The Dinosaur Hunter (9 page)

“What killed them, do you think? I know you only care about how they lived but you must have a theory on why they disappeared.”

“Oh, I think environmental and evolutionary pressures are the likely culprits. We also think there's less oxygen in the atmosphere now so maybe it just got too hard for them to breathe. Anyway, whatever it was, I don't think it was anything so dramatic as a meteor or comet, although something like that may have pushed them over the edge. Maybe a virus, even. I just don't know. No one does, no matter what they say.”

I glanced down and saw Pick was awake again and peering into the box where Tanya had placed the plastic sample bags. He took one of the bags out, pondered it, then put it back. The way he held it, I couldn't see what was in it, not that I would have recognized what it was, anyway.

“What did you find this morning?” I asked.

“Just odds and ends,” Laura replied. “You ready to help dig up this old boy?”

“Sure thing.”

Laura called Tanya and she climbed up beside us. Pick wandered off and then things got quiet for the rest of the morning as the three of us dug and scraped. It was hard work and my fingernails, knees, and back took a beating. I looked up once and found both women smiling at me. “What?” I asked.

“You'd make a good grad student,” Laura said. “You work hard and you don't complain much.”

“I like that in a man, too,” Tanya said, giving me a dazzling smile. I confess my heart sped up a beat.

After a while, Tanya got up from the dig, got her backpack off the truck, dropped in some water bottles, and went off in the direction Pick had gone. I sat back, swigged some water, and appreciated her trim little figure until she'd disappeared around the hill. “Where's she going?” I asked.

“To find Pick,” Laura said. “He'll be lost by now. She'll try to track him down or give him a call on the radio to figure out where he is. He never goes far. He always finds bones and that slows him down.”

We dug, picked, scraped, and glued for a bit more, then Laura squinted at the sky where the sun had taken up station, seemingly not moving and just blazing down. “We need to put up an awning,” she said.

We walked back to the camp and she got out a tarp and some poles, ropes, and pegs. It wasn't easy on the side of that hill but we managed to get the tarp up to provide some shade. When we were finished, Laura pronounced the working day over. “When you get too tired, you start to make mistakes on a dig,” she said. “Want to go prospecting?”

That sounded like fun so I said OK. She filled a pack with water bottles and I did the same. She handed me a small digital camera, a pocket-sized notebook, a pencil, some plastic lock-type sample bags, a permanent marker pen, a two-way radio, and a handheld GPS. After a quick lesson on the GPS, she showed me how to write up any finds I might make, then pointed at a low line of wedding-cake shaped hills. “Those hills look to have some Hell Creek Formation,” she said. “Ever been on them?”

I had not, even though they weren't that far from the Square C. “They're on Haxby BLM,” I said. “I wouldn't even think about going over there without permission.”

“But we have a BLM permit,” she said. “And we won't cross private land getting to it.”

“You don't know the Haxbys,” I replied.

Laura looked at the hills longingly. “I'm sure we'd find some good bones there.”

I gave it some thought, mostly focusing on Laura's unhappy expression. “All right,” I said, finally. “But if anyone comes around, let me do the talking.”

This suited her so we hefted our packs, tested our radios, and off we went, first crossing a field of grass that stopped abruptly at a deep coulee that had been invisible until we were right on top of it. The badlands can fool you that way. What you perceive to be an expanse of flat land can suddenly drop a hundred feet straight down. More than one cow, trundling along, has lost its footing along one of those coulees and taken the tumble of death. We were more careful, clambered down inside it, then walked along its narrow bottom. There was a layer of cracked mud studded with some low reeds, clinging to life. Laura spotted a grayish outcrop of dirt and walked over to it, bent over, and plucked out a bone. She showed it to me. “Theropod toe bone, probably Ornithomimosaur.”

Quoting Pick, I asked, “Where's the rest of it?”

