Bone Hunter

by Sarah Andrews

  As I hurried along behind Lew, I tried to figure out who he was. He had the look and smell of a department fixture, one of those guys who’s been around so long that he’s ossified in place and no one can figure out how to fire him. His posture was both arrogant and sunken, giving him that air of absolute security cut crosswise with a hangdog sense of fatalistic depression, but the huge wad of keys swinging from the metal clip on his belt argued against professorship.

  “Do you teach here?” I asked, diplomatically shooting high.

  “Me? No, they don’t pay me well enough for that kind of stuff:”

  “Department tech?”

  “You got it. I’m the guy that keeps the big dogs in line.”

  I smiled, certain I had found the perfect informant. There is nothing like a long-suffering underling to call it like he sees it. Information is power, and all that. I had only to watch for gratuitous fabrications, divide the dirt left over by two, and adjust a little for redeeming qualities he would fail to perceive in others.

  Lew led me into the museum, signed me in at the desk—“Security,” he said importantly—then took me down a flight of stairs and through a heavy door into the basement. He shuffled a ways down a hallway and approached a door, whif fled through his access-is-power array of keys, and chose one. Applied it to the lock. Swore underneath his breath. Chose another key. Succeeded in opening the door. Waved me into the room.

  I found myself in a tight, no-frills laboratory littered with workbenches, peculiar tools, and wide metal storage shelves. Specimen storage was instantly recognizable even in the dim light that filtered down from the basement window high on the far wall. I could see the dark hulks of very old bones peeking out at me, big bones, bones that could only have belonged to something as large as a major dinosaur. I qualify that because not all dinosaurs were large. Some were as small as chickens. But Dan Sherbrooke was definitely a big-bone kind of guy.

  Lew flipped on the banks of fluorescent lights, bathing the room in cold illumination. It was a homey, disarrayed room, coated with pale dust, sort of like having the backyard in your basement. The dust clearly stemmed from the process of picking plaster jackets and rock matrix off of fossils. And matrix picking there was, all up and down the heavy tables that commanded the center of the room, an astounding array of huge femurs and colossal vertebrae, each in a state of unearthing. The delicate tools of the operation lay all about, as did the crumbling wreckage of excavated rock. “There,” Lew said, sweeping a hand across the scene. “That’s what the fight’s about.”

  The door to the lab opened behind us and I heard someone come in. A slight young man hurried past us, hunched painfully at the chest. I recognized him from the conference: he was Vance, the small weaselly fellow I had first seen nattering at Dan Sherbrooke about a problem with the poster tent and had last seen hissing to me about commercial collectors. Without making eye contact with either of us, he sat down at the table, switched on an exhaust fan, bent over a bone, and set furiously to work cleaning matrix off of it with a dental drill.

  “What am I looking at here?” I asked, awed by the size of the bones before me.

  “Allosaurus fragilis,” Vance said without looking up. “About the biggest, fastest predatory dinosaur on record.”

  “Bigger than Tyrannosaurus rex?” I asked.

  Vance grunted disdainfully. “T. rex was bigger, sure, but he was a wanna-be. A scavenger. Or are you one of those Bakker fans?”

  I tried to figure out how old Vance was, to sort him into S, for Dan’s student, or C, for colleague. His skin was already creased, but it looked to me like sun damage and there was no sag under the chin or fold around the mouth. I guessed that he was somewhere in his twenties. He had wispy mustaches the color of butter and thin, unkempt hair pulled back into a ponytail. He wore the same wire-rimmed glasses, white T-shirt, and sagging pants I’d first seen him in at the conference—or another set just like them—like he hadn’t changed clothes in two days, but the brand names and style were au courant. I, for impecunious, not E, for eccentric. That and the youth argued for S, for student.

  As I watched him scratch away at the fossil in front of him, I contemplated the fierceness of his concentration. He went at his work with a fervor that held the twitchy overtones of barely contained anger. I had seen the type before. As a student, he was newly converted to the manias of the profession, hell-bent on advancing the science, and certain everyone but himself was a fool. I had seen him now three times, and had begun to feel a certain antagonistic affection for him. He was, after all, the only person at the conference who had spoken to me without seeming as if there was something he was either wanting from me or trying to keep from me.

