by Homer Hickam
Suddenly, everybody appeared out of the shadows and cheered. Someone had fireworks and they shot them into the sky, showering us with bazillions of brilliant and flaming colorful sparks. The moon popped out, milky and brilliant, and the sun posed on the horizon, turning the sky a bright pink and the clouds scarlet. A sky-writer appeared and traced out a heart in the sky and two rabbits and a prairie dog linked arms and did an impromptu cancan dance.
Actually, none of that happened. Tanya and I just gazed at each other, realizing that we were always going to be together from that moment on. It didn’t matter if three hundred million years passed, our part in the timeline would be there, affecting everything that was to come. Time, at that moment, was in our hands. Deep time never seemed quite so real.
Edith appeared, breaking our little spell. “Mike, could I have a word?”
I was willing to provide a word. She had, after all, brought the beer. I demurely pecked Tanya on the cheek and followed Edith to the base of Blackie. I sat down on a sandstone boulder and she sat on another. “Tanya is a beautiful girl,” she said.
“She is,” I replied and left it at that. Talking about a new lover with a past lover, I suspected, was not real intelligent.
Edith studied me. “You look beat,” she said. “Maybe you should take a break. Why don’t you take a few days off, go back to your trailer, get cleaned up, and get some sleep?”
I thought she was kidding so I chuckled and said, “Thanks, but I’ll stick it out.”
Even though the temperature was still in the low 90s, she shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. “Get away from this place, Mike,” she said.
I realized she was serious. “Why would I want to do that?”
“Jeanette has no loyalty to you. She just wants to work you like a dog.”
My shrug was one of those what else is new? gestures.
“You owe her nothing. Why work so hard? She’s just being greedy Jeanette as usual.” She nodded toward the field of jacketed bones. “Everything belongs to her. Even these damn bones. Nobody gets anything but Jeanette.”
“It’s her land,” I reminded the mayor.
“That’s right.” Her tone turned hard and sarcastic. “She owns the land. She owns everything. All these ranchers own everything. What’s left for the rest of us?”
“Edith, you’re losing me. What are we talking about?”
She gave me a disgusted look. “Well, I tried,” she said.
I’d had stranger conversations but I couldn’t recall when. Anyway, she just sat there, looking all defeated, and I said, “The night Toby was killed…”
“Don’t ask me about that. Don’t ask me about anything.”
“The last person seen with Toby was Ted.”
“How do you know that?”
“Somebody saw them.”
Edith seemed to be studying her boots, then she shook her head. “What do you want from me?”
“Do you think it’s possible Ted killed Toby?”
Her laugh was harsh and bitter. “Ted doesn’t kill men. He loves them.”
I wasn’t too surprised that she knew this. “Maybe a lover’s quarrel?”
“Just don’t go there, Mike.” When I opened my mouth to say something more, she waved me off and said, “I’m just not going to talk about this.” Then she stood up and walked back to camp.
I watched her go until she went inside her tent. Ted’s truck was parked on the other side of the field of bones and a thought occurred to me. I strolled nonchalantly to it and took a look in the back. Besides some rope and a shovel, there was a tool box. Just about every truck in Fillmore County has one so this was no surprise. I opened it and examined its contents, finding the usual dirty wrenches and screw drivers. There was also a hammer. In fact, it was a ball-peen hammer. When I took it out to examine, I saw it wasn’t dirty like the other tools but clean. In fact, it was so clean, it gleamed in the light of the setting sun. I put it back and considered the ramifications of a clean tool in a box of dirty ones.
I went back to the fire pit where all the chairs were empty. I chose my favorite one, sat down, and tried to make sense of what I had discovered. Ted had driven his truck to the marina the night of Toby’s death. His tool box was available to lots of people while it was parked there but if his hammer was the murder weapon, it was another nod toward Ted being Toby’s killer. Unfortunately, before I could think too deeply about this, I dozed off. When I woke, I saw someone moving in the direction of the bones. Quietly, I sneaked through the shadows and saw it was Edith. She walked a little outside camp, a telephone to her ear. It was news to me that a cell phone would work this far from Jericho but I’m not up on the technology. Although I couldn’t hear her, she talked for a few minutes, then walked back to her tent and went inside.
