Bone Hunter

by Sarah Andrews

  “No money. Not enough money or manpower to prepare the specimens for display. Look here,” she said, pointing at a large block of rock still swathed in its protective plaster jacket. “This shouldn’t even be in here. The dust off the plaster is a problem. But we had no place else to put it. This is the pelvis and partial spine of Allosaurus. It’s an important find because it was partially articulated. It will tell us lots about how the bones set together in life. That is, when we find time to train a volunteer to prepare it. There’s no way we could afford paid preparators for all of these.”

  “But once you’ve prepared it, will it go on display?”

  “Probably not. The public doesn’t want to see just the pelvis and spine. Now if it was just the skull, that would be a different matter.”

  “Oh.”

  “Most just don’t know enough biology to be interested in only the pelvis and spine, unless it’s really huge, or the only part of that particular creature on record.”

  I thought of what Vance had said about size and smiled ruefully. “I understand that much of your field collecting is done with volunteers, too. I’m wondering how that works.”

  Jane’s warm eyes grew even warmer. “To tell you the truth, I sometimes wonder myself how we get them interested. After all, you’re out there in the blazing sun with gnats crawling into your ears and warm beer and bad spaghetti for dinner, dry camping, with no place to wash, but you rue the day you’ve got to go back to town.” She shook her head, smiling at the memory.

  “Why?”

  “Because when you find something, it’s better than any feeling you can imagine.”

  The joy of discovery. Every geologist, no matter what stripe, understood that. “You just want to know a little bit more,” I said.

  “Always. We scratch away for every little clue we can get that tells us something about how these animals lived. Not just how big they were, or how they stood or swam or crawled, but how they lived.” She laughed, leading us down an aisle into the catacombs, where she turned her palm up toward a case filled with huge teeth and jaws. “Take the dinosaurs, for instance. Everybody gets so het up about what killed them, what made them go extinct.” She pulled out a drawer. “An asteroid, some people say. Climate change. Mammals eating their eggs. You know what grabs me? Not how they died, but how long they lived.” She selected a jawbone twice the length of my hand and laid it tenderly across my palm. “Feel the serrations along the edge? Allosaurus. Each tooth is curved back toward the throat. She bites you, you’re caught. Notice how it’s actually two bones, hinged in the middle. Most carnivorous dinosaurs had that. It gave the jaw flexibility, so it could hold on to an animal that was thrashing.”

  I held the jawbone with care. “It looks like the bronze one George Dishey had, only smaller.”

  “Yes. This one’s from a juvenile.”

  As I goggled at the ferocious biting equipment that rested on my hand, marveling that it had belonged to a child, Jane pulled out other drawers, zeroing in on favorite specimens. “The dinosaurs were around for a hundred and eighty million years, lived on every continent on the earth. They were more diverse and advanced than you’d imagine, and I’ll bet we haven’t even found examples of whole groups.”

  “Why not?”

  “Some of their ecological niches would not have been preserved, and if the sediments they died in weren’t preserved, then they weren’t preserved. Like any alpine species.”

  I had never thought about the possibility of alpine dinosaurs, but it was true—mountain habitats were not preserved in the rock record. It was the plains that were preserved, the areas where sediments eroded from the mountains were deposited by the action of wind and water. The bones of any animal that died in the mountains would be ground to dust as they were borne downhill. “But alpine dinosaurs? Really?”

  “There are alpine birds. Ptarmigans. They grow white feathers in the winter, so they can hide in the snow. But remember also that the global climate was much warmer during the Mesozoic, so we aren’t necessarily talking about snow. And they could have migrated up and down the mountains, like many modern mammals, such as sheep and deer. We know they lived in the Arctic regions, because we find their bones there. So they must have migrated long distances, just to follow the vegetation. Like elk.”

  “Elk,” I echoed. I imagined Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with hadrosaurs grazing by the lakes instead of elk. “Herds.”

  “Yes. And they cared for their young, some of them. Adapted like crazy.” She stopped by a drawer, pulled it out, and handed me two short black bones. “Metatarsal bones—the foot. The same bone from two different allosaurids. See how this one is smooth on the end and this one rough? Disease.”

