by Homer Hickam
Ray came out with his school backpack and handed Jeanette a mug of coffee. I could smell it and I knew he’d made it strong enough to float horseshoes, just the way his mom liked it. “Fixed you some eggs when you want ’em,” he said.
“You driving Bob?” Jeanette asked, referring to the old pickup named after the fellow who’d sold it to Bill a quarter century ago.
“Naw. I’d get stuck for sure. Mr. Thomason got his tractor out. Amelia just called. They’re on their way.”
“See you,” Jeanette said as Ray carefully edged down the road, trying to keep his boots out of the mud. “See you,” Ray said over his shoulder. There were never wasted words on the Square C. To translate, what Jeanette and Ray had just said was: “I love you, I will always love you, and I would die for you in a heartbeat.” I said, “See you,” too, meaning the same to both of them.
The tractor arrived, driven by our neighbor Buddy Thomason, with his daughter Amelia sitting beside him. She was sort of Ray’s girlfriend. I could tell because Ray blushed furiously anytime Amelia’s name was mentioned. Jeanette and I waved at Buddy who touched his hat to us while Ray climbed up into the cab. Amelia turned her face toward him and gave him a big smile but Ray just looked straight ahead. I thought to myself that maybe I needed to give that boy some advice about women but then, it wasn’t my place unless he came asking. Also, truth was I hadn’t been all that successful with females myself.
After the tractor ground on down the road, Jeanette and I got to work. She headed inside the house and I went inside the barn to pull on some coveralls and finish the job I’d started the day before on her tractor. One of the lift cylinder seals on the loader boom had blown out. Luckily, I had some extra seals but it was still an oily mess requiring lots of pinched fingers and cussing. Throughout the day, I kept checking on the little heifer and her calf and they kept being fine. The sun blazed away all day, too, and by noon, the gumbo had turned hard again and everything was back to normal, if such a thing existed on the Square C.
After I got the tractor fixed, I started working on the case of the errant bull. I’d decided to take what we called the big truck, an ancient Ford, for my foray into the badlands to chase it down. Heavier than Bob, the big truck would provide extra traction in case there were still some wet spots out there. Before I got too far checking the Ford’s fan belts, oil levels, and such, I heard somebody drive into the turnaround. When I stuck my head around the barn, I saw a pickup I didn’t recognize. It had probably started out white that morning but the backsplash of red dog and gumbo from Ranchers Road had turned it mostly pinkish-gray. The young fellow who got out of it was wearing cargo pants, a multi-pocketed shirt, and hiking boots, all of which pegged him for a hunter, had it been hunting season. He was also wearing a hat I admired, one of those Indiana Jones-like fedoras with a hat band that had tiger stripes on it. I took right away that this was likely an interesting fellow.
“Howdy!” I called to him, real cowboy-like.
When he turned toward me, I saw he was handsome in a catalog model kind of way, blue eyes that were so blue they were kind of startling, with sandy hair peeking from under his hat. “Is this the Square C Ranch?” he asked.
My response was typical Fillmore County spare. “Yep.”
An expression of relief crossed his face. “I’ve been driving up and down this road all morning looking for you,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “you’re here.”
That’s when I saw Jeanette, still in her barn coat, coming out of the house. A glance at her face and the way she was walking told me she was not happy. She opened the yard gate and the young man doffed his hat to her, revealing a pony tail tied with a red rubber band. Jeanette stepped up to him and got right to the point. “The answer is no,” she said. Before our visitor could reply, she added, “You want to pick up fossils on my ranch and I don’t have time to mess with you.”
Now, how she knew why that fellow was there, I don’t know. Maybe it was instinctive. Anyway, he dug into one of his shirt pockets and produced a folded paper, unfolded it, and handed it to Jeanette. “You’re Mrs. Coulter, right? I’ve been trying to call you for a week but the phone just rang and rang.”
I could have told him the reason for that. We didn’t have an answering machine and most of the time during daylight hours everybody was outside working. In the evening, Jeanette sometimes simply chose not to answer the phone. It was just her way.