So who was she talking to? And did it matter? I had no idea about that or much else. I went to my tent and crawled inside. A hand covered mine, then arms took me in. “Hello, cowboy,” Tanya said.
Later, I woke up because I think I’d programmed my brain to hear that particular sound. There it was, that strange engine noise, far out in the darkness. I started to wake Tanya to see if she could make sense of it but she looked so peaceful, I left her alone. The next thing I knew, it was morning, and Tanya was in my arms again. She kissed me. “Good morning,” she said. “I love waking up next to you.”
“Any morning with a beautiful Russian woman in bed with me is bound to be a good one,” I answered.
“Just any beautiful Russian woman?” she teased.
“No, dear,” I said. “Just you.” And, what do you know, I meant it.
30
Pick gathered us outside the cook tent. “People,” he said, “I’m an idiot.”
When no one disagreed, either because they were too tired to argue or they thought his assessment was spot on, he continued. “The T. rex family would have gone out to meet the intruder. Therefore, the nest must be somewhere else.”
“What about the little bones we found?” Laura asked. “That indicates a nest.”
“Not necessarily. Those bones could belong to a chick, which followed its mother.”
He spread out the BLM map on a field table and stabbed his finger on the eastern end of Blackie Butte. “I looked over there yesterday. An excellent outcrop of the Hell Creek formation, the right elevation, and on the other side of what was a small stream from the battle.”
“The chick couldn’t have crossed a stream,” Laura pointed out.
“It was just a little stream, not very deep. There were rocks that the chick could have hopped on to cross.” He looked up, squinting at the hill. “The mother T would have gone back to the nest after the battle, leaving the bodies of the dead rogue and the little male, which was probably her mate. It was at least a day later that the rain came and the flooding began that would preserve everything including, if we find it, the nest. Of course, the mother T would have left when the water started to rise but a nest, perhaps with eggs or egg shells, would be an amazing find all by itself.”
When we all just stood around, scratching our bug bites and massaging our sore muscles, Pick said, “The bottom line is we need to move the dig.”
This announcement prompted groans and whining. Laura let them play out, then started organizing everything. I was keeping an eye on Edith. When she walked away from the rest of us, I sneaked between the tents so I could watch her. She went into her tent, came out with a telephone in her hand, and walked over to Ted’s truck and went behind it. In a couple of minutes, she returned to her tent, then came out without the telephone.
As our little army climbed painfully up the hill to fulfill Laura’s plan and Pick’s vision, I pulled Edith over. “I didn’t know cell phones worked out here.”
She hesitated, then said, “It’s a satellite phone. As mayor, I need to be in touch with my office.”
“Who were you talking to?”
“Oh, office personnel.”
“You don’t have any office personnel,” I po
inted out. “Did you talk to Cade Morgan? Last night, I’m pretty sure I heard you say his name.” I hadn’t but it was a stab in the dark.
She looked exasperated, and then said, “OK, Cade and I have a thing going. He’s funny and makes me laugh. That’s why I called him. Anyway, with Ted the way he is, what did you expect?”
I ignored that. “Did Cade mention visitors? Say, in a black limo?”
Edith shrugged. “Toby’s relatives came to pick up his body. They needed a place to stay so Cade let them spend a few days at his ranch.”
“Do you mind if I call Cade on your phone?” I asked. “And Ted?” The latter was because I was curious about Ted’s illness, which seemed somehow convenient.
“Yes, I mind very much,” Edith said with some heat. “And I mind that you’re asking me all these questions. It’s like you’re accusing me of something. I think, Mike, you and I are no longer friends.”
“Edith, I’m on your side. I always have been.”
“I know,” she answered, softening. “That’s what makes this all so hard.”
