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Lara didn’t have time to think when she saw Carlos attacked by a pack of wolves – she cut the rope and started shooting. In the end she couldn’t save her guide, but at least she could say she had tried.
As she entered the large stone doors and it closed ominously behind her, she wondered though, eyeing the wolf paw prints in the snow. This… didn’t make sense. While history and archaeology were closer to her heart, she had learned – both in school and on her own, in preparation for her travels – about the flora and fauna around the world. She had approximate expectations what could try to eat her or poison her.
Grey wolves in the Peruvian mountains? That wasn’t what she’d learned. Maybe she could have encountered a maned wolf, with its mostly red fur and long legs. That was, if there would be any predators at all, so high up. But there was no use thinking of it now, she admitted, as long as she could protect herself from them.
Not many steps later she encountered a very well functioning ancient trap and her mind went in another direction completely.
A few minutes later, deeper in the caves, Lara was accosted by bats. Shoot first, ask questions later was her well-tried policy, and so it was only their lifeless bodies that she could inspect. Now, bats in caves weren’t unheard of and she had admittedly hadn’t read up much on the chiroptera, but something at the back of her mind was nagging at her that they shouldn’t have been there either.
Continuing on down the cave, it got slightly warmer and some rocky surfaces had become covered in thriving, sprawling greenery. Now Lara could add unexpected flora on the list.
Maybe it hadn’t been the bats that hadn’t fit here in this place, but the caves themselves were just… unusual.
When her progress started rewarding her with remnants of clearly man-made structures, she had come across the first bear. Now, there were some bears living in Peru. Though again, not at such a high altitude and definitely not brown bears, but rather smaller and less dangerous spectacled bears. Although by now Lara was in the process of accepting that this was one of those adventures and she shouldn’t count on the conventional knowledge.
Much later, in a lush green valley where waterfalls were rumbling, insects were buzzing and birds were singing, she admitted that there was certain knowledge she could at least partly use, although from another field altogether.
That was, palaeontology.