  “I’ve heard about the controversy surrounding T. rex,” I said. In dinosaur land, T. rex had the biggest of the two-legged meat-eating big. The leaf-eating sauropods—those big long-necked dinos that walked on all fours like Brontosaurus and Seismosaurus—were infinitely larger yet, but at six tons and the height of a two-story building, Tyrannosaurus was no slouch. But it was the interpretation of the dinosaur’s feeding strategy that was in question. Was he really a king, or just an opportunist?

  Vance paused to proselytize. He turned toward me but stared at the floor while he made short chopping gestures designed to convey the intensity of his message: “They named it T. rex because its six-inch-long fangs were so fucking big: Tyrannosaurus rex, the tyrant lizard king. Everybody’s hung up on big. That’s bullshit!”

  I smiled at this petite man who was worried about size. He was right: we are a culture devoted to such images—to big-gests, longests, tallests, firsts, and fiercests. “But once that name was dealt out, it stuck,” I said. “I love watching those debates on PBS specials. In this corner, we have Bob Bakker, the guy with all the hair and the funny straw hat, and he thinks T. rex was the mighty hunter who chased his prey at high speed, grasped it by the spine, and throttled it—like a Russian wolfhound or something. In the other corner, we have Jack Horner speaking to us phlegmatically from some dig site in Montana, and he thinks T. rex was just a scavenger who kind of lumbered onto the scene after dinner had begun to grow ripe, days after it had died of natural causes. What’s the latest evidence?” I asked.

  “The bones tell the story,” Vance answered without looking up. “You do a cast of the inside of the skull and what do you get? A big optical lobe, like you’d need for a visual hunter like a hawk or an eagle? No. You get a big olfactory lobe, just like a vulture.” He emphasized his statement with a decisive slash with his dental tool.

  “But dinosaurs weren’t birds,” I said.

  Lew snorted contemptuously.

  Vance said, “Nope, they weren’t birds, just bird great-granddaddies.”

  “And great-grandmommies?” I asked.

  Lew snorted again, stuck his thumbs into his belt loops, and slouched.

  Vance flinched each time Lew snorted. Studiously ignoring the lounging department tech, Vance flipped his glasses up onto his forehead and stared at a flaw in his fossil from only millimeters away. “Whatever,” he muttered, “but also, the legs aren’t for running. The length and cross-sectional area of the femur is all wrong. And I know, I know what Bakker says about the size of the Achilles tendon and the cnemial crests on the tibia, but that’s all qualitative analysis, without a shred of quantitative.”

  “Oh.” He was beginning to lose me. “You’ve compared their proportions to those of modern animals.”

  Vance sighed with exasperation. “He’d be unstable at high speeds, even if he could reach them instantaneously, and he’d fall over and break something under the weight of his own fall!”

  “You mean an animal can exist that could crush itself by its own weight? That seems against nature.”

  “Elephants,” Vance said, brushing fiercely at a bit of plaster dust with a whisk broom. “You sit an elephant down with a dart so you can tag him, you’ve got to get him up fast, before he suffocates.”

  “Oh. But dinosaurs were
n’t mammals. They were reptiles. You can’t compare them straight across.”

  “Avian,” he corrected.

  Avian, similar to birds. Interesting, but I needed to redirect the conversation to the fight between Dan Sherbrooke and George Dishey, not Cope and Marsh or Horner and Bakker. “So Dan has an Allosaurus here.”

  “This is one of Dan’s allosaurids. One of them. Dan at least has the wit to compare individuals before he draws conclusions about a whole species.”

  Here I could follow him. Paleontologists like to compare as many examples of a species as they can before publishing on it. That way, they are better able to discuss the range of characteristics within the group, rather than getting caught describing a genetic freak or a malformity as the norm. “What did George Dishey go after?”