  “Arthritis?” I asked, amazed. It had never occurred to me that dinosaurs might ache like humans do.

  “Not that, but something like it. Here’s a rib that broke and healed crookedly. See the extra bone that built up around the injury? There are people who study just the diseases evident in museum collections. Dinosaurs were wonderful,” she continued, replacing each bone and drawing out others for me to examine. “They evolved to fill every major niche of the terrestrial ecosystem, even flight. And you and I, our kind have been lucky to walk upright for three million.” She shook her head slowly. “And it doesn’t look like it’s going to take an asteroid to kill us.”

  “Yeah,” said Lew. “We’ll just kill each other.”

  My shoulders tensed. For a moment, I had relaxed into the pleasures of learning. Suddenly, I was back on a murder case, watching my back.

  Jane said, “Yes, we do have our problems, don’t we?” She considered the rough-ended bone in her hand. “Disease.” She placed it back in its place in the drawer. “Pollution. Ignorance. Greed.”

  Taking care to keep my voice calm, I said, “Tell me about the greed.”

  Lew spoke. “Yeah, that’s where George Dishey comes in. Him and Sherbrooke always had to one-up each other.”

  Jane said, “Heavens, I heard that George died! Isn’t that terrible? Dan must be beside himself. They were roommates at Yale, weren’t they?”

  Lew said, “Yeah. But Sherbrooke came from money; Dishey came from a blue-collar background, like myself.” He looked at me through narrowed eyes.

  Jane said, “Oh, you hear a lot of gossip about those two, but you shouldn’t take it seriously.”

  “Try me,” I urged.

  Jane unlocked a metal case, and I was immediately engulfed in the reek of crude oil. She pulled out a skull that looked new, save for a thin coating of tar. “Know what this is?”

  “Wolf?”

  “Exactly. Dire wolf, La Brea tar pits, Pleistocene. Looks like new, huh? That’s because it is, geologically speaking. It isn’t even mineralogically altered.”

  “Neat. But what about Dan and George?”

  “Oh, Dan got a grant; George had to get a better grant. George found a fossil; Dan had to find a better one. Dan got a girl; George had to … well, you get the picture. Dan published on some little anatomical thing he’d figured out, George went into print just to say Dan was full of it. Or he’d find out what Dan had discovered and publish something about it in the popular press before Dan would dare to. It’s not a nice story. They really both ought to be embarrassed. Well, at least Dan might still be.”

  “But Dan won. He got the jobs, the status within the society. How’d that happen?”

  Jane closed the tar pit case and leaned against it. “I shouldn’t be talking about this.”

  “Why? It seems a lot of people don’t want to talk about this.”

  “It’s a small community. You don’t badmouth people.”

  Lew snorted.

  I said, “We’re talking about a murder case.”

  Lew snorted again. He was beginning to remind me of a pet pig a high school friend of mine once kept.

  “Vance said George sold bones,” I said. “That sounded like a big deal. Why?”

  “Look at it this way,” Jane said. “You can�
�t get the information you need from a bone you buy at a shop; it’s too far removed from its context. You need the bone in place, lying relative to other fossils.” She gestured with her hands, staring down into a dig site she saw laid out before her in her mind’s eye. “You need the reference of the surrounding rock outcrop, and all those other little clues that tell you how it lived, how it died, how it got buried, all that. And you need all that information with the stratigraphic sequence above and below, so you can know how old it is relative to other similar specimens and what environmental pressures it was encountering, so we can make interpretations regarding evolutionary pathways. Without all that, it’s just a bone.”

  “So you’re saying you need the evidence from the rock around the fossil to fully understand it.”

  “Yes. How old is it? What else was living at the time? Was it buried in a lake? A river? What kind of river? A perennial stream that flowed through a desert?” Jane’s hands began to move with the pictures that were emerging in her head, her right hand fluttering like wind on the water, her left hand describing the river’s bend. “Did that mean the animals were crowding together at a water hole, fighting for resources? Was the herd on the decline?”

