Digging For Trouble

by Linda Fairstein

  “For what?” I asked.

  “Usually to hunt on your land, or fish your rivers and streams.”

  “In our work,” Ling said, “the poachers come to steal the bones, once we’ve done all the hard work to find the fossils in the first place.”

  “On midget bulldozers?” I asked. “You’d think one of those would stand out like a sore thumb around here.”

  Kyle shook his head. “There are loads of them, Dev. There’s a big mine not far from town, and the mini-dozers are used to go down into the mines and scoop up minerals.”

  “Don’t worry, Ling,” I said. “We can follow the tracks and figure out who sneaked in here while we were all asleep.”

  “Dev’s really good at this kind of thing,” Katie said. “I promise we’ll all help find you some more dinosaur teeth.”

  “It’s not teeth, Katie. It’s much more than that,” Ling said, discouragement dripping from her words.

  “What then?” I asked.

  “When you find several teeth, like our group did this week,” she said, pointing at three other nearby orange circles on the ground, “Steve’s right that there’s a good chance there’s a skull pretty close by. And the skull is the biggest prize of all, Dev.”

  “How come?”

  “That’s how fossil thieves work. Museums will pay a fortune for an intact dinosaur skull, complete with its jawbone. It’s the easiest way to identify the species of the animal. We’re all just picking up bits and pieces like we did yesterday, hoping the scientists will be able to put the puzzle together for us,” Ling said, looking too close to tears for my taste. “Meanwhile, someone just sneaked in right under our noses and may have dug out the biggest treasure of all.”

  5

  Kyle and I followed the tire tracks more than a hundred yards off to the right, while Katie brought up the rear.

  The tracks ended when we reached a dirt road that ran parallel to the wide bone bed that we’d been digging on.

  “What happened here?” I asked.

  “Probably whoever was thinking about poaching something had a flatbed truck parked here,” Kyle said. “It’s how he brought the bulldozer and left with it.”

  The three of us were stumped. I turned to walk back to the spot where Ling was standing, guarding her piece of turf against all comers.

  I pulled my cell phone out of my backpack.

  “No reception here,” Kyle said. “Don’t you remember?”

  “I know. I’m taking some pictures of the tracks.”

  Kyle shrugged and passed by me. “Just ordinary tracks.”

  “There’s no such thing,” I said, getting down on one knee to snap a close-up of the indentations in the soil. “Every brand of tire has a unique tread mark.”

  “It’s not that Dev is smarter than we are, Kyle,” Katie said. “It’s just that her mom finds out all these things in her job, and then Dev stores this useless information in her brain till the right moment when she can pluck it out to try to impress someone.”

  “You never know when stuff is going to come in handy,” I said. “My mother has this amazing detective named Sam Cody who works with her. Sam once caught a major criminal because the guy was careless enough to drive on the grass in the middle of Central Park after fleeing the crime scene. There’s a company that makes a business out of identifying every brand and model of treads on tires.”

  “That’s neat,” Kyle said.

  “We could get lucky here.”

  Steve Paulson, Chip Donner, and the group of grad students and volunteers were making their way down from the ridge to start the day’s work.

  The three of us huddled with Ling.

  “Did you find anything?” I asked her.

  “How could you expect me to find something that’s been taken away?”

  “You don’t know that for sure, do you? I mean, it’s possible the poacher didn’t have any more productive a dig than I did yesterday.”

  She uncrossed her arms and pointed at a large hole in the dirt. “Don’t you think something was scooped out of there, Dev? Isn’t it obvious?”

  “I’ll admit that it looks like someone tried to lift out a big chunk of earth. But how would he—or she—know where to find the skull in all this dirt?”

  Ling was rocking herself from side to side. “Maybe he was watching us all week.”

  “You mean you think it could be someone involved in Steve’s project?” Katie asked.

  I knew Katie was thinking of Chip Donner.

  “Why not?” Ling said. “You know that two days before you got here, other people found teeth in that same area of the grid that I did. It’s as good a guess as any.”

  “We’ve got to sound professional when we tell this to Steve,” I said, trying to get the four of us to focus. “Let’s start with the facts. Everyone in our group was accounted for last night, right? All sleeping in our tents.”

  “I wasn’t in the tent,” Kyle said. “But I didn’t move from the spot once I got into my sleeping bag.”

  “You’re not a suspect anyway,” Katie said, smiling at Kyle.

  I’d save it till later to tell Katie it was bad investigative form to take the pressure off Kyle before we even got started. How do we know what he did during the night?

  “And Chip went home to sleep,” Ling said. “He said his wife hadn’t been feeling well all day and he wanted to be with her.”

  “Check,” I said.

  “I thought it was really a sweet thing,” Ling said.

  “We have to set a time frame for this,” I said. “What time did you and the grad students go to sleep, Ling?”

  “We were up till after one o’clock. I think it was one fifteen when I said good night to the others and came back to the tent.”

  “Did you see or hear anything going on down the slope?”

  “Not then,” Ling said. “A few of us even stood at the edge of the ridge and looked around, trying to imagine what it was like when all those terrible lizards—that’s the Greek translation of the word ‘dinosaurs’—roamed Montana. But there was nothing happening here at that hour.”

