Bone Hunter

by Sarah Andrews

  “What kind of people are these?” I asked, recalling the slick, conservative look of the commercial collector who had eluded me at the conference.

  “Most of the pros work within the law. They work only on private lands or Indian reservations, giving the owners a cut. It’s still baubles instead of history, but it’s legit. But then there are the guys who love to bend the law. They’d do it no matter what business they were in. They like to think they’re smarter, somehow above the law. Or they they think the law should be changed to suit their business interests, so why not just behave as if they’ve already been changed?”

  “The permitting laws?”

  “That and the Antiquities Act. They want the whole works repealed. They lobby hard, and when they can’t get what they want by playing fair, they go the other way. You’d be amazed. We’ve got paper trails that lead into every Federal agency involved, even the Forest Service and the U.S. National Park Service. They have little stoolies letting them know when the patrols are going out, so they can nip in and get the bones when nobody’s watching.”

  “But those guys have a job. What do they want to get involved with organized crime for?”

  “It’s a lifestyle thing, usually. They get into a habit like gambling, or driving fancy cars, things their salaries can’t support.”

  “So they’re lying, too,” I said.

  He looked at me sharply. “What do you mean?”

  “They’re compulsive. When you’re compulsive, you’re lying to yourself, not admitting that the gambling rush or some damned object you buy with your blood money isn’t going to make you happy, isn’t going to fill the hole in your soul.”

  Not Tom favored me with another smile. “You’re good,” he said. “Want a job?”

  “What, with you?” I smiled back. “But you’re a liar, too.”

  He put a hand mockingly across his chest. “I?”

  “Yes, you. Your name ain’t Tom Latimer, and you ain’t no artist. Unless your artistic medium is bullshit.”

  Not Tom shrugged equitably. “You’re right, of course. Lying for the truth is like killing for peace. But …” His voice trailed off. He glanced at his watch again.

  “So what are you going to get the bad-guy commercial collectors for, collecting without a permit?”

  “Nah. Some local magistrate will let them off with a wrist slap—a hundred-dollar fine for plundering a hundred-fifty-million-year-old site. Some nice local joy boy who’s known the collector all his life and thinks I should go back to Washington and let the locals make a living. That’s a kind of lie right there: It’s okay to steal if we do it to put food on the table. You see? The ‘we need food’ part is true, but the method of getting it is not.”

  “Because it’s against the law?”

  Not Tom rammed his fists farther into his pockets, shoving his shoulders up nearer his ears, finally showing some emotion. “What’s a law? A law’s a reflection of the will of the people, or a good one is. But laws are slippery, easy to disavow, depending on whose ‘side’ you’re on, just like our local magistrate who thinks I should go back to Washington. Don’t ask me how many times I’ve fudged my taxes. No, a law is not enough to get you on the flying bucket of bolts you call a helicopter, not enough to send you out into the desert to look for people you’ve never met who disemboweled a man you didn’t like. What makes you go is the lie. You go because you want your truth to gain the upper hand. Am I right?”

  We both stood quietly for a while, watching the western sky. In a small voice, I asked, “What’s your truth?”

  “My truth? My truth is leaving the campsite better than I found it.” He laughed, a quick snort. “Doesn’t sound like much, does it? You can say, Who gives a shit about dinosaur bones anyway? Don’t we have enough of them? But I say no, life is precious, every minute of it, and every detail of every creature that lived before me, and every creature that hopes to live after me.”

  “We’re all on one earth,” I said.

  “That sure is how I see it. Those bones are part of our history and our heritage, and at least on these federal lands, we’ve been able to claim them for the people. That’s democracy in action. You wouldn’t let someone walk into your classroom and start tearing pages out of your history books, so why let them steal any part of what those books are written about? It’s time to value natural history just like any other part of ourselves.”

  I stared at the tarmac for a while while the man next to me stared up into the sky. The day was almost gone. The hours in which we could still find that site had ticked down to minutes. “Thanks, whatever your name is,” I said, wondering if the FBI had sent him out to the far wastes of Utah because he was too human.

  “Theft is undemocratic,” he told the sky, and to me he said, “Here comes your ride.”