  I was ranch born and bred. Herds I understood. Herds crowding together at the watering hole in a semiarid climate, with coyotes on the hunt. That was the life I had lived as a kid in Wyoming. Cows miring in quicksand, falling over into the water, drowning, making a nice feast for the coyotes. “But dinosaurs aren’t cows,” I said, forgetting to fill in the leap that connected my thoughts.

  Jane said, “No, they weren’t. The cows came later, much later.”

  “I have a hard time imagining them moving in herds.”

  “Some species did; you find them in mass burial. Others, no; you only find them alone. Just like us mammals. Or modern birds. Some flocked; some hunted or browsed alone. Some ate seeds and leaves; others went for meat. Some apparently laid their eggs in rookeries and cared for their young. They were a great bunch of animals.”

  “I still have a hard time featuring them. I mean, giant reptiles filling the world?”

  Jane led onward to another case, obviously relieved to be back on the subject of something dead a little longer than twenty-four hours. “Like I told you, they weren’t just a bunch of big dumb reptiles. Think of them as more like birds. You compare them to lizards, like their name suggests, and it doesn’t work as well. That was the mistake everybody made the first couple hundred years we looked at these bones: We thought they were lizards. Terrible lizards. Dinosaurs. That’s what the name means. Think of them as lizards and it’s hard to imagine a herd of them gathering by a water hole to drink, but think of them as birds and all of a sudden we can see them moving in flocks, gathering for the protection of numbers, feeding together, nesting together.”

  “Like flamingos, or pelicans.”

  “Sure. Lovely, elegant things, moving as gracefully as birds. The early paleontologists mounted T. rex standing upright, dragging his tail, but they had to break its tail to do that, mount it dislocated—no kidding—and also dislocate its back, and neck. All because they looked at those big bones and thought heavy and thought lizard and assumed it’d have to drag its tail even to walk. But think of their spines as balance beams. Think bird. Think light for their size. The bones weren’t always made of rock.”

  “So now they mount them head forward and tail out in back,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Lew. “Or go like Bakker and have them rearing up and dancing.”

  “You don’t think they did that?” Jane asked, shooting him an impudent smile.

  “What do I know?” Lew joked. “I’m only a tech.”

  Jane curled up a delicate hand and gave Lew a playful punch on the shoulder. “Yes, you’re a tech, but you have a feeling for them, Lew. You’re good. You’ve worked with Dan for years. You’ve been in the field with him half a dozen times.”

  Lew’s face clouded. “Yeah. I’ve worked out there alongside Dan for years, carrying his damned equipment, busting my back in those pits, getting heatstroke. Vance thinks he’s just invented suffering for science, but I’ve been at it since before he was born.”

  I looked at Lew more closely, reappraising him. Had he been jealous of Vance’s closeness with his professor? Had he brought me here so I’d suspect Vance of murder? Or did he feel sorriest for himself, and want to nurse a grudge against Dan?

  Lew hung his head. “Then Dishey has to go and make it all a contest. He yanked the damned things out of the ground as fast as he could, just to make his name big, just to make a buck, just to beat Dan.”

  I watched the emotions that flickered across Lew’s face. Much as his tone and gestures spoke of an almost morose dedication to Sherbrooke’s interests, the glint in his eyes suggested a crafty consciousness of the theatrical effect he thought he was projecting.

  12

  AS I FOLLOWED LEW BACK UP ACROSS THE UNIVERSITY campus, I peppered him with more questions, and he alternately shrugged his shoulders and made grunting noises. As we reached a fork in our paths, I said, “Oh, come on, Lew, you have something else you want to tell me, so why don’t you just spill it?”

  Lew looked almost miffed. Then he said, “You want to know more about Dan and George, you come on Dan’s field trip tomorrow.”

  It was the second time that day I’d heard that line. I’m slow, but I do catch on. “Okay, sign me up.”

  He nodded. “The buses leave Snowbird at seven A.M.,” he said.

