Texas, One Million B.C.
    It was good land, rich land, big and sprawling and Paleolithic, rich in swamp, rich in algae, in the heart of The Fern Belt. Wild and unspoiled, a place just crying out in pre-linguistic grunts to be tamed, it was a land waiting for a man with a club and a dream.
    So far, the clan that lived, by its own choice, in a tiny corner of these unclaimed acres had not yet seemed to produce anyone so far-seeing. The clan's lone cave was a simple mom-andpop operation. Everyone pitched in and made choppers and scrapers. Expectations were low. You died at 30.
    Mean while, out on the subtropical plain beyond the cave door, were the ones who, at least up until this time, had clearly been the movers and shakers.
    Brontosaurus. Triceratops. Tyrannosaurus rex.
    The big boys.
    Fifty to 75 feet in length. Thirty tons or more.
    In a word, players.
    They strode the land, like some big private club, for months at a time, then wandered off, the clan didn't know where. No on asked. They just ran out and took a pee.
    This was enough to ask out of life for most in the clan, who consoled themselves with faith in totems -- do-nothing gods like The Long-Toothed Cat or The Great Cave Bear. But it could never be enough for one among them, a hairy, dynamic one, who seldom spoke but whose eyes burned, beneath a sloping forehead, with the entrepreneurial spirit.
    That he had more on the ball, and walked a little taller, than some who'd come before him was unquestionably true. Yet some who came later -- his critics and detractors -- would also point out that fate just handed some guys the aces, that there was such a thing as being in the right place at the right time.
    It was early one bright, steamy morning, the day of the hunt. All the ablest spear throwers and rock tossers had just gone forth from the cave in pursuit of the small game that was safe, but yielded a small return. All the strong of limb, that is, except for the hairy, dynamic one, who, as chance would have it, remained with the clan that day to pick nits from the bottom of his foot.
    The cave was filled with workaday sounds: chop, chop,scrape, scrape. Nothing out of the ordinary, just another boring Monday.
    Then it happened. The clan look-out came scampering into the cave and announced, by way of several somersaults and frantic hoots, that they had returned.
    He didn't have to name names.
    Work immediately shut down on the chopper-and-scraper assembly line. There was an interval of wild and not very productive gibbering. When it finally subsided, all eyes turned to the vacant-gummed 30-year-old known as The Old One.
    By The Old One's calculations, the dinosaurs had returned about a moon early. This was an omen. Wrestling with its meaning, he stared into the fire and thought out loud
.     "What," said The Old One, not quite in these words, but in grunts to this effect, "are the dinosaurs doing back on the land?"                 "Balls!"
    The cave echoed with the voice of the hairy, dynamic one, who, having been seated by the fire eating nits till a second ago, now rose to his full, impressive height of just over five-two. He hadn't known his destiny until just this moment. He still didn't know quite how to say it. But something in that part of the human brain that had just punched its timecard told him to go for it.
   "What," he said, "are the dinosaurs doing back on my land?"
    It was The Big Bang, an earthquake, a flood, a solar eclipse. In one fell swoop -- the daring invention of the pronoun"my" -- the hairy, dynamic one had become the first, in the history of the clan, to assert ownership over the land. There was a stunned silence, after which the cave was up for grabs. Numerous injuries were sustained somersaulting. Muchhooting was done by all.
    When it was quiet again, The Old One approached the hairy, dynamic one. Slapping him once on the shoulder, ceremonially, The Old One invented an expression of his own.
    "Nice going," said The Old One. Even though such a thing as currency had yet to be devised, the hairy, dynamic one knew it was time to put his money where his mouth was. Turning from the clan, he threw his club up onto his shoulder, rubbed noses with his mate -- perhaps for the last time -- and headed out the door of the cave to take care of business.
    "Give 'em hell, kid," said The Old One, inventing another expression.
    The scene greeting the caveman as he stepped out onto the steamy plain was of the kind that, in the past, had been enough to discourage any serious interest in real estate in far larger and hairier mammals. Enjoying a junket on his land, drinking his swamps, eating his leaves, were field reps from at least four of the most formidable suborders around. Momentarily, the caveman exercised his fledgling capacity for wonder to wonder why he was not more afraid to go up against these heavy hitters. His instincts were urging fight, not flight, and it would be nice to know the reason. Slowing down his approach, the caveman took time to think it out, in terms he could understand.