“That's always the question, isn't it?” She gave me a grin, which was nice. Even though we'd just spent all morning digging up bones and erecting an awning in the hot sun, and were now walking in the hottest sun of the day loaded down with packs full of water, Laura was cheerful. I have always believed cheerful is a fine trait in a woman. I reflected that Jeanette was hardly ever cheerful but I didn't care. I still loved her. Love is weird that way, ain't it?

We found a way out of the coulee and continued across the field until we reached the hills, which proved to be steeper than they looked from a mile away. “I'll go that way,” Laura pointed, “you go the other. See that first step? I think if there are any bones, they will be at that level. It's a bit too steep for me to try to go along there so what I like to do is walk around the base of the hill and look for float at the bottom. If I see anything that looks interesting, then I'll climb the hill up to the step to see what's there. You might try the same strategy or just make up your own. There's no right or wrong way to find bones.”

Although I wasn't certain it was a good idea for us to split up, considering that we were on Haxby BLM, I went along with it. I went off in the direction she wanted me to go and before long, I was thoroughly enjoying the pleasant stroll at the base of the hill, which was actually several hills with low saddlebacks. I soon came across some float, clambered up to the shelf Laura had suggested, and was rewarded by a pile of shattered bones. There was nothing in the pile that had any shape, just irregular scraps, but there was enough of it to fill up several backpacks. I settled for logging the GPS coordinates in my notebook, photographing the site, taking a sample, and moving on, feeling very much like a true paleontologist. I searched all along the base, finding more float and scraps here and there. Though I climbed up to the step, I found no more piles of bones, just scraps including something that looked like a claw, although the tip was broken off. No matter that I had probably found nothing of importance, I had still discovered the remains of creatures, which had lived very long ago. I sat down on one of the steps and just looked out at a land which should have been familiar to me but now seemed alien, as if I'd been plucked up and set down not only far away but long ago. Maybe I was getting a sense of deep time, I don't know.

I was startled by the
clip-clop
of a horse at the base of the hill and, when I looked down, I saw an equally startled rider. It was Carl Haxby, Sam's youngest son. “Hello, Carl,” I said.

Carl finally found his voice. “What are you doing up there, Mike?”

“Looking for dinosaur bones. There are quite a few of them on this hill.”

Carl briefly scanned the exposed brown dirt, the ancient gray mud, and the sagebrush of the hill, then shook his head. “All I see is Haxby property,” he said. “Are you lost?”

It would have probably saved us all some grief if I had answered that I was indeed lost and would get my tail back to the Square C first thing but, instead, I said, “No. I know exactly where I am. I should have asked you before coming out here but I'm working with some folks who have a BLM permit and…well, here we are.”

“We?”

“On the other side of this hill is a young lady. She's a professional paleontologist. She's just looking for bones, Carl. No reason to get upset.”

But Carl was upset. “I'll thank you to leave our property, Mike,” he said.

He didn't curse, he didn't say he was going to climb up there and whup my ass, he didn't threaten to go burn down my trailer, he just said what he said, most calmly. He was also armed. There was a rifle, a .30-06, slung next to his leg. I climbed down until I was eye level with him and opened my backpack, showing him the fragments of bone I'd picked up. “This is all I'm doing,” I said.

“You found those on our land?”

“On BLM land.” I sat down on a rock. I had learned in my past life in the thin blue line that sometimes sitting down while talking to someone in a tense situation tends to have a calming effect. “I'll say it again, Carl. I should have asked before coming out here and I apologize. But, technically, BLM is not your land.”

“I'll have to tell my dad,” Carl said. “He's going to raise hell.”

I took off my hat, wiped the sweat from my brow with my sleeve, and plopped it back aboard. It was hot and getting hotter and I needed to get going and probably so did Carl on whatever business had brought him out here. “All right,” I said. “But be sure to tell him I apologize for not asking him first.”

Carl backed his horse up, then swung it around. He nodded toward the plastic bags. “Could I look at that bone again that was sort of like a claw?”