She reluctantly took the paper, looked it over, and said, “I remember this. Ray’s homework from about six months ago. How’d you get it?” When I eased in closer to hear everything, Jeanette gave me a warning look, then filled me in. “For English class, Ray wrote a paper about some fossils his father found.”
“He included some photographs, too,” our visitor said.
Jeanette provided him with the Fillmore County stare, a look that would freeze a man on fire. “I know my son. He wouldn’t send this to anyone without my permission. I’ll ask you again. How did you get it?”
“Someone e-mailed it to me, an address I didn’t recognize. I e-mailed back but got no answer. When I called you and couldn’t get through, I decided to come visit. Mrs. Coulter, I’m Dr. Norman Pickford. I’m a paleontologist. The bones described in your son’s paper may be very important. That’s why I came all the way from Argentina to see them.”
Jeanette absorbed this information. “What were you doing in Argentina?”
“Hunting for dinosaurs. It’s what I do.”
In an attempt to lighten things up a bit, I stuck out my paw. “Mike Wire,” I said. “I’m the hired hand.”
His grip was satisfactorily manly, even by Fillmore County standards. “Nice to meet you, Mike. I’m called Pick.”
“Pick,” I said, testing the name. “Sounds like a good name for a man who digs up fossils.”
He smiled tolerantly. “I don’t dig. I like to say that’s why God makes grad students. I just hunt and find. I’m very good at finding.” He shifted back to Jeanette. “Mrs. Coulter, those fossils your son wrote about might be important to science. If I could just look at them, I won’t take more than ten minutes of your time, I promise.”
There was something about Pick that made me want to help him. I was also curious about those fossils. “What could it hurt?” I asked Jeanette.
Jeanette shot me a look, but I could tell she was wavering. I guess she was curious herself. She said, “All right, come on inside. I’ll let you have a gander. And you can come along, too, Mike. That way I won’t have to explain everything to you later.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Coulter,” Pick said but it was to Jeanette’s back. She was already walking across the yard, her arms crossed, her head down, and I could tell she just wanted to get this over with.
We went inside the house, which was its usual mess. I was a little embarrassed for Jeanette when Pick walked in and looked around her dilapidated living room, furnished with an old sofa, a couple of overstuffed chairs with the stuffing peeking out of them in a couple of places, two mismatched end tables, and an old brass lamp with a tattered, dirty lampshade.
Jeanette led us into the kitchen and pointed at the coffee pot and then the kitchen table, which I guess would have been in fashion when Eisenhower was President. The chairs around the table didn’t match. Likely, old Bill had picked them up alongside the road where they’d been pitched. “Mike, pour the man some coffee,” Jeanette said. To the paleontologist, she said, “Have a seat. I’ll get the fossils.”
I did as I was told and silently handed the young scientist a mug of hot joe along with the sugar bowl and some pouches of fake cream Jeanette had carried out of a diner in Miles City. He spooned in a couple dollops of sugar and used all the ersatz cream. Even cut, Ray’s coffee was a spine stiffener and when Pick took a sip, he kind of shuddered. I allowed myself a chuckle.
Jeanette returned with a battered old cardboard box with the misspelled word FOSILS hand-printed on its side. She placed it on the table and I moved to loo
k over Pick’s shoulder as he reached into the box to pick up a smooth, curiously shaped object that I thought looked like the end of a leg bone. I was disappointed when he said, “This is a sandstone concretion. Not a bone.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I have a PhD in paleontology and a master’s degree in geology, Mike. I know bones and rocks.”
Pick rooted around some more in the box and brought out a quarter-sized fragment of yellow rock. “Bone,” he said. He plucked out three other such pieces, all about the same size, then put one against his tongue. “A field test,” he explained. “If it’s sticky to the tongue, it’s probably bone. These little pieces are what we call float, a generic term for indistinct bone fragments falling down a hill from an unknown fossil horizon. Your husband has a good eye to find them, Mrs. Coulter.”
“I’m a widow,” Jeanette replied. “What kind of dinosaur is it?”
