Conard County Watch

by Rachel Lee

  “What? Why not?”

  “Your operation, boss. You don’t need my useless advice. You sure didn’t need me to suggest you ask Claudia about the underlying rock here. Guess I wore brass too long. Old habits die hard.”

  She reached a level spot on the trail and waited for him to finish the last three feet and catch up. “What made you so sensitive to such things?”

  “My sister.”

  “Oh.” The things she didn’t know about him. “What does she do?”

  “She teaches English at the university in Heidelberg, Germany. She’s always complaining that European men are chauvinistic. Listening to that for a couple of years has taught me to be a bit more cautious about what I say to the boss lady.” He gave her a half smile. “Not working too well, I guess.”

  She laughed quietly. “If only you knew how accustomed I am to men contradicting me or trying to take charge. It gets so I hardly notice, it’s so common. Like a fish swimming in water.”

  “Well, if I annoy you, tell me so. Callie would. That’s my sister, by the way.”

  “I hope I get a chance to meet her someday.” Still smiling, she turned and started climbing again. The path was steep, but not so steep she couldn’t do most of it without having to hang on with her hands. Not much farther and they’d be on the ledge.

  The ledge. It had been a dream-space for her since Gray Cloud had first shown it to her. She’d spent months gathering grants based on her first survey, and now she had arrived, ready for the undertaking. Years of exciting research and study probably awaited her, the fulfillment of lifelong ambitions.

  With each of the last few steps, she felt as if she were growing lighter. The steep path no longer seemed too steep. She was here, and she might even be able to start releasing some of the fossils today.

  From below she heard the cheery voices of her students. Just ahead she heard Denise and Claudia talking. The moment had truly arrived.

  Which explained the big grin on her face as she at last joined the others. Her fingertips nearly tingled with the desire to get at it.

  Denise had done a great job, isolating the area Renee most wanted to get at first. Claudia was busy measuring rock layers, chipping them lightly with her geologist hammer and studying the qualities.

  “What do you think?” Renee asked her.

  “It’s looking good for Late Cretaceous where the egg is. I’m noticing we’re not seeing any sign of large fossils much above it. There must have been some kind of catastrophe, a sudden wipeout.”

  “That would actually be useful to me.”

  Claudia smiled. “I thought so. Listen, I’m going to do some sampling from all around. Maybe the layers of rock will tell us what happened to that egg and the other things poking out around the same level.”

  “That’s why I called you.”

  Looking over the edge of the cliff, she saw her other interns busily sifting through the rock below, occasionally pulling out a piece they put on a separate table. Then she looked down at the remains of the slab that had partially fallen over the winter, the tooth as she thought of it. There was still about ten feet of good rock that would need examining, but that egg called to her like a siren. Finding an egg with a fetus still in it was even rarer than finding other bones from the long reign of dinosaurs.

  But she still had to wait a bit before she could dig in. Denise was almost done, but not completely. She perched on a rock and Cope sat beside her. “So tell me,” he said, “why is it so hard to find fossils?”

  “Because most organic material, if left exposed, rots pretty quickly. A primatologist once remarked to me that if they hadn’t seen chimpanzees with their own eyes, they wouldn’t have known they existed. They searched an area of about 150 square kilometers before they found a partial skeleton. Nature’s very efficient in cleaning up remains.”

  “Really?” He fell into thought, looking bemused. “I never would have guessed. I mean, I know about vultures and other carrion eaters. I’ve certainly seen enough in action. But I never thought of it in quite this way.”

  “Fossilization requires perfect conditions. Or nearly perfect conditions. You need remains that predators don’t rip apart and scatter all over dozens of miles, stripped of all flesh, bones broken. Plenty of bacteria and insects will finish the job. That means we need the remains to...oh, maybe fall into tar or a swamp, or to the bottom of a lake bed to be quickly covered with silt. To be buried in ash, or flash-frozen during a quick climate change. Like the woolly mammoths you’ve probably heard about. A find like this is a treasure trove.”