  22

  THE HELICOPTER SLID TOWARD US THROUGH THE YELLOWING sky, the mighty thudding of its blades growing to a deafening drumming as it moved overhead. My hair kicked up around my face and my shirt buffeted against my chest as it descended, slowly, touching both skids gently onto the ground. The rotors slowed infinitesimally as the whine of the turbines began to descend, and then, bit by bit, the blur of whirling metal resolved itself into two sweeping blades. The pilot, a surprisingly slight person, stepped down out of the cockpit and walked briskly off to find a fueler. My jaw dropped as what I thought should be a man turned slightly and I saw the silhouette of her breasts and the rounding of her hips. A bolt of unease shot through me. This had not been in the plan. My breath shortened as I tried to understand why it bothered me that she was a she. Was I sexist? Had I rigged this whole adventure in my mind as one more dramatic moment to be alone with Ray, or at least the only woman around him? No, I realized. I’m afraid for her. She makes this real.

  As I thought this sobering thought, two more doors popped open, and first Bert and then Ray appeared from opposite sides of the passenger compartment in back. They met by the front of the helicopter and walked toward me in close communication, discussing a sheet of notes Bert held on a clipboard.

  I waited for Ray to look up and see me. I couldn’t help wondering how he was feeling about me, whether he still found me interesting, or if, with these latest developments, he had decided I was too much of a troublemaker.

  Ray took the clipboard from Bert and continued to stare scrupulously into his notes.

  Lightning flashed overhead. The rumble of thunder came too quickly afterward. The storm was moving over Price now.

  Bert gave me his gallows grin. “Hey, so it’s the junior detective,” he bellowed across the tarmac. “You get a signet ring in that box of Cracker Jacks, too?” He strode toward me, closing the final distance quickly on his long legs.

  I fixed a noncommittal gaze into his pale green eyes and tried to remember that there was a human being beneath his nastiness.

  Bert ignored me and turned to Not Tom Latimer. “What’s the buzz from ground patrol?”

  Not Tom said, “My latest contact says Nina went over the backyard fence at Ray’s mother’s house forty-five minutes ago and thumbed a ride south. One of our unmarked cars picked her up. Fast little rabbit, she is. Made the interstate in ten minutes flat. We almost lost her. We have a listen-only channel open, but she isn’t saying much.”

  I spun around toward him to say, You didn’t tell me that, but I stopped myself. I made a mental note: They still aren’t telling me everything.

  “Good,” said Bert. “My dispatcher said no calls out from Miz Raymond’s house, so our bogeys have no phone, like you supposed. Real bunch of millennium survivalists, looks like. Off the grid and into the country. Wonder what kind of firepower they have hidden in their bunker?”

  “Let’s not find out,” said the FBI agent, “or at least, let’s leave that to Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. They’re on their way.”

  Bert’s already glowing eyes flared even brighter. He was pumped up, almost salivating. “Great! Gonna be quite a party.” He looked to the west and south. �
��This storm’s gonna blow over quick. We still have enough light to see. In, out with this chopper quick, so we don’t arouse their interest; wait till our rabbit gives us an address, then send in the hounds. Now, you—” He turned his crazy peepers my way. “Your job is to take us to this site soon as my pilot gets fueled. Out, back, real simple; all you got to do is show us your location and any other little geological goodies you want to lay on us so we can tie this up to that warehouse in Salt Lake. You understand?”

  “Like the fact that the bones might be radioactive?” I asked.

  “Really!” said Bert, his eyebrows shooting up appreciatively. “Now, what does that mean?”

  “That’s another thing I picked up on the bus. Uranium likes to attach itself to organic matter. Imagine it in the groundwater, flowing along in solution, and then it hits organic matter like a fossil log, maybe, or a bone. Bam, it come out of solution and into the bone, where the accumulation slowly concentrates. A lot of the dinosaur sites in this area were originally found by uranium prospectors. There’s so much uranium in the bones that the paleontologists use scintilometers to prospect for fossils sometimes. You might be able to match concentrations in bone chips left over in the site to the contraband in storage. Or you could use it as a way of looking for hot debris in whatever truck they used to move stuff. It’s also probably part of why George Dishey stored his stuff in a locker. You know, keep the heat away from his house. It can cause cancer if you keep it close for too long.”

