by Stuart Gibbs
“Whoa,” Violet said. “That is big.”
“Bigger than I expected,” Summer agreed.
“I’ll need some help here,” I told them. “I’m going to grab the snake, and his instinct is going to be to grab me right back. So keep him from wrapping around me, okay?”
“Uh… okay,” Summer agreed, although she didn’t sound happy about it.
I cautiously approached Julius. Six feet of the snake was now out of the truck. I reached down and grabbed him right behind the head with both hands.
Julius immediately became far more animated. He opened his mouth, revealing his thin, hooked teeth, and hissed angrily. His body writhed, trying to coil around mine.
Summer and Violet both rushed to my aid, grabbing Julius farther down his body. They kept him from wrapping around my arms and legs, although he was powerful enough to pull us all together. I was quickly smashed up against both girls as we fought to control the snake.
“This is not how I thought this day was going to go,” Violet gasped, straining to control the anaconda.
“Welcome to my life,” I told her.
Meanwhile, the Barksdales had settled their differences—sort of. The parents had grown tired of chasing the boys around and given up on clobbering them. Both were bent over, hands on their knees, gasping—although they still had enough breath to yell at their sons. “I want that snake out of my truck—and out of my house!” Pa Barksdale ordered.
“What?” Tim whined. “But we just got him!”
“And he’s already eaten our cat and destroyed our truck, you moron!” Ma yelled. “You’re taking him back to Snakes Alive today and that’s final!”
The girls and I all shared a look of interest, although it quickly shifted back to concern, as we were still wrestling with the anaconda. The entire snake was now out of the truck. Its tail whipped around my right leg like the vine of a strangler fig.
“But they said no refunds!” Jim protested.
“I don’t care,” his father replied. “You either take it back—or I’ll gut it and make you two eat every last inch.”
The twins seemed to realize there was no point to arguing and sadly returned to the truck, where they were surprised to find the girls and me grappling with Julius.
“Hey!” Tim exclaimed. “That’s our snake!”
“We know,” Violet said. “Can you give us a hand here?”
The boys came to help—although both looked slightly disappointed that I had gotten wrapped up with two of the most beautiful girls from school instead of them. With their added muscle and extra hands, it was much easier to control the anaconda, and we began to extricate ourselves from its grasp.
“You got him at Snakes Alive?” Summer asked, trying not to sound too accusing.
Tim and Jim looked at each other, as if considering denying this, but then realized the secret was already out.
“Yeah,” Jim admitted sullenly. “But now it sounds like we’ve got to give him back.”
“Maybe that’s for the best,” Violet said, unwinding a coil of anaconda from her left arm. “Having a snake this big doesn’t seem like such a great idea.”
“You don’t think it’s cool?” Tim asked.
“Not at all,” Summer said, stepping out of a loop of snake.
“What about a cobra?” Jim inquired. “Would you think that was cool? Because they had some cobras for sale too.”
“No!” both girls exclaimed at once.
“Really?” Tim seemed surprised by the vehemence of their reaction.
“Cobras are incredibly dangerous!” Summer explained.
“Exactly!” Jim agreed. “That’s what makes having one so awesome!”
“That’s what makes having one idiotic,” Violet argued. “You guys have had an anaconda for one day and look what it’s done so far. If you got a cobra, you’d probably be dead by sundown.”
Tim and Jim exchanged another look, wondering if this was true. Then they looked back at the girls. “The alligator’s still cool, though, right?” Tim asked.
“No!” the girls exclaimed again.
“That alligator might be cute now,” I said, “but what happens when it doesn’t fit in the bathtub anymore? In a few years, it’ll be six feet long and need a lot more to eat than hot dogs. What are you going to feed it then?”
“Stray dogs?” Jim suggested.
The girls both made faces of disgust.
By the truck, Tran had regained consciousness. He seemed embarrassed to have passed out—but he made no attempt to help us either. Instead, he kept his distance and looked ready to flee at any moment.
