I waited with Katie and Chip while Ling ran back up to the ridge to get me a change of clothes. Steve had drawn the group into a circle to give instructions for the day’s work, so we stayed quiet until he finished and set them off up the hill.
“You must get used to poachers in your business,” I said to Chip, “but I’d find them really annoying.”
“Back home we’d call them thieves,” Katie said, “and Dev’s mother would catch them. Fast. That’s why her nickname is Commissioner Quick.”
Katie was trying to keep things light, but I’d heard that joke about my mom’s name too many times to laugh at it again. She had rolled her finger in the mud on my pants leg and was writing her initials on my forearm. “You have to steal something to be a thief,” Chip said.
Steve joined our conversation. “Could be, Katie, that it was just a diversion someone tried to cause.”
“What do you mean by that?” she asked.
“Might be someone jealous of the operation we’re running over here. Took a run in during the night just to snoop around and see what we’re doing.”
“That sounds pretty weak to me, sir, if you don’t mind my opinion,” I said.
Maybe it wasn’t my place to butt in, but Steve’s whole manner had changed since we told him about the tire tracks. He wasn’t so cheerful now. He was trying to downplay the trespass. But it sounded like a real problem to me.
“Seems more like somebody was scooping around than snooping,” Katie said.
“Okay, I’ll even give the trespassers a few scoops. They’re trying to divert my attention from the real job at hand,” Steve said. “Take my focus away from keeping this team together.”
“That’s really interesting,” I said. “A diversionary tactic which throws us all off our game. You’re saying we could be wasting this entire day if you panicked and made us stop to hunt down the trespassers.”
“Time is really precious to us out here,” Steve said. “There are only so many weeks before the seasons change and then the harsh weather and shorter daylight hours cut us off.”
“Sometimes, Dev, it’s just a local rancher who’s curious about how we do what we’re doing,” Chip said. “I’ve run into guys on neighboring property who’d like to try to dig up their own bones and sell them off before we can. Just harmless folks who live around here and hope to win the lottery by finding a dinosaur leg by copycatting what we do.”
Steve seemed to have one idea and Chip quite another. Steve thought the trespassers were intending to throw him off course, while Chip chalked it up to nosy neighbors. I had to wonder whether they were being honest with us, or just trying to keep us from getting spooked. What if these nighttime invaders were really criminals, looking to make off with valuable fossils?
“How about we give you and Ling some privacy down at the edge of the river, so you can wash that muck off and get back to digging?” Steve asked.
“I’d like that,” I said.
“I’ll go with you,” Katie said.
“I’d rather get you started up on the hill, Katie.” Steve looked like he’d spent enough time with us kids because of the trouble I’d caused—or because of the news about the trespassers. He was ready to work, and probably to alert the sheriff. “Dev can catch up to you.”
“But—”
“It’s okay, Katie,” I said. “I’ll come right back after I change my clothes.”
Steve uncrossed his arms and pointed at the incline, just to the right of the orange spray-painted circle where Ling had found her tooth yesterday, and about ten feet below where the tire tracks had entered the property during the night.
“Pick up your tools, Katie,” Steve said. He was dead serious now. “Let’s see if you can earn your keep again today.”
7
By the time I took my muddy things off and dipped into the chilly river water, dried myself, and dressed in Ling’s clothes, we got back to find Katie on her hands and knees, using a small ice pick to chip away at the rocks she encountered on her slow climb.
I dropped down next to her after Ling walked off to join the older students, and Katie paused to ask me how I was doing. “I’m fine, I think.”
“You’re still shaking, Dev.”
“That water is really cold.”
“You can’t fool me,” Katie said. “I know you better than that.”
I picked up a small shovel—like a garden tool—and leaned over to start to dig. “Back to work,” I said. “I don’t want to go home empty-handed.”
“I sort of don’t want to go home at all yet.”
“Kyle fever, huh?”
Katie got back on all fours with her tool in hand, and we inched our way upward side by side. Pretty soon, we were both sweating so much that the coolness of the mud and the nippy river were a distant memory.
We poked around for more than an hour before Steve called out for the first mid-morning break. Kyle was passing bottles of water to all the volunteers.
I stood up and walked over to Steve’s position, where the graduate students had gathered around him.
“We’re off to a good start today,” Steve said. “Ling found two more teeth, not far from yesterday’s discovery—”
“Why is it always Ling?” Katie asked me.
“Hey, you found some little bones. There’s no room for jealousy in a bone bed.”
“Can you look at these?” Steve said, holding out his hand for all of us to see. “These are duckbill dino teeth, for certain.”
“How can you tell?” Katie asked.
“Good question. As I was saying last night, teeth give us a lot of information.” Steve held up one of the fossils between his thumb and forefinger. “Meat-eaters— carnosaurs—have sharper teeth.”
We all nodded.
“Duckbills ate berries and plants, like honeysuckle and evergreens,” he said.
“Excuse me,” Katie said, “but how do you even know what kind of plants there were so many millions of years ago.”
Steve grimaced at the second interruption. He didn’t know, I guess, that at Ditchley we’re taught to ask questions about everything we don’t understand. Katie was a pro at that.