  “That’s enough to get me excited.” He rested his elbows on his knees. “I imagine you can hardly wait to start. I’m getting there.”

  “Yeah.” She sighed. “It’ll also be fascinating to find out what Claudia learns about the conditions around the fossils. Was there a sudden flood, one that maybe swept all the animals together? Did one of these mountains erupt and asphyxiate them with ash and bury them swiftly? I have a billion questions.”

  They were dancing around in her head like popping corn. Her tablet held a list of most of them, and she’d studied it for weeks before arriving here, wondering how many she’d be able to answer and if she’d overlooked anything.

  “In the end,” she remarked to Cope, “this is going to be a lot of slow, dirty work. For every day of excitement there will be lots of days when we come up with nothing. We’ll get dirty and sweaty and tired with nothing to show for it. But right now...” She smiled again. “Right now I’m staring at what it’s all about. I just hope there’s a lot more in there than I can detect out here.”

  She reached out a hand and he grasped it. She needed a solid touch right now, feeling as if she might float away if not tethered to the ground. Everything she’d wanted was at last coming true right before her eyes. No more waiting, no more hoping for a unique find. Gray Cloud had brought her right to one.

  “You said Gray Cloud is married to your...cousin, right?”

  “Yes.” She turned toward him. “Did I say? Mercy’s a wildlife biologist and she met him while she was studying the wolf pack on this mountain. Right now she’s down in northern Mexico studying the gray wolves. They’re facing some migratory problems because of border fences and she’s studying the impact.”

  Cope stared off into space for a bit before saying, “I never cease to be amazed by the way humans consistently act as if we’re the only species on the planet that matters.”

  In an instant she truly warmed to him. “Too many people don’t see beyond their own noses,” she agreed.

  “I’m not sure we’re built to think of long-term consequences,” he remarked, returning his gaze to her face. Those blue eyes of his almost made her shiver with pleasure. “We tend to think only a day or two down the road. Sometimes that’s useful. Sometimes not so much. But you’d think by now that we could see the impact of short-term thinking.”

  Crunching on rock drew Renee’s attention and she saw Claudia making her way toward them, her hammer tucked into a holder that hung from her waist, a sample case full of glass bottles in her hand.

  “I think that’s most of what I need for now,” she remarked, sitting beside them. At once she began to wrap a padded container around the samples, zipping it into place. “If there’s anything unusual here, I’ll find it.”

  She smiled at Renee, her gray eyes dancing. “This could be exciting. I know we’ll find some uranium. That’s everywhere on the planet, usually deep enough that we don’t run into it without mining, but who knows. Quite a bit of rock sheared away. A lot of sandstone that indicates sediment, but there’s granite and some quartz as well. So a mix of sedimentary, indicating lots of water, and igneous, indicating that this mountain may have erupted far in the past. There used to be gold mining up around here, yeah?”

  “I think so. Farther up and over to the south there’s a gold-mining camp, abandoned
long ago. My cousin told me about it. Apparently, they didn’t find much ore.”

  Claudia nodded, her eyes still sparkling. “Quartz is a good indicator there might be gold around. But I’ll keep my mouth shut about it. The important thing is fossils, not some slim chance of finding a small vein of gold. Probably wouldn’t be worth the effort of trying to extract it.”

  Cope spoke. “What are you going to learn from those samples?”

  “I hope to find out why there’s a layer of fossils all together here.” She pointed to the rock face. “Not all of them are as obvious as the egg, but when the shadows catch them right, you can tell quite a few dinosaurs died right there at about the same depth. Renee has a bunch of great photos on her tablet taken during sunrise. Anyway, something had to have happened and it’s my job to try to find out what. And if I can, what helped the fossilization along. Dang, what a find!”

  Later, Renee went below to where her other interns were busily looking through the debris on the creek bank.