Summer, Violet, Tim, Jim, and I had now uncoiled the snake and stretched it out into a straight line. Or as straight as you could get an anaconda. I was still holding it behind the head as tightly as I could, which wasn’t easy, as the snake didn’t appreciate it. It was wriggling in my grasp and hissing angrily. My hands were starting to cramp up. “How’d you get this snake here in the first place?” I asked.
“It was in a big old plastic tub,” Jim explained. “It’s still on the porch.”
“I’ll get it!” Violet volunteered, and quickly ran back to the house.
Without her, it was a slightly greater struggle to control the snake.
“Snakes Alive just sold this to you?” I asked the Barksdales. “Without any questions?”
“What do you care?” Tim asked.
Summer sighed, aware that she would have to unleash her feminine wiles again. I could tell this annoyed her, but she knew it would be the fastest way to get an answer. She fluttered her eyelashes and spoke in her coyest voice. “We just want to know how you got it. It’s important.”
The boys instantly cracked, desperate to impress her. “There’s this guy there,” Tim said, doing his best to sound cool. “Rick. He can hook you up with anything you want. It’s on the down low, though. You have to ask to see him and use the code word ‘erotic.’ ”
“Exotic, you dimwit,” Jim corrected.
“Right!” Tim agreed. “You ask to see something exotic.”
“Rick has all kinds of amazing stuff,” Jim told Summer. “Including things even you would think were cool, I’ll bet.”
“I doubt it,” Summer said.
Violet came running back across the yard with a plastic storage tub. It was three feet wide and two feet deep, with plastic clamps to hold the lid down. “Got it!” she announced breathlessly, then set it on the ground and popped the lid off.
I slipped Julius’s head inside and finally let go. Tim, Jim, and Summer quickly crammed the rest of the snake into the tub. It wasn’t easy, although it wasn’t quite as hard as I had expected, either. Julius didn’t seem too upset; it was as if being wound up in a confined space was comforting to him. Anacondas often denned in small spaces, so maybe it felt natural.
I set the lid back in place and used the clamps to lock it down.
As I did, I caught a glimpse of my watch. It was getting late in the day. “I have to get to Sage’s ranch,” I told the girls. “Before it gets dark.”
Violet considered the snake in the tub, then looked to Summer and me. “Maybe we shouldn’t leave Julius here. Could we take him back to FunJungle?”
“No way!” Tran exclaimed. “I’m not putting that thing in the car!”
“You’re not taking him period,” Jim said. “We paid for Julius fair and square. He cost us six months of lawn-mowing money. If you take him from us, that’s stealing!”
“We’re returning him to Rick first thing tomorrow and getting our money back,” Tim added.
“Tomorrow?” Ma Barksdale came around the truck, finally having got her breath back. And her boots as well. “I don’t want that thing in my house one more minute.”
Pa Barksdale was now inspecting the smashed-up front of his pickup. I thought I heard him sobbing softly.
“Snakes Alive is closed right now,” Tim argued. “But I promise, we’ll keep a close eye on Julius until then.”
&
nbsp; “Darn straight you will,” Ma Barksdale warned. “Or I’ll sell both of you to Snakes Alive.”
“What if Rick won’t take the anaconda back?” Violet asked.
“Oh, he’d better,” Tim said. “If he doesn’t, we’ll kick his butt.”
“Maybe we’ll kick his butt anyhow,” Jim said. “For what the snake did to Griselda.”
“Great plan,” Summer said. She was obviously being sarcastic, but the Barksdales didn’t catch this. Instead, they beamed at her praise.
“We’ll let you know what happens,” Tim told her.
Summer, Violet, and I stepped away and headed back to Summer’s car, glad to be done with the Barksdales and Julius. I still had the musty smell of anaconda all over me.
Summer slipped her hand into mine and said, “You were very brave with that snake.”
“Which one?” I asked. “Julius or Vance?”
Summer laughed, then said, “Julius.”
“Running away from a bully doesn’t exactly count as bravery,” Violet informed me.
“I punched his lights out once,” I reminded her. “You weren’t so snarky then.”