“Too small to tell,” Pick said, then picked up another fragment about the size of a shot glass “This is the vertebra of a Champsosaur. Notice the hour-glass configuration along the dorsal edge of the centrum? That’s the tell-tale clue. Not a dinosaur but a small crocodile-like reptile. This area was mostly floodplain and lake systems during the Cretaceous. Lots of swampy areas. Perfect for crocs.”
Jeanette arched an eyebrow. “Sometimes when it rains around here for a few days, it’s still a swamp.”
Pick gave that some thought, or pretended to, then picked up a chunk of rounded rock about three inches long and two inches in diameter. “This is a portion of a Triceratops horn, likely one of two orbital horns that grew out of its skull above its eyes.”
“What’s it worth?” Jeanette asked.
“I don’t buy or sell fossils, Mrs. Coulter,” Pick said, “but I guess maybe twenty dollars at a rock show.”
“Is that all?”
“It’s not in very good shape. I’m sorry.”
She nodded. “How about those bones you called float? Worth anything?”
“Some people make jewelry out of little pieces of dinosaur bone. Earrings, that kind of thing, but I’m against that.”
Jeanette narrowed her eyes, always a dangerous sign. “What are you for, Dr. Pickford?”
“Truth through science.”
This earned him a mirthless chuckle. “Does truth through science pay your bills?”
Pick thought that over, then said, “I don’t need much, Mrs. Coulter. Give me a little food, water, and a place to look for bones and I’m happy.”
He took two more pieces of whatever from the box and separated them from the others. “These belonged to a theropod. Theropods were meat-eating dinosaurs.”
“They look like chicken bones,” I said.
Pick nodded. “We think theropods were distantly related to chickens, only usually a lot bigger and with more brain power. Tyrannosaurus rex is an example of a theropod. You’re familiar with T. rex, I’m sure.”
“I saw Jurassic Park,” Jeanette volunteered. Her tone had gone dry. I figured she was about five minutes away from kicking me and our pony-tailed paleontologist out of her kitchen.
“Actually,” he said, “T. rex lived during the late Cretaceous, well after the Jurassic. They were one of the last dinosaurs that ever lived. The Triceratops was probably the source of much of its diet. Duckbills, too.” When he saw Jeanette’s questioning look, he said, “Hadrosaurs, big dinosaurs with long, flat jaws that gave them a duck-like appearance. They were herbivores. Vegetarians.”
“Like Mike,” Jeanette said, giving away one of my peculiarities.
The scientist looked at me in surprise. “I used to live in California,” I said by way of explanation.
“Finish up, Dr. Pickford,” Jeanette said before Pick and I could get into a discussion of either vegetarianism or California.
Pick next withdrew from the box a cylindrical rock that was about two inches long and the diameter of a pencil. “This is an ossified tendon from a Hadrosaur. Tendons are like lines in a pulley from muscles to bones. The muscles twitch and the tendons are pulled, thus moving the bones. Ossified means this tendon has turned from collagen to bone. This propensity isn’t unique to dinosaurs. Some modern birds like turkeys have ossified tendons.”
“What’s that little curved piece?” I asked, pointing at something I’d spotted in the box. “Like a hawk’s claw.”
“A claw, indeed,” he said, “but not from a hawk. From a T. rex.”
“How come it’s so small?”
“It belonged to a baby. So does this phalange.” He touched a brown object that looked more or less like a thin twig about an inch long. “By phalange, I mean a toe or finger bone. Although it doesn’t fit this particular claw, it could still be from the same animal. These bones are very interesting. A baby T. rex this young has never been found before. We don’t know much about them. If the entire skeleton was nearby…”
“What would it be worth?” Jeanette interrupted.
Pick had his mouth open to complete his sentence but he closed it, mulled over Jeanette’s question, then said, “I don’t know. A lot. But to science, well, you can’t put a price on it.”
Jeanette leaned back against the counter and crossed her arms. “Dr. Pickford, on a ranch like this, every dollar counts. How do I find somebody who’ll buy these fossils?”