  “Nice, nice, nice,” said Bert. “We’ll keep you around to lecture to the kiddies. Now, when we’re done with you today, if you want to wait for us by the airport here until we’re done with the collar, fine—or you can find your own way back to Salt Lake City.” He put a hand mockingly over his heart. “But I am a law-enforcement professional, sworn to protect tender little innocents like yourself, and when the fun begins, you’re back here where you can’t get hurt. You hear me?”

  “Yes.” My nerves were screwed to an intensity that had me almost shaking.

  The pilot walked up to us and introduced herself to Not Tom and me. “Joan Howe,” she said. She was cheerful, enthusiastic. My stomach turned.

  I waited for Not Tom to give her his true name, but he just smiled and shook her hand. I said nothing, too unsure of my feelings to engage in social niceties.

  I decided to phone Carlos while I was still alive. I said, “I’ll be right back,” and headed toward the flight service station in the building behind us.

  “Where you going?” Bert called after me.

  “The bathroom,” I replied. Try following me there, wise guy.

  Carlos wasn’t at work or at home, but I left a message on his machine. As I was heading back around the corner of the building to rejoin the crew by the helicopter, I ran smack into Ray.

  “Hi,” he said, catching me by the shoulder while I regained my balance.

  “Hello,” I said.

  He was making eye contact now, staring straight into me, reaching for something I’ve seldom shared with anyone. “You don’t have to go,” he said.

  “I know.”

  He had both hands on my shoulders now. “I … don’t want to lose you.”

  I reached up and touched his cheek very gently. “You won’t.”

  THE HELICOPTER BROKE out of the clouds and moved smoothly through the air, chasing the fading rays of the setting sun across the desert. I looked over to where Joan Howe sat beside me, her expert, slender hands working the controls. Her blond hair stuck out in wisps around the edge of her helmet. I noticed that she wore an engagement ring, and a snapshot of a rakish-looking boyfriend showing off a prize trout grinned at me from the place where it was taped between the avionics and the radios. I could hear her voice inside my helmet, like twin spirits that had found their way inside my ears. “We didn’t have payload room for the FBI guy,” she was explaining to me. “We got a big spotlight hanging from our belly. It weighs almost fifty pounds. We would have had to leave fuel off to carry him, shortening our range.”

  I was still sorting out my surprise at her gender. I’m a pilot myself, and I work in male-dominated professions all day long, and always love it when I find a fellow female to work with. So why is this bothering me? I wondered. “I don’t think he particularly wanted to come, anyway,” I said. Not wanting to jinx our flight, I didn’t tell her that he’d already been in a crash. “Are you a police officer?” I asked.

  “No, pilot only. It works better that way. If I was an officer, too, I might get my priorities mixed, get caught up in a chase that wasn’t safe. This way, my number-one priority is to operate this craft safely.”

  “I’m glad to know that,” I said as I stared down through the Plexiglas floor panel that started just in front of my toes and swept up to meet the windshield. The ground was flying away beneath my feet—an uncanny, slightly sickening sensation. The whole front of the craft was Plexiglas, a big clear bubble that jutted to a rounded nose shaped not unlike the visor of a medieval helmet. “I understand overhead wires are a problem,” I said.

  “Right. You can’t see them. But we have wire cutters mounted above and below the fuselage.” She pointed down below us and up over our heads at forty-five-degree angles. “About ninety percent coverage. If a wire hits us in the face, it’ll be deflected up or down into the catchers, which would grasp it into the cutters. Above the upper cutter, there’s a small gap and then the rotors. If it hits the top of the rotors, it’s like hitting a Frisbee that’s flying through the air—kinda whips it away. This ship’s just plain loaded with safety equipment.”

  “I’m glad to know that, too,” I said, both excited and uncertain. From the moment I had felt the vibration of the turbines firing up, felt the secondary wobble set off by the accelerating rotors, smelled the wash of jet fuel before she snapped shut her door, watched the RPM gauges—T for turbines, R for rotors—run up into their narrow green operating zone, I had been both hooked and terrified. No carnival ride enjoyed the bite of reality this bird had. “I fly fixed-wing craft,” I said. “Most of them have a control wheel. I see you use a joystick.”