I stood up and handed it over. He studied the bone in his big, calloused hand. The Haxbys worked hard, all of them, and Carl's hands reflected that. “Looks like a broken bird claw,” he said.

“Yep. Dr. Pickford—he's the lead paleontologist—says there were a lot of dinosaurs with claws out here. Sharp teeth, too.”

“Then why does it look like a bird claw?”

“I don't know, Carl.”

“Maybe there were big birds that didn't get on the ark,” Carl offered.

“Could be,” I said.

Carl cocked his head. “How did you get into this, Mike?”

“Jeanette volunteered me.”

“You do what she says?”

“She's my boss.”

“But you'd like her to be more,” he said, smiling for the first time since he'd found me. When he saw my expression, which wasn't happy, he added, “Sorry. The Haxby wives gossip. I sometimes listen.”

“Tell them I said I'm in love with her. That'll give them something to talk about for a long time.”

He rubbed his jaw, then shook his head. “I'll do no such thing.”

“I'll get off your land, Carl. Right now. I'll find the girl and make her leave, too.”

He nodded, then said, “No need. As far as I'm concerned, you just asked for permission. Have fun picking up bones.”

Carl rode off and I waited until he disappeared around the hill. Although I was relieved at the way things had turned out, I still felt like shit. The Haxbys had their ways and I didn't agree with all of them but they'd always been good neighbors. Now, I'd thumbed my nose at them in the worst way I could do it.

Wanting to get off the Haxby BLM as soon as possible, I crossed the hill at one of the low saddles. Laura wasn't in sight as I came over but I did spot some bones. They were horn chunks, probably Triceratops. I wrote them up in my log, and collected them. Then I slid down the hill and walked along it for a while before spotting Laura on one of the benches. She was sitting there, looking at something with binoculars. I turned to see what it might be and saw that she was looking toward Blackie Butte. “What do you see?” I asked.

Startled, she hastily put down the binoculars. “Nothing. Just looking,” she said.

I climbed up beside her. “May I?” I asked, indicating the binoculars and she reluctantly handed them over. I looked at Blackie Butte and saw two people standing on a ledge about halfway up it. “Is that Pick and Tanya?”

“Yes,” Laura said. “I'm glad Tanya found him. Lost as usual.”

Laura had lied to me. She had definitely been watching the pair but, if so, why hadn't she said so? My first guess, me being a man, is that she was jealous that Tanya was alone with Pick.

“Look,” I said, “one of the Haxby brothers caught me and he wasn't too happy about us being here. Let's go back.”

“We have a permit,” she said.

“Yes. That and permission from the rancher who leases the BLM is all that we need to hunt fossils on this land. We have one but not the other.”

Laura looked at me. “Did you find anything?”

I showed her my plastic bags. Nothing interested her except the claw. “Nice,” she said. “Where's the rest of it?”

I smiled. “I don't know.”

“OK. Let's go back. I'm kind of tired, anyway.” She rubbed her shoulder and winced.

I crouched beside her. “I used to know how to give a decent shoulder rub.” When she didn't say anything, I took it as permission to proceed. She was muscular and some of those muscles were in knots so I had my work cut out for me. She leaned back into my hands.

“That feels good,” she said and took off her hat and dropped her head forward to let me at her neck, which was also in a big knot. I kept going until she said, “Thank you” and stood up. “Ready to go back?” she asked.

“Sure.” If I expected any kind of reciprocity, that clearly wasn't going to happen. I reached for the binoculars, planning to see what Pick and Tanya were doing now but Laura quickly stuffed the binoculars in her pack. She headed down the hill and I followed her, wondering what it was she didn't want me to see but pretty sure she wasn't going to tell me if I asked. So I didn't. Sometimes, things just have to come out on their own.

When we got back to camp, Pick and Tanya hadn't returned so Laura suggested a snack. I suggested snacks with drinks. When I told her I had the ingredients for a g&t, her eyes lit up. I followed her into the cook tent and to the refrigerator. When she opened the door, she saw my veggies. “I'm a vegetarian,” I said and she stared at me in shock. “No kidding,” I added.

