Every Hidden Thing (13 page)

R
ETURNING TO CAMP, THE SIXTH DAY AFTER
I found the pterodactylus, I spotted an antelope drinking from the river.

“We need some fresh meat,” Hugh Friar said, dismounting with his Springfield rifle and ammunition pouch. “We'll bring this one home with us.”

The antelope saw us but showed no sign of fear, bending its graceful neck to the water once more. Even when the first shot rang out, and missed, the animal didn't bolt, just looked up and about curiously. Hugh loaded another cartridge into the breech and took aim. He missed the second time. The antelope looked directly at him now, as if unable to believe what a terrible shot Hugh was.

Unlike the Yalies, I hadn't bought myself a rifle in Omaha, so I swung myself off my pony and asked Daniel if I could borrow his.

“Are you sure, Miss Cartland?” he asked. “You know how to use one?”

“Oh, yes,” I said as he handed it over. “I'll just need one cartridge, thanks.”

I came to where Hugh was standing, just as he took his third try. This one hit, but it was a messy shot, in the antelope's hindquarters, and the poor animal staggered away from the river, one of its legs clearly broken. It made a piteous sound.

“Almost,” muttered Hugh, reloading.

I took aim. The rifle had a satisfying heft and length, the stock hard and cool against my cheek.

I'd been shooting since I was twelve. Papa had taught me how to line the front bead up with the grooves; I discovered I had the most success if I kept the bead at the bottom of the target, so that when I pulled the trigger and the gun kicked, my shot didn't go too high but was usually just right. He'd always said I was a good shot. The first thing I'd hit was a partridge, and when it plunged to the ground, a heap of feather, I was stunned by what I had done. Beforehand I'd worried I would be ashamed or sickened, but I wasn't. I was exhilarated. My first thought in fact was: So this is how it feels to be powerful. Every creature on the earth is a hunter of one sort or another.

I squeezed the trigger and shot the antelope through both shoulders. It collapsed to the ground and was still. When I lowered my rifle, Hugh was looking at me, his expression both irritated and admiring.

“Good shot,” he said.

It shamed me to admit how satisfying I found this, how I'd accomplished in one shot what he couldn't in three.

“Everything all right?” a voice shouted, and I looked over to see three men on saddle ponies riding quickly toward us, a single wagon in the distance. They certainly weren't from our party. “We heard gunshots.”

“Just a bit of hunting,” Hugh said, pointing at the fallen antelope in the grass.

“Thank goodness,” said the lead rider, swinging himself a bit clumsily off his pony. “We worried there was an altercation.” He was a tall fellow, not ten years older than me, shaggy hair tufting out beneath his slouch hat. Fine, sun-etched lines radiated from his smiling eyes. His cheeks were a little gaunt, but his teeth were surprisingly good, though slightly yellowed. He managed to look clean.

“Can you tell me if we're near Professor Cartland's camp?”

“You are,” I said. “We're headed there ourselves. I'm his daughter, Rachel Cartland.”

He looked surprised it was me addressing him and not one of the Yalies. “Ah! Very pleased to meet you, Miss Cartland. I had no idea he'd brought his daughter with him. I'm Ethan Withrow. They said in town your party was headed north. I was hoping to have a visit with your father.”

Despite his weathered appearance, I had the sense Ethan Withrow wasn't from around here; he sounded like an Easterner. I'd never heard Papa mention his name, but I could only assume he was a scientist, or at least an amateur prospector. I took a
good look at his companions. One of the other riders had red hair and a thick beard and looked like he was used to sunburn and horses. And the other rider, I was fairly sure, was Indian, though he had short hair and was dressed in regular clothes. Pawnee or Sioux, I couldn't tell. Was he their guide? The wagon was close enough now that I could see the teamster. He had a slightly treacherous look, and I wondered if I'd seen him on the streets of Crowe, maybe outside a saloon.

“Why don't we help get that fine antelope onto our wagon,” said Withrow, “and we can ride into camp together.”