  “Small rocks are still falling,” Bets remarked as Renee joined them. A young woman with fine blond hair she could never keep in a tie, and a plump body, she stood with her hands on her hips, eyeing Renee from beneath her hard hat. “Maybe pieces that were shaken loose when part of that wall above tumbled. Or maybe the ground is moving very slightly. This entire place is geologically active, I believe, from what Claudia said the other night. But aside from that, we’re finding a lot of smaller fossil pieces.”

  “What are your thoughts?”

  The others gathered around, eager to join Bets and Renee. “Some of them may have been damaged in the fall. Not many pieces seem complete, but we’ve got a whole lot more to look through.”

  “Not as good as what you have on the ledge above,” Mason added. “At least not yet.” Even under a hard hat he looked too young to be a college student. Fresh-faced.

  “Still important,” Renee reminded them. “I hope I might be able to get started on the rock face before we lose light, but I’m not counting on it. When we get to that point, two of you can come up to help, but we’ve got to keep working this debris. Sometimes the most important information can come from the smallest pieces.”

  And again that feeling returned, the feeling of being watched. Despite herself, she turned around to look. The forest shadows, dappled still with light before the sun sank behind the peak, offered nothing. If anything out there was watching, it knew how to avoid detection.

  “Remember,” she said before she climbed back to the ledge, “stay together. I mean it.”

  A couple of them looked a little surprised by the reminder, but didn’t argue. They were going back to work, Mason and Carlos lifting buckets of the fallen rock and dumping them on the sifter where Larry and Maddie started shaking them while Bets ran water from the stream over them to highlight their shapes and remove loose dirt.

  They were doing a good job, Renee thought as she climbed back up to the ledge. So far, she could only count herself damn lucky.

  Denise was practically rocking as she worked at her tablet. Cope was scoping out broken rock on the ground using her pin flags whenever he saw something of interest. For just an instant she felt like an unnecessary wheel at her own site.

  “I’m getting excited,” Denise said, still rocking, her voice rising. “The more I diagram, the more I’m seeing. Renee, you’ve got your life’s work looking down on you.”

  “I’ll second that,” said Claudia. She was brushing at the exposed rock face with an artist’s brush, urging fine dust into a sample bottle. “I think Cope is finding stuff, too.”

  “They’re doing good below, too,” Renee answered. “Dang, this is like walking into a museum.”

  “A very important museum,” said the familiar voice of Gray Cloud from up the mountain a short distance. Renee whirled and saw him picking his way over some talus and around shrubs and trees in the company of two younger men in jeans and plain chambray shirts. They wore their tribal heritage proudly in their faces, and gently in their smiles of greeting.

  “My nephews,” Gray Cloud announced as they reached the ledge. “Short and Tall.” He shook hands with Denise and introduced himself to Claudia.

  Renee had heard the story years ago, so she didn’t ask. However, Denise bubbled over with curiosity. “Short and Tall, really? You both look the same height.”

  The young men laughed and sat cross-legged on the rocky ledge with them.

  “We’re twins,” Tall said. “Our mother had a dream just before we were born in which there were two bear cubs standing on their hind legs, and one was shorter.”

  “Oh!” Claudia said, expressing delight.

  “So, Short here was one inch shorter at birth. He got named Short Bear and I got named Tall Bear, and we also go by Sam and Tim, if you prefer.”

  “What a neat story,” Claudia enthused. “I love it!”

  Short gave a wry smile. “I don’t mind it until someone calls me Short Rib.”

  “Oh, no,” said Denise, turning enough that she could look at them instead of the wall.

  “Oh, yes,” said Short. “Not so much since I got bigger, though.”

  “And came back from the Rangers,” Gray Cloud remarked. “Cope?”

  “Yo.”

  “Short and Tall are under your orders if needed. Meantime, they’re going to wander by here every now and then just to make sure everything is going well. If they use their training wisely, you won’t know they’re here. Anyway, I don’t want to interrupt the work you’re doing so I’ll bring my nephews down to your campfire tonight so everyone can meet them and know they’re safe.”

  “Thank you,” said Renee and Cope at the same instant.