  Snowbird. I had a feeling that I wasn’t going back to Snowbird, not if Officer Raymond and the Salt Lake City police force had their way. I figured that they were right to be concerned. If I embarked at the conference, who knew who might be watching me get on that bus? And I didn’t like what this Lew was selling, either, but I’d have to take the chance that he was greedy enough about his infernal information mongering that he’d keep quiet that I was going along on the trip, if indeed he had anyone dangerous to tell. “Any way I can catch up with the game at the destination?” I asked.

  “No way. The location’s a big secret.”

  “Why?”

  “Poachers.”

  “Oh.” I let that go for the time being. “Anywhere else I can get on?”

  Lew scratched his head. “I guess you could slip on at the Salt Palace. We’re making a detour past there to pick up some journalists about seven-thirty. Our Dan’s got to have the camera on him.”

  “I noticed that about him,” I said. “Like today at the conference. A bunch of fundamentalists started picketing, and I’d swear Dan was more worried about upstaging them than disputing their ideas.”

  Lew smirked. “Ol’ Dan scored big this time. They’re going to do a press conference on the evening news. That’s like hitting the jackpot for our Dan.”

  “A press conference? For a protest rally?”

  “Sort of. That way he can show off Vance’s work like it’s his own.” He snorted.

  “Oh. Is that why Vance was so wound up?”

  “Nah, Vance is always that wound up. He’s been working all summer on this location we’re going to tomorrow. You’ll see. His doctoral stuff is riding on it, but Dan wouldn’t let him remove anything from the site before the conference guys got a look at it.”

  “What’s the problem with waiting?” I asked.

  “Poachers,” Lew said again, as we parted near the walkway back to the Geology Department. “Always we got to watch out for them damned poachers.”

  “You mean like people stealing game? Why? Do they get trigger-happy or something?”

  Lew shook his head. “Naw, I’m talking about the guys who like to remove your fossils for you after you’ve gone to the trouble to find them and dig them out and get them ready to pop.”

  “People do that?” I asked, appalled. It didn’t seem quite sporting to swipe someone else’s find.

  Lew shook his head contemptuously, like I was hopelessly naïve.

  “That’s disgusting!”<
br />
  “Welcome to the big bad world.”

  I couldn’t keep up with his venom. “So has Vance found something that’s going to rock the scientific world?” That would have complicated things, I thought. If George kept stealing his thunder, Dan might have felt moved to go to extreme lengths to stop him from doing it again … .

  “I’m sworn to secrecy. You don’t get on Dan’s digs unless you toe that line.”

  “I hear that no one knew where George was digging, either.”

  “Ha,” said Lew. “At least Dan eventually lets the world know where the fossils came from. Dishey probably dreamed the bones he wrote about.” He turned his back and began to shamble away up the walk toward the geology building.

  “Wait!” I called after him. “Who are these poachers you keep talking about?”

  Lew turned around, walking backward, still moving. He shrugged his shoulders. “Ask the commercial guys.”

  I had about had my fill of people baiting me toward asking a question, then referring me to somebody else when I asked it. “Explain this to me, damn it! Who are these people?”

  Lew turned his back to me again and kept on walking up the hill. “Who knows? Maybe it’s somebody local, maybe it’s not.”

  He was waffling, and waffling meant he knew nothing more. At his level of the professional food chain, knowledge is power, and he didn’t want the world to see his powerlessness. For the time being, I gave up.

  BACK AT THE police station, I was in for a surprise.

  “We found Nina,” Ray said as he turned down a hallway. He presumed I would follow him. He was right.

  “Where?” I asked, dumbfounded. “When?”

  Ray led me into a dark room. I’d been in rooms like this before, in the Denver police station. It was full of electronic recording equipment and had a window made of one-way glass, so that interviews in the next room could be watched and recorded without the subject’s awareness. When we had arranged ourselves in front of the glass, Ray finally answered my questions. Sort of. I mean, decency dictated that Ray had to say something. Nina looked like hell. Her appearance hit me like a blow.