them a strong hug. “Be very, very careful on this mountain,” they warned, with the half smile of those who knew too much. “Just watch out for yourselves, strange things happen here.”
“What was that about?” wondered Fernando with some concern.
“Did you see Friedel’s top-of-the line satellite phone? I caught a glimpse of it as she opened her shoulder bag to show us the map. Oh well, technology is ubiquitous, even for the octogenarian,” he continued.
The next morning, fuelled by strong coffee, they began their descent, eager to retrieve the vertebra. They let their imaginations run wild, describing the possible size, shape, colour, diet, and behaviours of this mysterious beast. Their path was easy to follow, as it was well-marked. But when they reached the spot where they had left the bone, it was gone.
“This is impossible,” Fernando muttered, scratching his head in disbelief.
“Things like this don’t just vanish, especially something that weighs several kilos,” Emilio added, equally confused. “Someone must have found it and taken it.”
As they continued downhill, still chatting about the strange disappearance, Fernando suddenly stopped. He gestured toward something a few metres away, partially concealed behind some bushes.
There it was—the missing vertebra. “This is very strange,” Fernando remarked. “It’s almost as if we’ve caught the attention of a mountain spirit.”
Laughing in disbelief, they packed it into one of their backpacks and resumed their trek downhill.
When they arrived at the parking lot, they were in for another shock. Their car was gone!
“Oh no, someone must have stolen it,” Fernando said, exasperated. “But this is Switzerland—no one steals cars in Switzerland!”
“I’m absolutely sure I parked here!”
“Could it have been the same person who moved the vertebra?” Emilio asked, as a strange feeling of being watched crept over them.
“We should call the police,” Emilio suggested, but neither of them had enough cell signal to make the call. They remembered another parking lot a few kilometres down the road, so they set off to check.
As they descended, a series of turbulent gusts whipped up leaves and debris, creating an eerie whistling sound as they swept across their path. “Did you hear this? Everything is unsettling,” said the usually laid-back Emilio, now visibly concerned that something strange was happening around them.
“What could it be?” muttered Fernando, usually unfazed by adversity after his many adventures as a mountaineer. “This reminds me of those mountain tales, where the unnatural becomes the norm.”
When they arrived, there was their car, parked neatly. Both men were stunned—they were certain they had left it in the upper lot. Everything in the car was in its place, as they had left it!
“Look at this!” exclaimed Emilio. “See these footprints by the car: they are not ours-they are smaller, and I can’t find ours.” “Very, very strange!”
“Yes, how very strange,” said Fernando, starting to feel very uneasy. “Let’s cut the excursion short and return-there are too many red flags!” “Yes, we must get out of here!”
“I can’t wait for a hearty lunch,” he added. “A good meal will distract us from all this nonsense!”
“We are taking the 3 to the 13 to then follow the Rhine to Vaduz,” Fernando said, his mouth now watering at the thought of lunch, especially of his favourite Kasknöpfle dumplings topped with cheese and onions, a local specialty.
Emilio woke up an hour later to the glorious sight of a calm lake dotted with small sailboats to their right.
“Look at the Rhine, how strange, it’s really wide here,” he said.
“Fernando, look to your right,” he insisted, giving him a nudge. “Hello! Hello! Are you asleep at the wheel?”
“Ugh, what? What is it, Emilio? Of course I’m fully awake!” Fernando replied, annoyed.
“Well then, why are we looking at the Walensee, the lake, and not the Rhine?!”
The signs around us indicated they were completely off track, heading toward Zürich, not Vaduz.
“Oh!” exclaimed Fernando. “Did you see what I think I saw?”
“Yes, I thought I was dreaming!”
For an instant, they both had seen the silhouette of a large reptilian figure in the lake some 100 metres away, its head clearly outlined by the reflected shimmer.
“Was that Nessie, the Loch Ness monster, we saw?!” wondered Emilio, with a nervous laugh.
“Could the vertebra have belonged to one of Nessie’s relatives?”
“This is too much!” they both agreed, forcing a laugh.
Sensing that something very odd and ominous was going on, and before anything else could go wrong, they decided to return the rental car in Zürich and continue their trip home to Worms by train. It seemed safer.
They decided to leave the mysterious vertebra with their friend Fritz at the archaeological museum in Heidelberg. After sending photos of it to Fritz by email, they dropped it off at the museum’s reception. They were relieved with the fossil safely in the museum and out of their hands.
The next day, they received a frantic call from Fritz.
“Fernando, this fossil is from an unknown dinosaur. I’ve never seen anything like it!” he exclaimed. “I’m forwarding the details to my colleagues at the museum in Oxford—they should be able to identify it.”
The cousins weren’t surprised. After all that had happened on their trip, anything seemed possible.
Weeks passed, and Fernando and Emilio had almost forgotten about the fossil. But then came a call from Oxford. Professor Bignose, the renowned palaeontologist, was on the line, his voice bubbling with excitement.
“Fernando, this is a new species of dinosaur!” he declared. “We have only seen something close to it in Chile. It is probably 70 million years old-although the carbon-14 dating studies are not yet back. The only reference of something close to it comes from Chile. In fact, there are reports indicating something like your vertebra has gone missing from a private collection in Santiago.”
“Are you serious?” Fernando replied, stunned.
“Absolutely. Yours is a unique find, and we’ve already given it a name— tentatively: Oribenosaurus rex!”
“I must warn you, however, that before this discovery is published, Interpol will investigate the possibility that it is the missing Chilean fossil. You will be questioned by the Swiss police and the Bundespolizei. Don’t worry, I’m sure you’re not considered suspects in the investigation. They suspect an international fossil- trafficking ring led by two mysterious women, octogenarians, can you imagine?!” he concluded.
“Oh!” said Fernando, trembling, the weird events in the mountain running through his mind like a movie reel. “Suddenly, it all made sense! Friedel and Ingrid, the satellite phone octogenarian climbers, were the thieves!”
The phone rang a few minutes later, interrupting his thoughts. “Hello, this is Chief Inspector Willermus Bürgler, Swiss Federal Police, am I speaking with Mr. Fernandez?”
“Fernando is my first name,” answered Fernando grimly. It was not the first time his first name was confused for the last name Fernandez.
“Where are you now?” inquired Inspector Bürgler. “Our Bundespolizei colleagues will pick you up and take you to the station for a few questions.”
“While you wait for my colleagues, try to remember where you were on the night of October 1, 2024. Proving this may help you…”
Emilio Oribe
Março, 2025
Fotos de Manuel Rosário
Eduardo | 2025-03-19
|
Muy bueno y original.