Digging For Trouble

by Linda Fairstein

  “Well, you let Mr. Donner walk off with my bones.”

  “I did no such thing,” I said, lifting the flap to leave the tent. “You didn’t exactly rise to the occasion, Katie. And as my grandmother would say, ‘I’m not done with Mr. Donner yet.’”

  I let her catch up with Kyle and followed behind them. Most of the adults were gathered around fire pits, talking and exchanging stories with one another.

  Steve Paulson’s headquarters was an enormous teepee—not a camping tent like ours. It was held up by four pine poles, more than twenty feet high, which crossed one another and interlocked at the top, and were covered on the sides by canvas. It was so big that inside there were even carpets and oversize pillows scattered on the floor. Six of the older kids were relaxing after the long day’s work.

  Steve had actually built a campfire in the middle of the teepee, and one of his assistants was fixing up some s’mores for us to roast over it.

  “Give a welcome to Katie and Dev,” Steve said. “Kyle’s sort of a summer regular here. The rest of you should introduce yourselves.”

  Most of the others—five guys and a girl—were college and graduate students. One of them, a very slender young woman, got up and came over to Katie and me.

  “Hi. My name is Ling,” she said, shaking my hand. “I’m in grad school at Yale University. I’ll be one of your tentmates tonight.”

  I perked up at the chance to talk to an older girl who was enough of a brainiac to be at Yale, and also had come a long way to offer to help with the dig. “Sweet,” I said. “That’ll be fun.”

  Katie had two older brothers. I was the only child of a single mother and had always wanted a sibling. A couple of years ago, my mom sort of adopted a teenager who’d been orphaned. Now Natasha, who was twenty-two, was part of our family.

  “Sit yourselves down, please, and make yourselves at home,” Steve said. “I like to get us together every evening because the questions you have now—after spending your first day in the field and getting your hands in the dirt—are going to be a lot better than the ones you asked me yesterday.”

  “Yeah,” Katie whispered to me, “like where are my bones? That’s a good question, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t go there yet,” I said. “Let’s scope out the situation, okay?”

  “I began my first dig in northwest Montana,” Steve said. “On Blackfoot Territory. This teepee is modeled after the original Blackfoot ones, perfected over hundreds of years. Tall, airy, full of light and sturdy, too. Holds a good fire in here.”

  The woman helping Steve was holding s’mores over the flames and passing out the sticks with melted marshmallow and chocolate to each of us.

  “What’s the first question you should be asking?” Steve said.

  Nobody raised a hand.

  “No time to be shy,” he said. “Why are we here? I mean right here on the Double G Ranch today?”

  Katie whispered again, reminded of grizzlies when Steve mentioned the name of the ranch. “Did you say bears come out at night mostly?”

  “I did. Nocturnal in this heat.”

  “Then why are we here right now? We could be back at my place hunkered down with a good movie and cell service, texting everyone at home in New York City.”

  “Sometimes you are so narrow-minded, Katie.” I pinched her arm. There was no cell service at all on this remote hilltop. “Remember the Ditchley motto: ‘We Learn, We Lead.’ You’ve got to stay out in front of things. Take some dares every now and then. Be bold.”

  “What’s there to lead, Dev? Dinos have been extinct for seventy million years, give or take a few million. That path is taking me nowhere I need to go.”

  A guy with a beard—a student at Montana State University—spoke up. “I’m here, Steve, because I want to learn from the best, and I know that’s you.”

  Steve Paulson waved off the compliment. “What else?”

  “So, the ranch owner found this piece of a dinosaur leg—a femur, right?”

  “Yep. The femur is the thighbone, longest and strongest in the human body—likely the same in dinosaurs—from the hip to the knee.”

  “But why have you waited almost a year to do our dig?”

  I was chowing down on my s’mores, thinking that was a good question.

  “Several reasons for that,” Steve said. “First off, it was winter when we got a confirmed ID on the fact that the femur was from a dino. And winter is no time to dig in central Montana. Since the discovery was made on private property, it was pretty easy to secure the area against trespassers. Foul weather and trespassers are the two biggest enemies of my work, young man.”

  “Understood.”

  “Then we had to get all the legal permits,” Steve said. “Fossils found on government property remain just that.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “A lot of the land out here is public property, monitored by the United States Forest Service. So they get to be in charge of any dinosaur bones people come across there.”

  “But what about the fossils that are right on this hillside?” I said.

  “Well, if you happen to dig up a triceratops horn under your tent tonight,” Steve said, “that belongs to the owner of the Double G. You’d be negotiating with him to carry it off into the sunset with you.”

  “Tell that to Chip Donner,” Katie said, a little too loud for my liking. “I can’t believe those precious little bones could have been my very own.”

  “They’re not your very own,” I said while Steve took a sip from a bottle of water. “Didn’t you just hear him?”

  “You bet. But my dad knows this ranch owner,” Katie said. “I’m hoping that if I ask really, really nicely that he’ll let me—or you and Kyle—keep at least some of what we find. And who knows? Maybe he’s allergic to dinosaurs.”

  “Third thing,” Steve said, “is that I tried to get some satellite imagery from space.”