There was nothing ominous about him, and Hugh and Daniel didn't seem to have any objections either, so we thanked him and rode the last mile or so to our camp. Not all the prospecting parties were back yet, but Papa was, and I introduced him to Withrow and his men.

“What brings you out here, Mr. Withrow?”

“Same thing as you, sir. Dinosaurs.”

Could he actually imagine we'd be happy to hear this? No prospector wanted to share his bone fields. Probably Withrow didn't know Papa already had a wily competitor an hour downriver.

“Are you a hobbyist, or a scholar? I must confess I have not heard your name.”

“I'm working for Mr. Barnum from New York City. He's a tireless man, as you know, and always looking for new wonders. I'm just one of his many lookers.”

“He wants his very own dinosaur,” I said.

Withrow tipped his head at me. “Bigger the better, that's Mr. Barnum.”

“Ah, I see,” said Papa. I was impressed at his calm when he must have been roiling inside. I knew how he felt about ringmasters. He filled his pipe slowly and offered Withrow some tobacco. “How much experience do you have at hunting fossils, Mr. Withrow?”

He gave a good-natured smile. “A very little.”

“Do you know, for instance, what this is?” He lifted my notebook from the crate and showed a drawing of an ilium.

“That is . . . a bone,” said Withrow, chuckling with such self-deprecation it was impossible not to like him. I couldn't help wondering if he was as unskilled as he made out. “Don't ask me what part of the body it is, or what animal it came from.”

“You seem somewhat ill-suited to your task,” Papa remarked.

“I surely am, Professor. But I'm quick to learn, and I was hoping we might be of some use to each other. I've got some strong arms with me, and Thomas here”—he gestured to the Indian man—“is an excellent guide. But we don't know where to look, or
what
we're looking at if we get lucky. But if we were to work under your expert guidance, we'd be a lot more useful.”

Papa chuckled. “You are proposing I help you become my competitor!”

“No, not at all,” said Withrow. “I'm proposing we help you with
your
work. And if we should find something that Mr. Barnum might like, well, he would offer you a very attractive finder's fee.”

“Well,” said my father, waving his arm around our enormous camp, “as you can see, I have no shortage of help or resources.”

“Clearly,” said Withrow, “you're very well financed for this trip. But I'm sure there are future expeditions to think of. Science isn't as well funded as the circus business.”

Maybe I had underestimated Withrow. He was a persuasive fellow and had a good point. Papa was a wealthy man, but not even a wealthy man wanted to spend his own money on expensive expeditions.

My father rocked on his heels, a prelude to a lecture. “How much do you know about me, Mr. Withrow?”

The Barnum man grinned. “Only that you're the most famous paleontologist in the nation, sir.”

As a bit of flattery, it wasn't bad, and Papa did look slightly mollified, but not for long. “Then you should know I'm a scientist and not a circus entertainer. If I were to work in tandem with a showman like Mr. Barnum, it would discredit my work and the whole enterprise of science. I am not interested in entertaining the masses, only discovering the truth.”

“I know, I know what you're thinking, Professor,” said Withrow calmly, as though he'd anticipated just such a response. “‘That Barnum, he's just after some new attraction.' And you're not entirely wrong. But Mr. Barnum does have a genuine interest in the natural sciences. He's even made charitable donations to universities and museums.”

“Well, we scientists don't have his gift for making money,” said Papa.

“No reason why money and science can't go together. All we need to do is
share
these things you're finding.”

“We're doing that already,” I said, “in the lobby of the Academy of Natural Sciences. Have you seen Joseph Leidy's hadrosaur?”

“That's a good start,” said Withrow, “but we need to go further. In England, there's a fellow, Hawkins, who's created sculptures of dinosaurs, with skin and teeth and eyes, and put them on display in the Crystal Palace. There was even one you could eat dinner in. What was it called . . . a . . .”

“Iguanodon,” I said, remembering the illustrated papers I'd seen.

“Mere spectacle!” my father said.

“A little spectacle's all right, surely, Professor, if it gets people interested in what you do.”