  There was a pause. Then Gray Cloud indicated he wanted to talk to Renee and Cope alone. “About tribal stuff,” he said, apparently so Claudia and Denise wouldn’t become offended. Although that wasn’t very likely, since the two of them had fallen into conversation with Short and Tall.

  “There’s more,” said Gray Cloud in a low voice when the three of them stood apart from the others. “You felt the eyes. That wasn’t the mountain. The mountain is hardly aware of you, busy with its own dreams. But my nephews could find no sign of anyone having been up here except this group. As near as they can tell, no one is showing any interest in this dig.”

  Renee felt a bubble of tension she’d hardly been aware of seep away. “Thank goodness. Nothing to worry about then.”

  “I didn’t exactly say that. I listen to the mountain. The fact that we can’t find anyone nosing around doesn’t mean no one is interested. I asked the sheriff to keep his ear to the ground.”

  Renee hesitated, not sure of how to respond. Even feeling slightly embarrassed to have caused such a stir. “I hate to put you out, Gray Cloud. I’m probably overreacting to something minor, like a raccoon.”

  “You weren’t the only one overreacting,” Cope reminded her.

  Gray Cloud didn’t answer directly. “You should probably know that my nephews are tribal law officers. If you need help, they’ll be more than willing. But right now, it appears you’re all alone out here, which is what you want.”

  Gray Cloud walked back over to where his nephews were laughing with Denise and Claudia, then squatted. He looked at Claudia. “You’re the geologist?”

  She nodded.

  “This land has never been mined. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been mapped. I’ll bring you a map tonight. It might be useful.”

  He and his nephews bade them farewell, then marched up the slope to disappear once again.

  * * *

  Renee hadn’t gotten to any work on the rock face that day, and Cope could tell she was disappointed. The findings of the group working down near the creek had been interesting, certainly not a waste of time, but didn’t deliver the kind of news she hoped for.

  “Most of these will w
ind up in boxes in a museum basement,” she remarked to him as the interns insisted on cooking while she and Cope enjoyed coffee. “I didn’t see anything that seemed to provide new knowledge, not yet, but they need to be more closely examined. I’ve been wrong before.”

  He nodded and smiled at her. “When was that?”

  “When what?” Then she caught on and he enjoyed seeing the laugh roll out of her. “Lots of whens. I got started in excavations while I was still in high school. We had a funded dig about thirty miles from my hometown, and they were desperate for hands, however inexperienced, because a road was coming through and they had a limited amount of time to gather artifacts.”

  “Really? Why limited?”

  “Because the road was coming through and all that has a timetable with dollar signs attached. They literally used bulldozers to clear off the top five or ten feet of soil for us and then we went to work. My first day I discovered charcoal from a fire pit and a small piece of bone. I was so dang thrilled. And I screwed up by touching them with my hands.” She shook her head. “I learned a hard lesson that day, although after I got scolded they told me they had enough samples that my mess-up wouldn’t be critical. And that was only my first mistake.”

  He nodded and gestured toward the rock face. “Do those have to be protected from human contact, too?”

  She shook her head. “Fossils like this can be washed to get rid of contaminants.” Then she smiled. “I hope there’s still some viable DNA in some of those bones.”

  “That happens?”

  “A number of years ago, a paleontologist got to wondering why the bones in her lab all had such a distinctive, unpleasant odor. She checked it out and found that all those millennia hadn’t been enough to kill all the life inside those bones. DNA remained.”

  Cope sat quietly for a while, thinking that he’d known a whole lot less about Renee’s work than he’d thought when he volunteered.

  He also found himself wondering why Gray Cloud had pressed him to accept Renee’s invitation to help out. He was now a history professor, rediscovering his civilian legs after so many years in the military. That in no way made him more than a useful gofer on this site. Nor was it as if Gray Cloud knew him that well. Their encounters had been few, the most significant a time he had Gray Cloud come in to speak to one of his classes about the indigenous view of the West’s settlement.