  My “wow” was audible to everyone in the tent.

  “There are a few places on earth that have been rich in fossil deposits, because that’s where the land was suitable for dinosaurs to live at the time. Alberta, up in Canada, is one of them, and Argentina is another—”

  My turn to cover my mouth and speak to Katie. “Liza’s from Argentina, you know,” I said. Liza was an exchange student who had just spent three weeks living with me and my mom to go to the Ditch summer program. “I wonder if she’s more interested in dinos than you.”

  “Don’t go threatening to switch besties on me, Dev.”

  “For me,” Mr. Paulson said, “it’s been all about Montana. Not far from where we are tonight, in Billings, is where the first juveniles—the first baby dinosaur fossils—were found, not all that long ago. They’re rarer than you can imagine. That’s kind of what I’m hoping to find right here. Fossils of babies, dinosaur eggs of any kind, and even the nests themselves.”

  Kyle got up to help himself to another round of s’mores. He poked his stick over the campfire.

  I raised my hand. “Mr. Paulson—”

  “Just call me Steve. That’s what everyone does.”

  “Okay, Steve. So, someone told me that terrible things happened right here where we are,” I said, sort of glaring at Kyle. “That these are the Badlands. So before I have any nightmares, would you mind telling us exactly what’s so dangerous about this territory?”

  At the same moment that Steve Paulson gave me his most serious expression in return for my question, Kyle tried to suppress a grin.

  “Who was filling your head with ideas about danger, Dev?” Steve asked. “The term ‘Badlands’ doesn’t have anything to do with violence.”

  “Outlaws, then?” I asked, watching Kyle bite his lip and shake the flame off his s’more. “Criminals?”

  “No, ma’am. It’s a geological expression,” Steve said. “Badlands is
a name for a kind of terrain that exists out here—in Montana, in the Dakotas, in parts of Wyoming. It refers to land that’s been greatly eroded over time by wind and by water. Badlands are soil formations, resulting from deposits of different sorts of clays and silts and sand. Don’t you let anyone scare you into thinking this is risky business.”

  I bit hard into the edge of the plastic cup and my lemonade spilled onto my lap. Kyle suckered me right into that one.

  “If it’s not about outlaws,” Katie said to me, “I’m going to ask Steve where my three bones are when he stops talking, okay?”

  “Go for it.”

  Steve stood up and was pacing around the fire, casting his shadow against the inside of the tall teepee. “Paleontology—my branch of science—is not an experimental one. I can’t test my results in a lab experiment, like a chemist or biologist can.”

  The older guys were nodding along with Steve.

  “This is an historical science. That’s why we’re going into the field. We test our ideas by exploring the earth, by trying to find old bones—whether from woolly mammoths or lizards or birds—to help us understand the history of life on this planet.”

  Suddenly, there was another large shadow on the side of the canvas. Chip Donner had just walked into the room. He was holding two small plastic boxes, stacked on top of each other, with both hands.

  “Your chance is the opportunity to dig up buried treasure, because that’s what these fossils are,” Steve said. He was fired up now, with the passion of a great explorer. “If you are fortunate enough to pick up a fragment of bone, you know you’ll be holding something that was alive many millions of years before mankind even existed.”

  “That’s an awesome thought,” Katie said.

  I was listening, but my eyes were glued on Chip.

  “And whether what you hold in your hand is a vertebra of a familiar dinosaur, or something from an entirely new species, you will be the very first human being to see that particular piece of prehistoric life. Just think of that.”

  The older students were buzzing among themselves.

  Chip Donner approached Steve Paulson and said something to him, passing over the boxes.

  “This is mighty good timing,” Steve said. “Thanks to my friend Chip. He’s been sorting through all the rocks and pebbles and debris that people picked up along the site today, and it looks like two of you struck gold.”

  Katie clamped her hand on my crossed leg.

  “Ling Soo,” he said, “apparently you found a tooth. An intact tooth.”

  Everyone in the teepee started to clap.

  “That’s really an important find, Ling, because as those of you who were here a few days ago know, two other volunteers found teeth just a dozen feet away.”

  “Thank you,” Ling said. “I was really excited.”

  “That suggests there may actually be a full jawbone close by, so it gives us some good energy to go back out into the heat tomorrow,” Steve said. “Teeth are also the tools by which we figure out whether the species they came from ate meat—other dinos—or ate berries and other foliage. Think of it all like a detective story, like a mystery that we have to solve once we have all the missing pieces.”

  I was right on top of it, even before Steve described the hunt as a detective story. Solving crimes was my thing. I loved being a sleuth. It was in my DNA.

  “Come get your tooth,” Chip said, holding one of the boxes out to Ling. “Sleep with this next to your pillow. When you give it back to Steve tomorrow, it will become a major part of our study going forward.”

  Ling went up to collect her box and everybody cheered for her.

  “Looks like girls rule today,” Steve said. “The other discovery was made by our youngest volunteer, Katie Cion.”

  I threw my arm around her shoulders and shook her till she pushed me off to get to her feet.