“OK,” she said, stretching out both letters, “I guess now I've heard everything. A vegetarian cowboy.” She eyed my other traps, especially the duffel bag which had the logo of the Los Angeles Police Department on it. “I heard you used to be a policeman.”

“I heard the same thing. So did a bad guy who shot me.” When she raised her eyebrows over her lovely baby blues, I told her a condensed version of how I was just standing there minding my own business when some fellow popped me. Actually, I had just beat up his buddy and tossed him through a plate glass window but never mind.

“What brought you to Montana?”

“A truck,” I said. “I sold it to Bill Coulter for one dollar. He sold it for five hundred.”

She let my evasion slide and asked, “Who's Bill Coulter?”

“Jeanette Coulter's husband. He died five years ago.”

She nodded, then poked around in the fridge until she found some crackers and cheese spread. “This OK? How about fish? I have some tuna salad.”

“Works for me. Eggs are OK, too.”

“Got it,” she said. “By the way, I tried being a vegetarian once but I kept having strange dreams.”

“What about?”

“That I wanted a steak and couldn't have one.”

“I have that dream all the time,” I confessed. “Then I go out and help a heifer have a calf and I forget it.”

“You help a heifer have a calf? Cowboys are really that lonely?”

I chuckled. “Maybe I could have put that a better way.”

“How about my drink? Get a cup from that box. Mine is that red one on top of the fridge.”

The indicated box held plastic cups. I used my pocket knife to slice a lime on a folding camp table, added ice from the little freezer compartment, and made two g&t's with a lot more
g
than usual. I felt we deserved it. I also hoped it might loosen Laura up so she would provide more information about…well, I didn't really know but my antenna was starting to go up. Something was going on that wasn't exactly clear.

Beneath the awning of the tent, Laura had another table set up along with two unfolded folding chairs. She had emptied some crackers in a plastic bowl and taken the top off two plastic containers, one with a creamed cheese something, the other the tuna salad. She stuck a white plastic knife into each. I subsided in one of the chairs and handed over her g&t. Cocktails were served.

Everything was pleasant. The sun hid behind a big puffy cloud, a little breeze came mewing over us, and no mosquitoes, flies, or gnats chose to bite us. Laura confirmed the obvious. “This is nice,” she said.

“Agreed,” I replied.

“The drink is excellent.”

“Some people would say it's the gin that's important, or the tonic, but actually it's the lime.”

“I would say all three ingredients are important,” Laura replied. “The lime keeps scurvy away, the tonic is a preemptive strike against malaria, and the gin is an ancient tranquilizer, good for the heart.”

Laura had bested me and I acknowledged it with a nod of my head, saying, “Well, anyway, I was glad to see the limes in the fridge since I forgot to bring any.”

“I bought them in Bozeman,” she said. “Little natural foods shop downtown.”

“Bozeman's nice,” I said.

“Yep. I went to school at Montana State. In a way, you might say I was one of Jack Horner's protégés. You know who he is, right?”

I did, mainly because I loved Michael Crichton's books and the movies made from them. I said, “
Jurassic Park
advisor, Crichton's model for the paleontologist in the book, an author in his own right, and so forth?”

“Well, those are a few of Jack's attributes. Actually, he's important to paleontology because he changed the way we think about dinosaurs with his study of Maiasaura, a duckbill he named and described. Its name means ‘good mother lizard' and Horner showed by his excavations how Maiasaurs took care of their nestlings. For the first time, somebody was talking about dinosaurs as social animals that parented their little ones. Without that insight, we might have been stumbling around in the dark for years about these animals. His insights gave other paleontologists a platform to build on. Now, we can infer that nearly all dinosaurs led complex, interesting lives, much like the animals of today.”

“What's the word for when you think of animals like people?” I asked.