Edith kept climbing after the others and I went back to my tent and got my backpack with the Glock. I told Ray and Amelia to carry their pistols, too. I caught Jeanette drinking her second cup of coffee in the supply tent, told her about Edith and her sat phone, then said, “She and Cade are up to something. I don’t know what it is.” I then told her about the black limo. “My guess is it hauled some of Toby’s friends here.”
Jeanette considered this and said, “I still don’t see why they would care about us. We didn’t kill Toby and we’re just a bunch of nuts digging up bones.”
“These bones are worth a great deal of money,” I pointed out.
She considered that, then said, “Tell you what. You work on Edith, try to find out what she knows. I’ll let Pick know he’s got three days and then we’re going to pack up our bones and go home. We need to be thinking about getting in our hay, anyway. Is that OK?”
“Yes, except let’s go in tomorrow.”
She shook her head. “Look, even if Cade has designs on these bones, this is the Square C. Nobody’s going to bother us here.”
“Jeanette, you grew up in Fillmore County so you have a powerful belief in the sanctity of private property. Believe me, Cade Morgan doesn’t operate from that perspective.”
“Well, Edith does.”
“Edith? I wouldn’t depend on her.”
“I’ll give it some thought,” she promised but I could tell she had her mind made up. We were stuck out here for three more days.
Pick’s new site didn’t look like much, just a step of ancient black-and-gray mud on the side of a fifty-foot-high peninsula, capped by a seam of rotten coal and a layer of sandstone. Above and to the right of the step was a cave. I knew that cave from my rides out by the butte and had even gone inside it just to see what I could see. It wasn’t very deep, likely formed by water seeping down from the top. I’d seen rabbits in there but otherwise it was empty.
Laura appraised the site and concluded it was good matrix to dig. It wasn’t too hard and or too soft, she said, and began to lay out where she wanted us to start and how we would proceed. Start we did and within a few hours, Amelia, on her hands and knees working with an ice pick and a brush, found something. “Bone!” she cried.
Laura carefully crawled over to the find. “Everybody back up, please,” she said. Then, after a quick appraisal, she added, “It’s bone all right. Good work, Amelia.”
Amelia grinned. When she stood up, Ray was beside her, telling her how proud he was of her. She fell into his arms and right there in front of God and everybody, kissed him full on the lips. “I love you, Ray Coulter,” she said.
Ray took off his hat, threw it in the air, and let out a mighty whoop followed by, “I love you, too, Amelia Thomason!”
While the rest of us were watching Ray and Amelia, Laura was focused on the bone. She scraped around it, then whisked off more dirt. Whatever it was, it was big. “It’s the ilium, two paired bones,” she finally announced. “But this is the top of them, not the side. That’s unusual.” She dug into the dirt around the twin bones and found more bone. “I think this is the end of a femur that fits into the pelvis,” she said, then dug and whisked on the other side of the iliums. “The joint of the other femur,” she announced, then sat back on her haunches and whistled. “Somebody get Pick. Now!”
Philip went running and within minutes, brought Pick back. Pick went down on his hands and knees to inspect the bones. “What do you think it is?” he asked Laura.
While we all strained to hear, Laura said, in a voice tinged with awe, “I believe this is a Tyrannosaur standing upright. Every T. rex ever found has always been on its side.”
Pick nodded. “You’re almost right, Laura, but this animal is not standing. It’s sitting. Or, I should say, she is sitting.”
“On her nest,” Laura said, understanding what he was getting at. “She’s protecting her nest.”
“Even with a torrential rain pouring down on top of her, she is nurturing her chicks. Yes, I think so.”
Pick crawled off the site, then went over to a slab of sandstone and sat down, his chin resting on his palms. We all waited while he thought over whatever he was thinking. Finally, he said, “We can’t expose this skeleton from the top down. The articulation would probably fall away and we would lose knowledge of her posture. I propose we come at her horizontally and expose only one side.”
“In effect, a bas relief,” Laura said.