    The hairy, dynamic one didn't know much. His world contained but a few concepts. There was day and night. Cooked and raw meat. And, then, there were winners and losers.
    All at once, the caveman glimpsed, through the steamy subtropics of his mind, that he was ready to risk it all, to put it all on the line today, because he was a winner.
    He knew it was just a feeling. But all the same, he knew it was true. That he was a winner -- in fact, a member of a species of winners -- and that the dinosaurs, they were losers.
    Sure, they were big.
    You couldn't take that away from them. And he wouldn'ttry.
    He wasn't that petty. But, big as they were, that didn't mean diddly. They'd had their chance, and they'd blown it.
    Losers.
    It didn't matter how much they tried to throw their weight around, they couldn't disguise it. It was written all over them, on their tough, crude hides. You saw it, in each attack, in their slow, lumbering walks. In the way they kept getting stuck in tar pits. You'd never said it to their faces, but you'd thought it.
    Losers.
    Yes, they were big. You had to grant them that. They had big on their side. They had it in spades.
    But only one species could be the best.
    If you can't stand the heat, get outta the jungle.
    Life's tough.
    Losers.
    Big losers, sure. Oh, yes. Definitely. No question about that.
    But losers.
    And, as the caveman had seen, the bigger they are, theharder they fall.
    Having bolstered his confidence with vague thoughts something along these lines, the hairy, dynamic one quickened his pace, walked straight up to the guy in charge, a Tyrannosaurus rex, wound up, and clubbed it murderously on the tail.
    Up till this moment, the Tyrannosaurus had been leaning over with its back to the caveman, leisurely eating a Brontosaurus for lunch, or Brunch. Now, turning slowly, the Tyrannosaurus fixed him with a long, condescending stare that seemed to say,
    "Have you completely lost your mind?"
    Maybe he had. Maybe he was crazy. A cockeyed dreamer.
    But then, he was more than a man with a dream.
    He was a man with a club.
    The combat that immediately ensued between caveman and Tyrannosaurus bore some resemblance to battles of will between man and beast that would occur eons later on the Texas range, except that instead of bestriding the animal's back as it reared about the plain, the caveman was spending most of his time upside down and clamped between eight-inch teeth. Blackness was closing in all around. His personal stock was plummeting rapidly. Though he might survive, clan members, watching from the mouth of the cave, were already dividing up his food ration, since there was no use in tossing good berries after bad.
    That was when luck intervened. Or -- as others would have it -- when the hairy, dynamic one, by frantically wiggling his halfswallowed feet, made his own luck. Creating an irritating tickling sensation in the throat of the King of Dinosaurs, the caveman was spat to the ground, his sole clothing, the pelt guarding his loins, snagging on a tooth and coming completely off in the process. He clambered to his feet and stood helpless before the dread Tyrannosaurus rex, no weapon in hand and all the more vulnerable for being seen, in these last moments before the end, as no dinosaur had ever seen him before: stripped to the buff. So this was it. It was all over. And he wasn't even 30. Closing his eyes, clenching his teeth, he awaited the worst...only to have his eyes jarred open by a savage, earthshaking cry from the reptile that sounded like nothing less than a roar of protest against its Maker.
    For what the Tyrannosaurus rex, even with its limited intelligence, had been able to grasp in an instant, or rather, two -- a first look and a double-take -- was that the hairy, dynamic one had been graced by nature with a hairy, dynamic one; one not only proportionately larger than the dinosaur's, when compared with their respective bodyweights, but, quite literally, larger – the Tyrannosaurus rex's secret shame being that its love machine was as pathetically unmatched to its stature as its undersized brain orits spindly little forelimbs.
    Which was to say, it didn't have much, the caveman had

more, and now everyone knew it.\    The Tyrannosaurus did not roar again. It did not attack. The truth was, it couldn't. Demoralized to the very core of its 30 tons, the King of Dinosaurs just turned away and slunk off the land. It did not go alone. Moving in a slow procession behind it, the other dinosaurs on the land lumbered over to the caveman one by one, took one look, and, similarly emasculated, shuffled away beneath a dark cloud of anxiety, which, if allowed to go unchecked, could mean the beginning of the end of the high-rolling species.
    An end that would come, not because of climactic change or volcanic eruptions.
    But because they'd learned they were losers.
    Losers headed for sexual dysfunction.
    And at last...extinction.

.