“Anthropomorphic,” she instantly answered, cocking an eyebrow. “Perhaps Horner and the rest of us are a bit guilty of that but I don't care. Animals feel a lot of the things we feel. They get afraid like us, and sometimes they panic and do stupid things, just as we do. They sleep, they drowse, they even ponder. Have you ever seen a squirrel stare at one of those bird feeders designed to stop them? They figure out a way to get at it, eventually. This is not by trial and error. They
think,
Mike. More importantly, many animals, and Horner showed this included some dinosaurs, feel a type of love, love of their children, love of their mates. Oh, I'm sure Jack Horner would argue he didn't say anything like that at all, but was only describing the methodology used to perpetuate the species, but I believe the emotion they felt was very akin to what we think of as love.”

“It's hard to imagine they had time to do anything but avoid getting eaten by T. rexes,” I observed.

She sipped her drink, then allowed herself a moment before answering. “Maybe things weren't quite as horrible in their world as we think. Maybe, in fact, they would think our world is the horrible one, what with all our rushing around, our polluting, our broken families, our terrible reliance on mind-altering drugs—your excellent g-and-t, of course, gets a pass here—and on and on.”

“Well,” I said, “the next time I'm in Bozeman, I might just go shake Dr. Horner's hand. You said you were his protégé. Why aren't you still with him?”

“A higher calling named Pick Pickford. It was an emotional decision, I'll confess, not an intellectual one. Luckily, I already had my master's degree before I met him at the annual SVP conference. That's the Society of Vertebrate Paleontologists. I heard him speak, saw the results of his work, and asked him if I could help. He said he had no money and I said that was no problem. I had a little and it was his if he'd take me on his next expedition. Been with him ever since.”

“Happily?”

She shrugged. “Most of the time. We've found some important stuff together.”

I decided to be blunt. “What else out here have you found besides this Trike?”

Again, she gave her answer some thought. In fact, she gave it so much thought, she didn't answer at all. So I prompted her by saying, “Pick said he was mostly interested in finding a baby T. rex, matching the bones Bill Coulter found years ago.”

“That would be grand, wouldn't it?” she said. “But maybe you ought to ask Pick.”

I didn't respond, mainly because our little moment with our snacks and drinks was really too pleasant to spoil. “I enjoyed myself today,” I said. “Being a dinosaur hunter is fun.”

“Nothing like it in the world,” she said. “It astonishes me that everyone doesn't want to do it. I mean, being outside, breathing fresh air, digging up the past, having a drink with a vegetarian cowboy and all that. It's the best way to live.”

“Cowboying is a bit like that, too, except there's cow manure involved,” I said.

She smiled. “Wait here,” she said, and jumped up and went behind the cook tent where her own tent was pitched. She brought back a plastic sample bag, opened it, and handed me part of its contents.

I handled what appeared to be a brownish-gray lump of crumbling rock. “What is it?” I asked.

“T. rex poop! Isn't it beautiful?”

I looked it over. Now that I knew what it was, I could see by its shape, sort of a tubular blob, that it was indeed poop except it appeared to be made out of rock and dirt. “How do you know it's T. rex?”

“Well, it's big and, if you looked under a microscope, you'd observe crunched bone. T. rex is the obvious candidate.”

Based on my expression, I think she could tell I was suitably impressed. “You paleontologists sure are interesting,” I said.

She smiled, but then took the T. rex manure away. “We call this stuff coprolite.”

“Why?”

“It's Greek. It means ‘shit rock.'”

“Ah, the Greeks,” I replied.

She carried her dino-doo back to her tent, then returned just as Tanya and Pick arrived, all sweaty and with their packs full. They did not offer to show me what was in them. Instead, with Laura helping them, they put the packs away and joined us for our hors d'oeuvres. I inquired about drinks for the two and both agreed that would be just fine. I could tell my gin wasn't going to last long with this crowd.

We lolled around the table, everyone being quiet. Finally, Pick said, “I heard you and Laura had a productive day.”

“I learned a lot,” I answered. “I also found a claw or at least a partial one.” I showed it to him and he took a moment to admire it.