Pick hesitated, then asked, “Do you lease BLM land?”
Whether he knew it or not, he had just lurched onto a touchy topic in the Montana ranchlands. BLM stood for Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency that owns a great deal of the western states. A rather large portion of that property is leased out to ranches and there is always some consternation about those leases for one reason or another.
“Everybody up and down Ranchers Road has BLM leases,” Jeanette replied.
“Did your husband spend much time on your lease?”
“Of course he did. Our cattle graze there. That’s why we have it.”
“If any of these bones were found on the BLM, then technically they aren’t yours. They belong to the government.”
Jeanette’s face clouded over. “Listen,” she said, “the Coulters have been taking care of that damn land for a century. The government can claim it all it wants but our blood and sweat says otherwise.”
Pick’s reply was gentle. “Mrs. Coulter, I fully understand. I didn’t come here to cause any trouble. I have a federal collecting permit, approved by the BLM, but I wouldn’t go out there without your permission.”
Before Jeanette could reply, he pulled a map from one of his many shirt pockets. I recognized it as a BLM-produced map, which included not only federal land but all the ranches up and down Ranchers Road. The map was a grid of squares, each one representing a square mile. BLM land was identified by a bright yellow color, private property was in white, state-owned land in blue, and the adjacent Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in a sturdy green.
Pick used the duckbill’s ossified tendon to trace a path along a dotted line on the map, which went past a prominent land feature called Blackie Butte to just inside Jeanette’s BLM lease. “This is the area I’d like to investigate. Its terrain features indicate to me that it’s an outcrop of the Hell Creek Formation. A remnant of the Cretaceous.”
“And if you find anything?” Jeanette asked.
“I would take it back to the university for further study.”
“Which university?”
“I work through the University of California in Berkeley.”
“Bunch of far-lefties out there,” Jeanette said.
Pick shrugged. “I’m not political in any way. My mind is fixed on what happened sixty-five to three hundred million years ago. What I like to call deep time.”
Jeanette took that snippet of news under advisement, looked up at the ceiling, and then back at our visitor. “If you find something, even if it’s on the BLM, I want to know about it.”
“Agreed.”
Jeanette took another moment, then said, “Mike
, I’m going to let this fellow go out there. You get him squared away.” In full boss lady mode, she turned back to Pick. “You understand we can’t be paying much attention to you. You’ll be on your own. How long do you think you need?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “If I don’t find anything, I’ll probably be gone in a week.”
“You’re not going to find anything. I’ve been all over the Square C and our lease, too. Never saw the first thing that looked like a dinosaur. Likely, Bill picked up everything that was out there.”
“You’re probably right, Mrs. Coulter.” He stood up, his chair scraping on the scarred linoleum floor. “But I appreciate you letting me look, anyway.”
“We’ll see how it works out,” Jeanette curtly replied. She picked up the bones, put them in the cardboard box, and headed upstairs with them while I ushered the young paleontologist out to his truck, opened the gate to the Mulhaden pasture, and pointed out the tire ruts cutting through the grass, which he needed to follow. “Here’s a strict rule of the ranchlands,” I told him. “You find a gate open, leave it open. If it’s closed, leave it closed.”
“OK,” he said.
He got in his truck and drove through the gate but he didn’t get far before I waved him down. There were a few more things I needed to say. “You got a firearm or any kind of weapon?”
“A gun? No, but I have a pick and a shovel.”
“It’s prime time for rattlesnakes. Watch yourself. Usually, Montana rattlers will just mind their own business but if you get bit, give us a call so we can let the mortuary know. Do you have a radio?”
“Yes. An FM handheld.” He opened the glove compartment to show it to me.
“That’ll do.” I gave him the ranch frequency and he jotted it down in a little notebook. “Set it now and keep it on you. I’ll be listening. If I don’t answer, climb up on a hill and try again.”
He fiddled with the radio, then placed it on the seat beside him. “So I just stay on this track and it will take me out to the BLM?”
“Follow the ruts, stay right at every fork, and go through three gates. The third gate, the BLM’s on the other side. It’s marked.”