The Dinosaur Hunter

by Homer Hickam

  “Do you miss us, Mike?” Edith suddenly asked.

  “I try not to think about it,” I answered honestly.

  “We had some good times, didn’t we?”

  I recalled them as mostly quick times, me sneaking into her house at night when husband Ted was out of town and I had an excuse to drive to Jericho. Sometimes after we’d made love, she’d weep while snuggling into my arms. I never asked her why because I guess I didn’t want to know. Our last time together, she’d pulled away and said we couldn’t do this anymore. I didn’t argue with her. I just got dressed, kissed her on her cheek damp with tears, and walked out of her bedroom without saying a word.

  I looked up and saw Jeanette coming toward us. The meeting had broken up with most of the attendees crowding toward the bar.

  “Hello, Edith,” Jeanette said. “You after my cowboy?”

  “I sure am,” Edith replied. “You finished reading My Dream of Stars?”

  Jeanette and Edith were in a book club that had as its members most of the women in the county. They met once a month at the library a block down from the bar, theoretically to talk about the book they’d picked to read. Actually, it was mostly to gossip and drink wine and not a man begrudged them that little bit of time together. Some of the women had to drive over fifty miles just to get there.

  “I read it,” Jeanette said. “How about you?”

  “Working on it.”

  Jeanette regarded the mayor for a short second. “Edith, don’t you ever bring a couple of jackasses like that near us again. I don’t care what that fool Claggers says. Do you understand?”

  Edith opened her mouth, perhaps to argue, but then she shrugged and said, “You bet.”

  Jeanette was done with the mayor. “You ready, Mike?”

  I wasn’t but I guessed I’d better be. I put my hat on and tipped it to Edith, paid Joe for the beers, then drove Jeanette back to the Square C. About twenty minutes into our drive, I said, “I don’t think you should treat Edith like that.” Thirty minutes later, Jeanette said, “I treated her better than you did, Mike.”

  I shut up. That’s what you do when somebody has just drilled you between the eyes with the truth.

  6

  It was nearly two in the afternoon when we got back and Ray and Amelia had not returned which meant they’d been out there alone for over five hours. Jeanette and I carried in the groceries, then I looked in on the little C-sectioned heifer and her calf for a while and Jeanette fed an orphan calf in a separate pen. Jeanette loved that little bum. She’d gone out in a deep March snow to bring him back alive after his mother had died giving birth. Once the calf was fed, she sought me out and said, “I guess we’d better go out there.” I could tell she was worried about Ray and Amelia.

  First thing I did was to go to my trailer to retrieve my trusty Glock 9 mm, left over from my L.A. days. I packed it into a small backpack, then climbed behind Bob’s steering wheel so Jeanette would have to open and close all the gates. She knew what I was doing and said, “Let’s take the four-wheelers.” We did and she let me take the lead, which meant I opened and closed the first gate. Somehow, even though Jeanette was fearless on an ATV, it worked out she kept dropping back enough I had to open and close all the rest of them, too.

  Before we got to the BLM gate, she said, “Show me the bull,” and I did.

  The dead bull lay in front of a small stand of twisted little juniper trees, one of the few trees that can live out there. The bull’s body was swollen, its legs rigid as posts, and it was covered with flies, their excited buzzing like little chainsaws. I made a mental note to bring the tractor out to haul the corpse away and bury it. There was no good reason to let the coyotes get a taste of cow meat even if it’s rotten.

  Jeanette climbed off her four-wheeler and walked up next to the corpse. The flies clustered on the bull’s wounds were too happy to notice. While I held my nose, Jeanette carefully circled the bull, stopping for a while near the junipers. Then she came back and, without another word, climbed on her vehicle and took off. I followed and after we’d gotten some distance away, she stopped and I pulled up alongside her. “It wasn’t a sledgehammer that knocked that bull out,” she said. “It was a shovel.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “I spotted the working end of one inside those junipers. It wasn’t rusty. It also had blood on it.”

  This made me angry, entirely at myself. If it was there, I should have found that shovel. Why hadn’t I poked around in those trees? My experience as a detective had decidedly faded.