“Ornithomimosaur,” he said, confirming Laura's estimate. To my disappointment, he put it in his shirt pocket. “You put down in your log where you found it?”

“I did.”

“Good. I might want to go have a look around there. Ornithos were interesting animals. They were theropods without teeth, just beaks.”

Tanya said, “I'm the cook tonight. Thought I'd grill some hamburgers.”

“Mike's a vegetarian,” Laura said, which, based on Tanya's expression, surprised her.

“Good for you,” Tanya finally said.

“Don't worry about me,” I said. “I can feed myself.”

“I'll fix a big salad,” Tanya offered. “And we have lots of rice. How about saffron rice? Would you like that?”

“Sure. I brought along rice and beans to add to your stock.”

She smiled at me. “Mike, you are an interesting man.” This made me happy. I mean how often did a beautiful Russian woman declare that I was interesting?

Laura wanted to document our Trike dig some more so I went along to help her. She took photographs, jotted notes, and directed me to brush off the exposed bones. When we returned, dinner was served around the same table where we'd had our drinks. The salad and saffron rice were excellent and before long, we were all stretching and letting our tiredness be known. Soon, we'd wandered off to our respective tents. When I crawled into my sleeping bag, I knew I wasn't going to last long and I didn't.

Tanya, who apparently was always assigned cooking duties, had breakfast ready first thing in the morning. Scrambled eggs, bacon (not for me, of course), toast, and several kinds of breakfast cereal. I was feeling downright pampered. “Back to the Trike,” Laura told me.

“I'm your cowboy,” I said.

“Giddyup,” she replied, smiling and giving me the eye. I liked both of Pick's ladies. They seemed to like me, too, which was kind of nice.

Pick and Tanya said they were going to go prospecting again so Laura and I dug, photographed, measured, and packed bones away until just before noon when a distant drone told us company was coming. It proved to be Ray and Amelia on four-wheelers. “We came to help,” Ray said.

“Can we?” Amelia asked, eagerly.

“Yes,” I answered before Laura could say a word, “but first I'll have to explain what we're doing here and why.”

Laura laughed and said, “Mike is already an expert dinosaur digger. Come on up. Let him teach you what you need to know.”

They parked their vehicles and came up and I essentially repeated the lecture Laura had given to me. Laura added some instruction on the careful use of the tools, assigned them a large bone to work on together, and then let them settle down to it. After a while, Laura said, “If you get hungry, food's in the mess tent. Fix what you like.”

Over the next week, we fell into a rhythm of up early, breakfast; Laura, me, Ray, and Amelia at work on the Trike; Pick and Tanya going off somewhere and returning in the evening with full packs. They seemed as tired as we were at the end of the day, so cocktails for those who wanted it, dinner, and to bed after a little conversation around the fire pit which we'd dug to burn cedar in to chase away the mosquitoes.

Of all of us, Amelia seemed to be having the most fun. She loved it all, the picking, scraping, and brushing. She overflowed with questions on our Triceratops and Laura patiently answered them all.

One night around the fire pit, Amelia said, “I've decided to be a paleontologist.”

Pick said, “I think you'd be a good one. But I have to tell you there's not much money in it.”

“I don't care,” Amelia replied. “I like it. Anyway, it'll get me out of this place.”

“What's wrong with this place?” Ray demanded, then said, “Never mind. I've heard it all before.”

“What's wrong with this place,” Amelia said precisely, “is that it's like living inside a cage. We're stuck, Ray. Can't you see that?”

“All I see is this ranch, which I think is a fine place to live. I don't think I'm in a cage at all.”

“Well, good luck,” she answered. “I'm out of here after graduation.”

“Sure. Good luck to you, too,” Ray grumped.

Laura and Tanya, recognizing a lover's spat when they heard one, stayed out of it. Pick wasn't so smart. “I can give you recommendations,” he said to Amelia. “There are several excellent institutions you could attend, including Montana State.”