“The rock formations that were created way back then actually have remains of pollen in them, Katie. Pollen that botanists have matched to berry bushes and dogwood trees.”
“Pretty cool,” she said, no doubt thinking of more things to ask to keep her off her hands and knees.
“Back to duckbills,” Steve said. “Not very many reptiles chew their food. They can bite and chop and swallow, but they don’t chew. Duckbills had scores of teeth—in rows, actually, on both sides of their jaws. They were grinders, which was the perfect apparatus for processing plant food. They were very successful dinosaurs.”
“Why are they called ‘duckbills’?” Katie asked.
One of the grad students, impatient to move on, answered her question. “Check them out, next time you go to a natural history museum, Katie. They’ve got really distinctive skull shapes, these dinos. They’re really broad and very flat, so they form kind of a beak. Just like a duck.”
“Don’t forget about the crests,” Ling said. “Some of the duckbills have crests, just like their feathered counterparts. And webbed feet, too.”
“Super-ducks!” Katie shouted. “That’s what I’d call them. Let’s go find us one.”
Her voice carried over the whole hillside. The older volunteers, scattered around the incline, turned to see why Katie was yelling at top volume.
Steve Paulson was going to think twice about us kid volunteers from now on—that was clear from the expression on his face. “Go for it, Katie. And remember, so far these seem to be the fossils of juvenile duckbills.”
“Is that unusual?” I asked.
“Juveniles?” Steve seemed to be relaxed when I spoke. Maybe he was reliev
ed that I was participating again, after my misstep. “They’re the rarest of all fossil finds. People have been finding dinosaur bones for centuries, thinking—back in the old days—that they were the remains of giants. But it was in 1824, in England, that the first scientific connection was made to an ancient animal.”
He went on. “It was another one hundred years before any babies were identified, in Mongolia. They’re still pretty hard to come by. So this is an exciting day for us, and I want you all to get back to work with renewed enthusiasm.”
Katie beat me back to our spot on the hill and got right to work. We scraped and dug and whisked off pieces of rock with our little brooms. When lunchtime came, we trudged off to the side and tried to shade ourselves behind a scrubby bush.
“Back to work,” Katie said. “Four hours to go.”
“I’ve got pebbles digging into my kneecaps,” I said. “They’ll be black and blue for sure.”
“Look who’s complaining today? Pouting about pebbles. Really, Dev?”
“The only things I’ve found since we started are a scorpion in my shoe and a mudflat!”
Every now and then, when I scanned the group above and below us, I could see Steve and Chip examining objects the others were holding out to them—finds that these volunteers had made.
Ling was about twenty feet above Katie and me. She walked down to grab another bottle of water and stopped to talk to us.
“How are you two doing?” she asked.
“Fine, thank you,” Katie said, hunching over her dig site as though protecting it from a poacher.
“See what’s going on there?” she said, pointing to a place in the soil—a dip in the earth—where the red mudstone met up with a patch of green mudstone. “Want some help?”
“I’ll call you if I need advice,” Katie said, offering a smile to Ling.
“Okay, then.” She walked on, but kept looking back over her shoulder.
“Do you know what she was talking about?” Katie asked me.
“Not a clue. You should have let her help you,” I said, scraping the pebbles off my knees.
“C’mon, Dev. Don’t you value your independence?”
“Of course I do, but—”
“You’ve got to see this,” Katie said, straightening her back and reapplying herself to the dirt in front of her. “It’s like a hollow bowl here, once you scratch the surface. It’s bigger than our kitchen sink.”
When I picked my head up, I could see Katie digging furiously with both hands, like a dog pawing into the ground to find a hidden bone.
“Slow down,” I said, swiveling around so I could dig, too.
But Katie was clearing the soil away from the top and sides of the bowl all by herself. The next thing I knew, she had uncovered seven or eight little mounds—black ones, spotted with gray, that were sort of planted within the dirt bowl. They stuck out of the concave hollowed-out spot in the ground like a bunch of upside-down cardboard coffee containers.
Ling must have overheard us. She was running back to Katie, leaning in over her shoulder. Her jaw dropped before she gathered herself to speak. “Don’t touch them. Let’s get Steve or Chip over here.”
She turned and called out their names, waving her arms over her head.
“I can’t believe you made this amazing discovery. I wish it had been me,” Ling said.
“What are they?” I asked.
“They’re eggs. They’re unhatched dinosaur eggs,” she said. “Katie, you’ve found an entire clutch.”
Ling was trying to get Steve’s attention.
“I don’t even know what a clutch is,” Katie said.
“It’s what you call all of the eggs that a reptile lays in one grouping,” I said.
“Do I really have a clutch of super-duckbills?” Katie said, taking her whisk broom from her jeans pocket and throwing it up in the air like it was a baton.
“It’s incredible,” I said, hugging my friend from behind. “You bet you do. You have the super-find of the entire dig!”
8
Steve was on his knees, gazing in wonder at Katie’s find. She was glued to the dirt, right beside him, refusing to move away from her triumphant discovery.