  “I’m surprised your Atwells didn’t pick up anything, Dev,” Katie said. “I didn’t think they were ever off-duty.”

  “Sorry,” Ling said. “What are your Atwells?”

  “So, my grandmother’s last name is Atwell,” I explained, laughing. “Louella Atwell. And she has the most incredible hearing of anyone I’ve ever known. Like she could have heard my whisk broom brushing sand away from rocks if she’d been in a tent up above us yesterday.”

  “And Dev inherited that trait,” Katie said. “She’s got Atwell ears, and they’ve even helped her solve mysteries.”

  Kyle picked his head up and looked at me like I was an alien.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I never heard a word that you and Katie were saying to each other last night. I promise. My ears fell asleep before I did.”

  There was no reason to let either of them know that the final thing Katie whispered to Kyle before I drifted off was that she was going to take a photograph of him at the Big Timber rodeo tonight to keep on her desk at home.

  Me? I’d rather frame a picture of his good-looking pinto than his face.

  “So, I’m guessing the poacher came in sometime between two in the morning and six,” Kyle said.

  “I suppose he knew exactly where to go,” Ling said, “based on observing us the past couple of days, before you girls got here. Maybe the poacher took two or three practice scoops nearby, until he found what he was looking for. That’s what we tell Steve.”

  “Hold your horses,” I said. “Do you know how many times you’ve used the words ‘guess’ and ‘suppose’? Real detectives don’t go to work on the basis of guesses, okay? We have to reach our conclusions by reasoning, not by guessing. We have to be logical and f
actual.”

  “You’re about to get Devlin Quick’s lecture on Sherlock Holmes,” Katie said.

  “Have you ever read any of Sherlock’s case studies?” I asked.

  Both Ling and Kyle answered in the negative.

  “He’s the greatest detective who ever lived.”

  “He didn’t live, Dev. He’s a character in a bunch of books and stories.”

  “The thing about good books, Katie, is that if they are really well-told tales, the characters come alive. They’re better companions than a lot of people I’ve met.”

  “What’s up with you kids?” Steve Paulson called out from the trail next to the bone bed. “What’s going on up there?”

  “Let me take the lead on this one, if you don’t mind,” I said. “Let’s make deductions, so we sound intelligent, okay? And while we’re at it, let’s all use our keenest powers of observation to watch how all the others react to the news that we’ve been visited by a poacher. That’s what made Sherlock brilliant. He was a careful observer of other people.”

  “So you admit there’s been a poacher, Dev?” Ling asked.

  “The tire track evidence and the scoops in the earth support the fact that there was a trespasser, for sure. What you’re guessing at is whether anyone actually found what he was looking for and got away with your treasure,” I said. “Let’s give it a fair shot and get on with our dig for the time being. We’re not even sure who we’re looking for or what, if anything, they took.”

  I turned away from our little group and started to jog down the incline toward Steve. Rope lines had been set up on the hill to mark the outer boundaries of the dig. I didn’t want to disturb any of the previous finds, so I ducked under one of the lines and headed down on the scraggly trail just south of the tire tracks.

  Steve was waving his arms over his head. “No, Dev, no! Stop running!”

  He sounded frantic as he tried to slow me down.

  “It’s okay, Steve. I’ll explain everything to you,” I said, picking up speed like a boulder rolling down the side of a slope.

  “You’ve got to stop, Dev!”

  I wanted to please him, of course, but I wanted him to hear the story from me.

  I didn’t understand why he wanted to stop me until it was too late.

  My feet were pounding into the dirt and my arms were pumping back and forth. I was eager to give Steve the news about the trespasser and to start to put my clues together. I was closing in on him, with Katie and Kyle somewhere in the distance behind me.

  I kept on running toward Steve until suddenly, the earth gave way beneath my legs.

  Before I could even blink, I was up to my knees in quicksand.

  6

  “Stop wiggling, Dev,” Chip Donner said, barking at me with his gruff voice. “I’ve got you and I’m not going to let go.”

  I was sinking deeper into the pile of soaking wet goo that was hidden beneath the dry brown dirt. Chip Donner had lay down on the solid ground next to my hole and stretched out his long arm to grab my elbow with his powerful right hand.

  “Stay still or you’ll make it worse, Dev,” Katie yelled to me. “Please don’t squirm.”

  “I’m not sq—”

  “No talking, Dev,” Chip said. “Steve’s got the rope from the boundary line, and we’ll wrap that around you and pull you out. You’re going to be okay.”

  I bit my lip and tried to keep myself from turning my head to look for Steve. I was a strong swimmer—a freestyler on the Ditchley swim team. My instinct was to kick my legs like I was treading water. But I knew this was not as friendly a spot as a swimming pool.

  “I can’t watch this,” Katie said, putting both hands over her eyes.

  Chip’s fingers were digging into my skinny arms. It was nothing for me to complain about since his hands were all that separated me from something worse that I didn’t want to think about.

  “Okay, now, Dev,” Chip said. “Steve and Kyle are right behind you. Kyle throws a lasso better than anyone in Sweet Grass County. It’s going to drop right onto your shoulders, and we’ll get it under your arms and yank you out. You good with that?”