  “It’s called a cyclic,” she said, patting the control between her knees. “Don’t ever call it a joystick, or a helicopter pilot will laugh.” With her left hand, she patted another lever that lay between the two front seats like a gearshift. “This is the collective. Feathers the rotors, controls lift. Cyclic controls the pitch of the Frisbee, gives us pitch and roll. Pedals control the yaw.” She moved each one to demonstrate. As she moved the cyclic, I could see the disk-shaped blur of the rotors tilt this way and that. It did look rather like a Frisbee. The odd thing was how smooth the ride was, but I realized that unlike a fixed-wing airplane, which flies through the wind, a helicopter creates its own. And controls it, or at least up to a point. I crossed my fingers that the storm would stay out of our track.

  Through a brief break in the western clouds, I could see that a fingernail moon was setting. If the storm dissipated, we would have a dark, starry night. We were on our way into the dry lands, unpolluted by the lights of cities or security lamps. The stars would be especially brilliant. If the storm dissipated, which looked unlikely; the tops of the anvils reached almost overhead.

  I straightened the map across my knees. I had chosen the shaded relief map rather than the air chart, as it had the best detail for drainages and rock outcroppings. “Follow that draw on the other side of that hogback,” I said.

  I could not see Ray and Bert where they sat behind the partition between the forward and aft sections of the cabin, but I could hear Bert’s voice in my ears through the rear intercom hookup. It was a bit like having him inside my head, an uncomfortable sensation. “Take us lower,” he said. “I don’t want our bogey seeing us coming.”

  “Okay, but I got limits,” answered the pilot. “As long as I’m moving fast, I can fly fairly low, but if you want me to hover, I want altitude, in case I’ve got to effect an autorotation.”

  Autorotation. Th
ere was that word again. It was a word that field geologists using helicopters had learned to fear. Autorotation was what a helicopter did when its engine went out. Lacking true wings, it could not glide down; it could only drop helplessly like a raw egg until the pilot lifted the collective and flared the rotors at the last moment, essentially cushioning the landing with air.

  “This isn’t the best craft for sneaking up on someone,” Joan said.

  “I’ll risk that,” Bert answered. “You just fly sweet and nice and try not to look like police, so we can get in there and see if we can get the lay of the land and follow these tracks little Emmy found. I’m feeling lucky tonight, sweetheart. I’m feeling these tracks are going to take us right to Mr. Bad!” He cackled, a sound relentlessly unpleasant through the earphones of my helmet, like having a rude bug loose inside my head.

  I turned my mind away toward the ground that was sliding quickly past below me. I could see why, even with fear of autorotation, geologists loved to work via helicopter. One could claim an infinitely adjustable overview not possible from the ground. Vast quantities of time could be saved as one sprinted from point to point, setting down quickly to gather data, springing up again, hovering to take a better look here, pivoting in place to glance quickly there. I could see the broad layers of rock spread out before me, trace them quickly with my eye. I could see the Morrison Formation now, see it open out its soft, easily erodible belly in a valley or a ravine here, watch it disappear underneath another layer of younger, harder rock there. The Morrison’s soft mudstones had been deposited in ancient lake beds and flood plains. It had lain buried, its fabulous fossil treasure hidden, for over 100 million years, a vast cemetery quietly holding its secrets. Now the region had been uplifted, and the deposition and burial of rock layers were being reversed by erosion. The sparse desert rains and arid winds now plucked at the shaley surface of the formation, carving the rocks slowly, inexorably into a broad badlands carpet broken by the occasional limestone or sandstone ledge. It occurred to me suddenly how little of its enormous expanse actually kissed the surface; just a thin interface between the volume that had already been eroded and all the billions of cubic miles of rock that still lay buried, and which would stay buried long beyond my lifetime, or perhaps all the remaining lifetimes of the human race. On this interface lay the few bones that nature had contrived to reveal to us, a mother lode of tissue turned to stone that drew the love and lust of the bone hunters. That which had been eroded before the advent of human curiosity was already lost, carried downstream, ground to dust. That which lay underneath the countless tonnage of overlying mountains and mesas would for the time being stay hidden, a task of excavation too costly in time and equipment even for the most committed. Bone hunting was a game of luck and perseverance, of walking the same ground again and again, hoping that this year the winter runoff had removed that critical millimeter of veiling mudstone that obscured a natural treasure; the enthralling magic of history disclosed for some, the love of strangeness and beauty requited for many, the ecstasy of treasure lust fulfilled for others.