“Touché,” Violet conceded.
“How’d you even know how to handle a snake like this?” Summer asked.
“There were plenty of snakes in the Congo,” I explained. “Most were a lot smaller, but the venomous ones were still dangerous. If you grab them behind the head, they can’t bite you.”
“Growing up in the Congo must have been crazy,” Violet said. “It’s so dangerous there.”
“Actually, my life here has been far more dangerous,” I said, glancing back toward Tim and Jim. “In the Congo, I never had to worry about guys like the Barksdales, or Vance Jessup. And I’ve ended up in a lot more danger at FunJungle than I ever did in the actual jungle.”
Tran was waiting for us beside the car, looking embarrassed about how he had behaved around the anaconda. He looked to Summer. “You won’t tell your father about how I, uh…”
“Passed out when we needed you?” Summer asked. “Don’t worry. Your secret’s safe with us.”
“Thanks.” Tran opened the door of the car. “I just had no idea there were snakes that big!”
The three of us climbed into the back seat. “Back to the Bonotto Ranch,” Summer informed Tran. “We’re dropping Teddy off there.”
“I’ll let Dash and Ethan know we’re done here,” I said, already texting them.
“And let them know we handled everything perfectly fine without them,” Violet added.
We headed down the road, passing the Barksdale family. Ma and Pa were berating Tim and Jim again, while the boys clutched the plastic tub with Julius between them.
Violet mused, “Would it really be stealing if we took the anaconda to FunJungle? And the baby alligator too? I mean, they were both probably stolen from the wild already, so really, the Barksdales are the ones who broke the law. We’d be setting things right.”
Summer sighed. “I don’t think the Barksdales would agree with that. And Daddy’s not going to risk bad publicity by taking someone’s pets away from them.”
“Even if those pets are dangerous to them?” Violet asked. “Jim just had part of his ear bitten off! When that gator gets bigger, it could kill one of them.”
“I can definitely see that happening,” I said.
“Plus, it seems wrong to let them give Julius back,” Violet went on. “Rick will just sell him to someone else. And maybe that person won’t know how to take care of an anaconda either.”
“That sounds likely,” I agreed.
Violet looked at Summer and me. “There must be something we can do to keep that from happening.”
“I’ll bet there is,” Summer said, with a determined look in her eye.
“Maybe,” I said. “Although, right now, I have a dinosaur to find.”
12 PALEONTOLOGY
Dashiell and Ethan ended up coming on the camping trip too. They called a few minutes after we had left the Barksdales’ to apologize for not showing up; Ethan’s brother had busted the axle of his truck while four-wheeling. When they heard I was going camping at Sage’s ranch, they asked if they could join us. After a quick round of calls, everyone’s parents agreed. So Tran swung by Ethan’s place to pick them up.
Summer and Violet both wanted to come as well, but none of their parents were keen on the idea of them camping with a bunch of teenage boys, and their requests were rejected. So Summer was annoyed when she had to drop the rest of us off at the Bonotto Ranch.
“My parents suck,” she said grumpily as we climbed out of her car. “If I was a boy they wouldn’t think twice about letting me do this.”
“It’s not that they think you can’t handle it,” Dashiell explained. “It’s that they don’t think we’re trustworthy. And to be honest, they’re probably right about Ethan.”
“You’re hilarious,” Ethan said.
Summer ignored them and looked to me. “Maybe tomorrow we can go to Snakes Alive and find out who Rick is.”
I wasn’t sure that this was a good idea, but Summer was already in a foul mood, so I said, “Yeah. Maybe. If my parents say it’s okay.”
Summer brightened a bit at that. “All right. Don’t have too much fun without me.”
“I won’t,” I said, then hugged her good-bye, which Dashiell and Ethan responded to by making kissy noises and chanting, “Teddy has a girlfriend.”
Sage was waiting for us by the front gate with his car. It took far less time to go back up the driveway than it had after that morning’s rains, but we still had to go slower than usual due to the mud and the occasional giant puddle. Sage had already packed up all the gear for camping in a small trailer that hitched to an ATV, but by the time we rode out to the dig site, there was only about a half hour of daylight left.