  I nodded my head up and down.

  I could tell by the dazed look on Katie’s face, staring over the top of my head, that Kyle was directly behind me, ready to throw his lasso.

  “Here it comes, Dev,” Steve called out.

  The loop of rope landed on me like dead weight. I felt myself drop down another inch.

  “Raise both hands as high as you can,” Chip said. “One at a time. Go on, I’ll grab your other arm when you lift this one.”

  With my free arm, I reached for the sky, letting the rope slip down into the mud, below my waist. Chip grabbed for that elbow and got me on the second try, telling me to raise the one he’d been holding on to as fast as I could.

  Kyle tightened up on the rope and I felt my whole body jerk backward.

  “Hand it over,” Steve said to Kyle. “You hang on, Dev. I may bounce you a bit.”

  Steve yanked me out of the hole and onto dry ground in less than a minute. Katie was the first one to reach my side, hugging me like she thought she’d never see me again.

  I was trembling all over, trying to make light of the situation but not doing that well enough to fool anyone.

  “I thought quicksand was only a feature in bad movies,” I said. “Careful, Katie. I’m not even sure this stuff will come off in a bubble bath.”

  “You hit a mudflat, Dev,” Steve said, trying to calm me and everyone else around. “You were sunk in about as deep as you could go, so there wasn’t much more to fear. No worries there. Just an old-fashioned mudflat.”

  “What’s that?” Easy for him to say I shouldn’t have been so scared at this point.

  “They happen occasionally where the surface looks just like the rest of the soil we’ve been walking on. But since this used to be swampland and marsh once upon a time when this part of Montana was an inland sea, we stumble on these underground pockets of mud every now and then,” Steve said. “You feeling okay?”

  “Better now,” I said. “I felt like I was falling through to the center of the Earth.”

  “Nah. We wouldn’t have let you go very far. It’s why I was trying to steer you off that side trail, though. We’ve never tested anything except the ground that’s within the rope lines, and the path we use off to the other side to come down in the mornings.”

  “Thank goodness for those rope lines,” I said as Steve helped me onto my feet. “Hey, Kyle, I owe you for that perfect toss.”

  He was too modest to accept my thanks. “Easier to get hold of you while you’re standing still, stuck in a mudflat, than to lasso a bucking bronco. Good practice for the rodeo, Dev.”

  “Great deduction you made there,” Katie said, testing to make sure that my sense of humor had come out of the mud intact. “You’re no Sherlock, Dev. Why don’t you just tell Steve why you were running?”

  “Can it wait till we get you some clean clothes and take you over to the river to wash up?” Steve asked.

  “It’s pretty important,” I said.

  “Maybe it’s not something everybody around us needs to hear about,” Chip said, gesturing to the group of volunteer diggers who had gathered near the foot of the incline to see what was causing the excitement.

  “I’m not one to be rude, Chip, but maybe that’s exactly what it is,” I said. “The four of us got down here early this morning, just to check out the sunrise and the scenery. But it was pretty quickly obvious to all of us that there was someone trespassing on the bone bed last night.”

  “Trespassing?” Steve asked. His brow furrowed and his whole body seemed to tense when he repeated the word.

  Chip held his forefinger up to his mouth and said, “Shhhh.”

  “There were tire tracks on the hillside, Steve,” I said.


  “And some scoops in the earth, right near the place that I found the tooth yesterday,” Ling added.

  The two men looked at each other without speaking. I couldn’t read the expressions on their faces, but they seemed more concerned about news of trespassers than they did about what I feared was going to be my journey to the center of the Earth.

  Chip had kept me from sinking deeper into the mudflat by holding on to me, and I was thankful for his kindness. I didn’t want to harbor any unfounded suspicions about him, to add to Katie’s hunch, so I was trying to keep a level head.

  “Have you got extra clothes in the tent?” Steve asked.

  “Nothing clean, sir.”

  “My things will be a little big on Dev,” Ling said, “but I’ve got jeans and some shirts that I can spare.”

  “Let’s let you wash up, little lady,” Chip said. “We’ve got hours to sort this out.”

  “But it’s our last day,” Katie said. “What if poachers came in last night? What if they took something valuable?”

  “I’ll be sure to tell that to the sheriff when I call,” Steve said. “Look, Katie, what’s more important to you? Your best friend is shaking like a leaf on a cottonwood tree, and you’re worried about some tracks in the sand?”

  “I’m really going to be fine, Steve,” I said, forcing a smile.

  Steve was rattled, that’s for sure. He didn’t want to let on to us how much he was, but calling the sheriff must be a big deal in these parts. Then again, someone trespassing on a dig site was even more worrisome.

  “What you need to do, if you don’t mind, is convince Katie not to tell her mother about this—um, this misstep of mine, Steve,” I said, “so that Mrs. Cion doesn’t feel the need to tell my mom.”

  “What’s there to tell? Everybody’s doing fine,” Chip Donner said, brushing the dirt off his clothes. “Best of all, you get to keep on digging. I’m hoping it’s going to be somebody’s lucky day.”