“I like the idea of seeing them as they might have been,” I admitted. “It's easy for us to imagine”—here I looked to Papa—“because we've spent so long with bones, but for most people it's just a jumble. I'm sure people would be more interested if we mounted more of them—I heard Leidy's hadrosaur brings a lot of people to the academy.”

“And they started charging an entrance fee, didn't they?” said Withrow.

“Regrettable,” Papa said.

“No. Just a measure of how important your work is. There's a lot of ignorance out there. You probably didn't hear about what Boss Tweed did in New York City just a couple weeks ago.”

I shook my head. We'd had no news from back east since setting out from Crowe.

“Well, you probably knew that Hawkins came over here to make some life-size sculptures of English dinosaurs.”

“For Central Park,” I said. I remembered Papa telling me about it now, and naturally he hadn't approved of a British fellow bringing his artistic notions of dinosaurs to our country.

“Exactly,” said Withrow. “Well, Boss Tweed thought the very notion of dinosaurs was blasphemous—there was no life on earth further back than the Bible, and the Bible had nothing to say about dinosaurs, so he had some fellows break into Hawkins's studio and smash up all his work.”

“Despicable, to be sure,” said my father. “Though of no great loss to science. Judging from his other work, his sculptures were wildly fanciful.”

“Well, Professor, you'll also know that even in our own government and Senate, you don't have a lot of support for what you do. You've got people like the senator from Virginia saying we've no business digging these devil's scraps up in the first place.”

“We've heard yes yes language like this before,” said Papa, rolling his eyes at me.

“But these are the big boys who write the checks. They'll pay for a geological survey of the West. That's fine. They want to know where the land's good, where's water, where's coal and gold. That's important. But where are the dinosaur bones? The boys in Washington aren't very inclined to pay for your kind of work, or fund schools or museums that do.”

Withrow seemed to have a good deal of information on hand. It was quite a speech he was making.

“All I'm saying is, Mr. Barnum might not be such a bad friend to have, looking ahead.”

“So what exactly are you proposing, Mr. Withrow?” Papa said, sounding a bit weary. “That you get the biggest find we make? I just hand it over to Mr. Barnum?”

“There's one thing in particular we're eager to find.” He nodded at his Indian guide. “Thomas grew up not far from here. He lost his people to the pox and would've starved if he hadn't been picked up by a traveling preacher. He still knows the Sioux language, and he hears things about his people from time to time. There's one story I was very taken with. Have either of you ever heard of the Black Beauty?”

I shook my head. The way he said it conjured the feeling of a legend, and in the cooling air I shivered. This was a story I definitely wanted to hear.

“I should let Thomas tell it.”

When Thomas spoke, it was deliberately, with enough spaces between sentences to let each one have an echoing power. It was the story of a Sioux boy on something called a vision quest, a rite of passage from boy to man. Thomas drew the story with vivid, bold strokes. The boy wandered until he was delirious from lack of food and water and all night fought with some kind of monster that had a skull of black bones.

My pulse quickened. There was a hypnotic quality to the tale that increased second by second.

“When he woke, the sun was rising and he was walking, streaked with blood, a black tooth clutched in his fist. He called it the Black Beauty.”

The shock of recognition was so strong, I had to work hard to compose my face. The black tooth. My tooth. I listened, rapt, as Thomas said the tooth had magical powers, could be shot like an arrow. Its owner became a great hunter and warrior.

“They buried him with the tooth,” Thomas said, “and set his funeral platform apart from the others.”

My eyes flicked from Thomas to Withrow to Papa. Like me, he must've known this was the story of our tooth, but he looked remarkably relaxed—amused, even.

“Extraordinary tale,” he said pleasantly.

Withrow held up a hand. “I don't expect you to believe all of it. The supernatural properties of the tooth, shooting like an arrow, all that. But I can't help thinking that this fellow must've stumbled on a dinosaur fossil.”

“Without seeing the tooth itself,” Papa said bluffly, “it would be difficult to assess its true character. You've never seen this tooth yourself, I'm assuming?”

“I have not.”

“The Plains Indians seem to have yes yes a great respect for visions, but this man might have brought back nothing more than an interestingly shaped stone.”