  “Katie picked up three fossilized bones, and we’ll do our work on them but they do appear to be examples of the extremely scarce foot bones of juvenile dinosaurs. The very elusive babies we’ve been searching for,” Steve said. “Pleasant dreams, Katie. Sleep with these beside you.”

  Katie held the closed box over her head in triumph, like it was a huge silver trophy, and everyone applauded her as she marched back to sit beside me.

  “We know these are juvenile,” Steve said, “because they’re barely three inches long. If they belonged to an adult, they’d be bigger than three feet. Can you imagine that, you guys?”

  • • •

  “What an amazing day,” I said as we started to make our way back to our tent. “I’m sticking right by your side tomorrow. I want to find an entire dinosaur’s head.”

  Katie lifted the top of her box and peered down at the three pieces of gray-black bone on the camel matting.

  “Hold on a minute, Dev,” Katie said. “These aren’t the bones Chip Donner took from me a few hours ago. I swear it.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “We didn’t have time to take a photograph of the ones I got, but I know they were longer than this, at least by half an inch.”

  “You know you can’t be sure of that. We didn’t examine them so closely.”

  “Trust me, Dev. Chip switched out my bones for these things,” she said, holding them out in front of her like she was allergic to them. “Each one of the three that I found was longer than my own fingers, I know that for sure because I picked each one of them up.”

  Katie plopped her box on the ground in front of her.

  “These are as short as my stubby little pinkie.”

  “Are you certain?” I asked. “Beyond a reasonable doubt?”

  My mother had spent a lot of years as a prosecutor in Manhattan. I wasn’t allowed to make accusations about people unless I could back them up with evidence.

  “Dev, would I try to fool you? My fossils had bits that looked like sockets at one end of the piece that would have connected them to another part of the animal’s foot.”

  “Slow down, Katie. We’ll find Steve in the morning and talk to him alone,” I said. “You can tell him exactly what you just told me.”

  She rocked back on her heels, totally dejected and suspicious of this whole operation. “These are just sticks, Dev. Just petrified sticks.”

  “We won’t let Donner get away with this.”

  “They could have been my pieces of buried treasure, Dev. Who’d want to switch something like that out on anyone?”

  3

  “Keep your distance, Kyle,” I said, walking backward and holding out my arm toward him, as Katie and I continued on our way to our tent from Paulson’s teepee. “You only fed me that stuff about the Badlands to make fun of me.”

  “I was just teasing you. Where’s your sense of humor, Dev? Did you leave it in the big city?” Kyle asked.

  “Actually, I take it with me everywhere I go, just in case someone mean is lurking behind the next butte.”

  Katie was doubling her steps, trying to keep up with me. “What’s a butte, anyway?”

  “Sort of a steep hill with a flat top, like the one you see across from your ranch,” Kyle said. “Y’all come out here from the East and act like we’re characters out of a western movie.”

  “It’s my first time here, Kyle,” I said. “I had no idea what to expect.”

  “Well, I don’t know any more about fossils than you do. Sometimes I help Steve out, when he asks me to come on his digs. Mostly I go to school, I play on the football team, I fly-fish on the river like Katie’s dad, and I help my dad feed the animals on our farm.”

  The land in Big Timber was really beautiful. It wasn’t dry like this hilltop we were digging on. The Cion ranch and Kyle’s family’s farm were in a valley. A lot of the farmers, like Kyle’s dad, irrigated their land with water from the river, so that alfalfa could grow there to feed the c
attle. It was green and lush in the summertime, and when you looked up, you could see snowcapped mountains all around.

  “Do you ever ride your horse up into the mountains?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Sometimes I just want to get away from my chores and my homework.”

  Katie had the dopiest look on her face. I thought she was going to swoon at the image of Kyle saddling up his stallion to head for his secret place on the trail above Big Timber.

  “There can’t be a more serene part of the country than where you live,” I said. “We can’t even see stars in Manhattan.”

  I looked overhead and it was as though the entire Milky Way was painted onto the night sky, close enough for me to touch.

  “I remember that,” Kyle said. “My family spent Thanksgiving week at Katie’s home two years ago. The city lights are so bright that we couldn’t see any stars overhead. I didn’t like that much.”

  Kyle veered off to the right and Katie started to follow him. I grabbed the cuff of her sweater and yanked on it, pulling her back toward me.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  Katie just smiled at me sheepishly.

  “You guys go to the tent,” Kyle said. “I’ll get a few bottles of water and flashlights from the supply truck for each of us.”

  Katie and I went inside and each sat down on our sleeping bags, which had been unfolded by one of the staffers. She didn’t seem the least bit interested in her plastic box.

  “So what are you going to do about this monster-size crush you have on Kyle when we leave for New York in a few days?” I asked.

  “Your mom’s right, Dev,” Katie said, letting out an exasperated sigh. “You have this tendency to exaggerate everything.”

  “On the contrary, I have superfine powers of deduction. I mean, I think you two would be good for each other when you’re about sixteen,” I said. “That is, if you can live on the ranch without Wi-Fi and bodega breakfast sandwiches.”

  “Time out, Dev!” Katie said, taking off one of her moccasins and tossing it at me.

  I ducked and took my moccasins off, too. “Now about the bones.”