Chip was commanding all the volunteers to keep their positions, but allowing Kyle and the grad students to circle in around the bowl to examine Katie’s eggs.
We were all snapping cell phone shots of the unusual sight. The whole crater looked like a miniature version of how I imagined the surface of the moon to be—gray and black, craggy and uneven, with worn markings that seemed as old as time.
Chip sprayed an enormous neon circle of paint to mark the spot, and we all gathered around inside it.
“You get to name that, Katie,” Steve said. “Anything you want.”
Katie looked at me and laughed. “It’s got to be the Ditch, Steve. For Ditchley. That’s the nickname of the school Dev and I go to, and it’s the perfect name for a clutch that was hiding in a scooped out hole in the earth.”
“I’m good with that.”
“Do I get to name the mama, too? The super-duck who laid the eggs?”
“Why not?” Steve said. “We may find some traces of her, even after you two are gone.”
“Then she’s going to be Willie D,” Katie said. “For Wilhelmina Ditchley. If Ms. Ditchley were still alive, she’d be so proud of me, don’t you think, Dev?”
“For certain.”
“I don’t even care if poachers made off with anything last night,” Katie said, leaning back to whisper to me. “I’ve got the best buried treasure of all.”
“You’re off the charts, Katie,” I said, patting her on the shoulder.
“How do I get my clutch out of here, Steve?” she asked. “I’ve got to take one of these eggs to my science class in the fall.”
“Not so fast, missy,” Steve said.
“But they’re mine, aren’t they?” Katie said, talking faster than she could think. “At least I sure hope they will be once we talk to the ranch owner and he agrees to let me keep them.”
“Think bigger picture, Katie,” I said. “This isn’t about you. These eggs might belong in a museum, not on your mom’s kitchen counter.”
I stood up and continued to brush pebbles off my knees. “Sorry, but these stones really hurt.”
“They’re not pebbles digging into you,” Ling said, reaching down to pick up some of the debris. “They’re fragments of fossils. Place them onto some matting for me, will you, so we can preserve them and pack them up with the rest of the find?”
“Eleven eggs,” Katie said. “I’m counting eleven of them. Can’t I have just one?”
“Use your common sense, girl,” Chip shouted out.
Steve held his arm out to his side to calm the other man. “It’s quite difficult to extract this entire nest from the ground, in one piece, without disturbing—”
“Extract the Ditch,” Katie said, laughing at the whole idea of it. “You meant to say you have to dig out this whole Ditch. It’s got a name now, you guys.”
“Okay. What we’ll have to do starting tomorrow is—”
“But Dev and I won’t be here tomorrow.”
“We’ll let you know every little step we take, Katie,” Steve said. “Look closely and you’ll see that the ends of the eggs are embedded in the soil. You can’t lift any one of them out separately. Remember, they’re petrified, just like other fossils.”
“Yeah,” Katie said. “I get it.”
“There’s a delicate process for lifting this entire nest—the Ditch—out of the ground safely,” Steve said.
“How do you do it?” I asked.
“Do you know what plaster of Paris is?” Steve asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“You do?” Katie asked. “How do you know?”
“Booker’s mo
m’s an orthopedic surgeon. Remember?” I said. “Those doctors use plaster of Paris—it’s a kind of powder that they mix with water—to make casts when you have broken bones.”
“We use the same technique to make plaster molds, girls,” Steve said. “Chip and I will soak some burlap strips in wet plaster, and then wrap the entire Ditch—eggs and all—and cover it in a cast so it doesn’t break apart, to get it safely back to the museum in Manhattan.”
I was staring at the large hole in the earth, and its eleven mounds of buried treasure, sticking up in the air every which way—duckbill eggs. “But first you’ve got to get that whole thing out of the ground, Steve, before you make a cast for it. How do you do that?”
“We’ll have to get a bulldozer in here,” he said, “with a large scoop on the end of it.”
“Just like the poachers used last night,” I said, grimacing at the thought of what those people might have done if they’d come across Katie’s Ditch.
“Trespassers, maybe. But you’ve got no reason to call them poachers,” Steve said. “Look at this incredible treasure trove that they missed. Sort of goes to show they weren’t trying very hard to find anything. Not half as hard as Katie.”
I was happy for my best friend, trying to force back down into my throat that little bit of envy that was bubbling up. You can’t envy your friends, my grandmother Lulu liked to tell me, or you won’t have them for very long. Delight in their good fortune. Lulu’s advice was usually spot-on.
“You let us get your nest back to the museum in New York, ask the scientists to tell us exactly what we’ve got and how rare it is, and then you and I can talk again about what you want to do with these things,” Steve said to Katie.
I didn’t think anyone would hear me talking to Kyle. “Will you do me a favor?”
He nodded. Kyle was the silent type, which served him well in this kind of situation.
“Get me some photos of the tire treads of that bulldozer when the crew brings it in tomorrow and e-mail them to me when you get back home,” I said. My mother would know an expert who could compare the two sets of tire tracks—the ones I took today and the ones on the bulldozer. Maybe that will be a useful clue.
Digging For Trouble Page 5