Camping at Sage’s ranch was a lot different from camping outside my trailer. At my home, we were still close enough to hear all the residents of employee housing inside their trailers, and we weren’t allowed to build campfires because J.J. McCracken owned the property and he didn’t want us burning the place down. So we usually ended up eating dinner in my trailer, then maybe watching a movie, and merely sleeping in the tent.
However, at Sage’s ranch, we were really in the wilderness—or at least as close to it as our parents would allow us to go. Sage’s family camped a lot, so they had a lot of top-quality gear for us: nice tents, bedrolls, and a full set of pots and pans to make our dinner. And since it was a working ranch, the Bonottos provided us with a cooler full of steaks so fresh, they had probably been walking around the day before. There were also homemade sausages and freshly laid eggs for breakfast. The only thing the Bonottos didn’t provide for us was firewood, as there was plenty of that out by the campsite—although they did give us some hatchets and saws to collect it, with the stipulation that we not chop any of their trees down. We were only to hack up trees that had already fallen.
We decided to camp atop the small bluff that overlooked the dinosaur dig, rather than down by the river. It didn’t look like it was going to rain again, but we didn’t want to risk getting flooded out.
We set up the tents as fast as we could. Then, while Dashiell and Ethan went off to get firewood and Sage set up the camp kitchen, I took advantage of the remaining daylight to check out the dig site.
Dr. Chen and her team had used dozens of plastic tarps to protect everything from the rain. The tarps were staked over sensitive areas of the dig, draped over piles of equipment, and wrapped tightly around what I presumed were pieces of Minerva that hadn’t been stolen. Given the violence of the storm, the tarps hadn’t all worked perfectly. A few had blown off in part—or entirely—exposing some of the sensitive areas and equipment to the elements. In addition, an entire canopy had blown away and lay crumpled by the edge of the river. Luckily, that one hadn’t been sheltering as many artifacts, and the gear that had been stored beneath it had secondary tarps as cover, but much of it had gotten dre
nched anyhow.
To my surprise, the tools the paleontologists were using were very low-tech. I had expected to find some sort of fancy device that x-rayed the ground for fossils, like the one shown at the beginning of the original Jurassic Park movie, but there was nothing so advanced. Instead, the entire dig looked like it had been outfitted at a hardware store. There were picks, shovels, trowels, and levers to get the artifacts out of the ground, although those didn’t look nearly as well used as the more delicate instruments: brushes, chisels, rock hammers, and tweezers. For wrapping the fossils, there were bundles of burlap and two wheelbarrows in which plaster had been mixed. The act of excavating dinosaur bones didn’t seem to have changed much since it had first been practiced in the 1860s.
I knelt by one of the artifacts that had been bundled up, and carefully unwrapped the tarp. Encased in burlap and plaster, the artifact was a white, misshapen blob, one and a half feet high, two feet long, and more than a foot in diameter. Someone had written on it in Sharpie: T. rex ulna, along with the date. I knew the ulna was an arm bone—in humans and dinosaurs alike. In a T. rex, the arms were comically tiny compared to the rest of the animal, but given the size of the bundle, I realized that they were actually quite big when compared to, say, my own arms. Which indicated that Minerva was a very large dinosaur.
I checked a few of the other bundles. According to the labels there were several vertebrae, a pelvic bone, and a lot of metatarsals, which I thought might be parts of the feet or hands but couldn’t remember for sure. The ulna was the biggest bundle, which meant that either the large bones of the legs like the femur and tibia hadn’t been dug up yet—or maybe they hadn’t been found at all. As Dr. Chen had said, no one had ever located an entire dinosaur.
I wrapped the bundles back up in their tarps and turned my attention to the bones that were still in the ground. All of those had tarps pulled tightly over them and staked around the site. I cautiously untied one tarp and pulled it back, taking care to make sure that any water that had collected on it ran away from the bones.
What remained of Minerva didn’t look like much.