  “About anything he could find lying around.”

  “Kind of like a vulture?”

  Vance made a horizontal slicing motion with one hand. “Exactly. That’s our George. Fucking roadkill pimp.”

  “Roadkill?”

  Lew muttered, “It’s what you call a poorly preserved fossil.”

  I thought for a while. Surely there was no way for paleontologists to dictate what they were going to find. They were the ultimate scavengers, opportunistic hunter-gatherers who just went after whatever the gods of erosion happened to leave at the surface. That was the big gag about bone hunting: A perfect skeleton could lie a millimeter beneath the surface and a paleontologist could walk right over it and never know it was there. So it was not really paleontologists who found fossils; it was rain and wind and ice, those busy little forces of weather that dig constantly at the landscape all around us. “So, Vance,” I said, “you don’t think much of Dr. Dishey’s work.”

  “What’s there to like? He published gray literature, fucking puff pieces in Ladies’ Home Journal. I’d have liked to have seen him go up against a jury of his so-called peers just once!”

  I considered asking Vance what George Dishey had done to him to get him so pissed. But just then, Vance slammed down his dental pick. “I mean, I don’t get why you’re sounding so supportive of him. You were his last conquest! Doesn’t that sting just a little?”

  I thought long and hard before answering. I was embarrassed, yes, but not as much by the appearance that I was George’s last bimbo as by the fact that I’d bought one of his lies. I cared about trusting myself, and being taken in by George’s lies had shaken my self-security. Tit for tat, I presented about the nastiest comeback I could think of, as much to see what would happen as to get my licks in: “Why, are you jealous?”

  Vance’s eyes shrank into slits. “I am not a groupie,” he sneered. “I do real work. I collect real data. I form hypotheses and have the balls to present them to my colleagues, laying my ideas open to scrutiny, asking that they be supported or disproven. That is science. George wrote popular jerk-off articles that the boys and girls swooned over. I mean, shit; you saw him!”

  “Saw him what?”

  “At the conventions. He’d walk around in his paleontologist suit—we wear T-shirts, he’s got to wear a baggier one; we wear our hair long, he’s got to wear his longer, a mockery of the rest of us—waving that fucking brass jaw of his! Like he was trolling for groupies!”

  Vance’s venom was so caustic that it took me a moment to recall that he was talking about a man two decades or more his elder. I smiled. George Dishey had probably been growing long hair and whiskers while Vance was still in diapers.

  I indulged myself in an urge to touch the wide end of the four-foot-long femur at which Vance was picking. It was rough and cold. “I can’t for a moment believe that personal style has anything to do with this. So it’s really something else, isn’t it? Spell it out to me, Vance. What was George up to that pissed everybody off so much?”

  The young man spun around in his chair and faced me, his hands balled up into fists. His face had turned so red that I was afraid it might explode. Through his tiny yellow teeth, he hissed, “He sold bones!”

  “He what?”

  “Sold ‘em. Went out and dug them up just to sell ’em. Regular whore!”

  “Is that what you meant by a ‘commercial collector’?”

  Vance’s face darkened to almost purple. “That’s too kind a term for George Dishey.” Vance’s hands began to tremble. “Oh, sure, there are amateurs out there who’ll sell a find to a rock shop, and there are even pros who have a regular business doing that kind of supply. But they aren’t Ph.D.’s. George was. That’s prostitution!” Having said this, Vance jumped up from his chair and raced out of the laboratory just as abruptly as he had entered it.

  “Oh,” I said. But I didn’t understand, not really.

  I WAS QUIET for a moment, waiting for the proverbial dust to settle on the scene. Then I asked Lew, “Is there something I’m missing?”

  Lew turned his hands outward. “Hey, I’m just a tech.”

  “Oh, come on, Lew, you brought me over here to show me something.”