“Yes. It may be that we’ll have to leave her that way to be studied. We’ll also have to build a structure over her for protection. Great care must be taken to preserve everything we find. Laura, I leave it to you to make the necessary plans to make this happen. No paleontologist has ever tried this, not with a creature as big as this one, but I know you can do it.”
Pick’s confidence in Laura was well-placed. A couple of hours later, she presented us with the plan. Essentially, it meant starting off to the left side of the T. rex, using our picks and shovels to remove all the dirt down to the probable level of the animal’s feet, then shaving off the matrix trowel by trowel, ice pick by ice pick, brush by brush until we found bone again.
We attacked the site like maniacs, tons of earth moved, the spoil piling up below. It was nearly ten o’clock that night when we were done slicing off a nearly rectangular step in the side of the peninsula. We were ready to start moving toward the T. rex but Laura stopped us, telling us to get some rest and we’d start again at first light. There was no one to fix us dinner since we were all at the new dig site. All but Edith, that is. I don’t know where she was during all this, maybe on her fancy sat phone for all I knew, but I saw her when we staggered back into camp. She was in one of the chairs around the fire pit, looking glum. I hoped she was thinking about leaving. Tanya and I ate some crackers, drank a sports drink, and crawled into my tent. If the strange mechanical noises occurred that night, I didn’t hear them. I don’t think I would have heard an atom bomb.
The next morning, we all made a run on the cook tent to grab food, mostly cereal and bread. Nobody was willing to wait for a cooked breakfast. Ray and Amelia already had the coffee going, dark and stout. It never tasted so good. “Today,” Pick said as we prepared to trek to the new site, “we may make one of the most important discoveries ever made in the history of paleontology.”
Pick knew how to motivate the troops, I’ll give him that.
We toiled through the day, revealing more and more of the extraordinary creature. We stopped when Laura ordered us to stop so she could insure there was enough matrix to support the bones. This meant no pedestaling. We revealed only enough of the bone to see what it was, then left it in place. Gradually it began to take shape. The big T. rex’s tail drooped, her legs were drawn up along her rib cage, and her neck was down. And around her was a set of small bones, snuggled against her leg. A chick maybe a yard high, still sixty-five million years later struggling to get clo
ser to its mother for protection from the rain, just as our calves do with their moms in the pasture during storms. Of course, from the mudslide cascading down on this baby, there was no protection.
When we found the young T, Amelia couldn’t take it. She retreated to a boulder for a good cry. Brian said, “Ray, you’ve got a great girl there.”
“Don’t I know it!” he exclaimed. “And you know what, she can be anything she wants to be. If she wants to be a veterinarian, then that’s great. If she wants to be a paleontologist, that’s fine, too. We’ll figure out a way to be together.”
Laura responded to this pretty little picture by saying, “Get back to work, you guys.” But she said it with a smile on her face.
I pointed out some clouds on the horizon. “I think we’ve got rain coming our way.”
Laura studied the clouds with me. “We’ll keep tarps handy. That’s all we can do for now.” She looked at me and caught something in my expression. “What?”
“Do you believe in karmic events? I mean, we just found these dinosaurs killed by a rainstorm. Are we going to get punished for that by the rain gods?”
Laura took my observation seriously. I could tell by the way she rolled her eyes, then said, “Cut the bullshit, Mike, and get back to work.” I got back to work.
The digging kept on until we reached the last vertebrae in the mother T’s neck. There was no evidence of the skull. Pick came down to investigate. “I’m sure it’s here,” he said.
“I don’t think so,” Laura said. “The flood likely carried it away.”
“No, Laura,” Pick said quietly. “Don’t you feel it? Her spirit is still here. She will be here forever to protect this nest.”
“Spirit and skull are not the same,” ever-practical Laura said. “I’m telling you, Pick. We’re not going to find her skull. It’s gone.”
“Her skull is here,” he replied. “All of her is here. Her love for her family would not let any part of her leave. She has defeated deep time. Don’t you understand? She is watching us, trying to decide if we’re worthy. When she is ready, she will let us see her face.”