  Lew stared at the floor, deciding how much more he was going to tell me. “Let’s just say that grad students get a little … unbalanced after a while. Me, I go home at night and have a beer, watch a little TV, and life doesn’t get so serious. But these students,” he said, his voice taking on a heavy note of insinuation, “they bust their humps for wonderful old Dan or some other blowhard like him, living in some lousy tent eating beans, trying to dig up something good enough to write their dissertation on. And you know there’s no job waiting for them. Kind of makes you wonder if they’re quite right in the head, don’t it?”

  “You’re saying Vance is a little overwrought.”

  “Now you’re talking.” Lew started switching off lights. “Gotta save energy,” he mumbled, as we left the room.

  I thought, So you think Vance killed George. Or you’d like me to think he did. Why?

  “Now it’s your turn,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You want anything else from me, you tell me what you got on Dishey first.” He observed me through narrowed eyes, a parody of the smart guy extracting information from the stooge, or was he hiding a deeper intelligence than he let on?

  I thought for a while. Should I tell him about the man who had ransacked George’s house, or just give him the bare essentials about the sequence of the phone call and George’s abrupt early-morning departure? “I don’t know much,” I said.

  Lew grew truculent. “Sure you do.” He looked insulted.

  “Well, like I told the police, George left early yesterday morning, before it was light out. Someone phoned. He went. Next I know, the police have found his body.”

  “Where?”

  “They won’t tell me.”

  “How’d they kill him?”

  “They won’t tell me that, either.” Shifting the interrogation back to him, I said, “How well did you know George?”

  He lifted his shoulders a half inch and dropped them again. “Not well. He was around.”

  “Who’d he hang out with? He have any friends?”

  Another shoulder twitch. “Some of his old army buddies. Okay bunch.”

  “Like maybe a helicopter pilot or two.”

  “Maybe.” Lew’s eyes narrowed and opened again, as if he was thinking, or trying to cover his thoughts.

  “You know a guy he hung out with who maybe had high cheekbones and a long beard like the pictures of Moses?”

  Lew’s lower jaw shifted forward a fraction of an inch. After a moment, he said, “No.”

  He’s covering something. “He have a wife?”

  Lew considered. “Don’t think so.”

  “So you didn’t know him that well.”

  He shrugged again. I was treading on thin ice: It would not do to push a knowledge broker too far off the edge of what he knew. He might start making things up just to sound important.

  I said, “He like little girls, maybe?”

  Lew smirked. This was clearly a new idea to him, and he
liked it.

  With disgust, I said, “Well then, that’s all I know. Show me more about collecting, would you?”

  One more shrug. “Okay. I’ll take you to the collections room.” He led me down a short hallway and up a ramp to another room. This one was much larger, both wider and longer, and it appeared to turn a corner at the far end. The underground guts of the building showed—supports and large pipes and conduits running this way and that—but fitted in around these necessities, packed floor to ceiling, were specimen storage cabinets, hundreds of them. Specimens of classic fossils winked out at me from every corner: mastodon skulls from the Pleistocene, turtle shells from the Cretaceous, dinosaur bones by the bucketload. The sight was overwhelming.

  As we entered the space, a slender woman stood up from a table and met us. She fixed dark, richly luminous eyes on me and smiled. “Hi, are you here from the conference?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m Em Hansen.” I pulled my name badge out of my pocket to show her.

  She extended a delicate hand. “Jane Whitney. I’m the museum’s paleontology collection manager. Sign in here. What would you like to see?”

  I looked around the immediate area. A man sat at a wide table, scrutinizing a fossil turtle. Catacombs led off deeper into the basement, all lined with more drawers of specimens.

  Lew spoke. “Em here’s just trying to get a feeling for things. She’s trying to figure out what all the shouting’s about.”

  “Um, yes,” I said. “I’m a stratigrapher, not a paleontologist. But I’m trying to learn more about fossil collections and collecting. I’ve been in a lot of museums, but I’d never dreamed that there was so much in storage beyond what the public sees.”

  “Oh, yes,” Jane replied. “In fact, there are some museums that have no public displays.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re purely working collections.”

  “But why not share them with the public?”