  We motored on up and over the rolling pastureland. If I hadn’t been worried for Ray, Amelia, and Pick, and mad at myself about missing that shovel, I might have enjoyed it more. We found the BLM gate closed but there were fairly fresh tire tracks and hoof prints on both sides of it, which meant to me that Pick likely had made it this far and so had Ray and Amelia. I got off, opened the gate, let Jeanette go through, then got back on my four-wheeler, drove it through, then got out and closed the gate and got back on my vehicle. You see what trouble this is? Even worse, you have to do it all over again on your way back. I’ve heard of automatic gates but Jeanette, like every rancher in Fillmore County, thought they were too expensive. It’s cheaper to let your cowboy do it. That’s the attitude.

  Some more words about the territory we were entering, and the BLM, which runs it. The Bureau of Land Management is responsible for more land than any other agency, government or private, in the United States and maybe the world. At last count, the BLM was responsible for more than two-and-a-half million acres of land, mostly in the Western states. Since Congress doesn’t pay much attention to it, the agency gets only a little legislative pork thrown its way. This is actually fine with the BLM because it makes plenty of money through the sale of gas, oil, uranium, and other energy deposits beneath their lands. It also leases its land to such folks as the owner of the Square C.

  This all began with the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, which allowed leases for private ranchers to graze their cattle on the BLM. Since most of the ranchers had already been grazing cattle and sheep out there for generations, the act simply put in code what was already a fact. The difference was the fee. I suspect the size of that fee is one of those things that Westerners and Easterners will argue about until the end of our republic. Mostly, the ranchers of Fillmore County wished the federal government, or any and all governments, would just go away and leave them to do what they do best, raise cattle and sheep, sell them, then raise some more. As usual, Jeanette had the final word on the BLM, saying it meant well and that was the trouble with it.

  Once, a couple years ago, I was in the Hell Creek Bar when Ted Brescoe, the local BLM guy who also happens to be the mayor’s husband and therefore the fellow whose wife I’d been in bed with a few times by then, came in. He was already pretty drunk. Ted’s a guy who wears a perpetual sneer on his face. When he lurched up to the bar beside me, just to make conversation, I asked him to tell me what he did out on the BLM. “It ain’t none of your business, asshole,” he said and went back to his booze. Yep, a nasty customer, Ted Brescoe. Although I felt guilty about Edith much of the time we were together, right then I was glad I could give her a little relief from her husband.

  So, anyway, there we were on the BLM land which the Square C leased, motoring along on a track that wound through a series of small brown and gray hills, then along the edge of a deep coulee filled with grass and occasional stands of juniper and gnarly limber pine. It was where the coulee necked down near the base of a little hill that we found Pick’s truck. There was a tarp in its bed covering whatever was in there. I lifted it up to inspect the cargo, then put it back. What was there, or, more importantly, what wasn’t there was interesting but I said nothing to Jeanette about it. Nick and Dusty’s hoof prints littered the ground around the truck so we followed them. We had to go a good mile before we found Ray and Amelia. There, we also found Pick.

  We drove up to the horses. Nick was looking bored but D
usty was intently watching the three humans who were halfway up a pyramid-shaped hill. I marveled anew how Dusty could be so entertained by herself and her surroundings. Ray saw us and waved. I waved back and we climbed up there. Pick was sitting down, his legs sprawled. Beside him near a pair of leather gloves was a well-used pick, its working end shiny from use. Ray and Amelia were looking at what lay below Pick’s boots, which were shapes in the dirt. “Pick says it’s a Triceratops,” Ray said.

  I looked closer and I saw a rock about two feet long that was curved, appeared somewhat cylindrical in shape, and came to a dull point. Its color was only a little different from the dirt around it so I had to look carefully to see it at all. “Tip of an orbital horn,” Pick said when he saw where I was looking. “Be careful where you step. I think there’s nearly an entire adult Triceratops here. If you look closer, you can see the edge of its frill, an occipital condyle just starting to weather out, a couple of ribs, and three dorsal vertebra.”

  “Why did a dinosaur climb the side of a hill to die?” I asked.

  Pick smiled. “You have to understand nothing that you see now was the same as it was sixty-five million years ago when this animal lived. This is but one layer of many in deep time. When this layer was on top, it was part of a land of rivers, lakes, and rich, green floodplains. Not too many miles away was a vast, inland ocean.”

  I had heard something about ancient Montana being a seashore but sixty-five million years was more than my mind could quite wrap itself around. “How do you know how long ago?” I asked.

  “We use radiogenic dating,” Pick replied. “That means we measure the amount of decay of a radioactive isotope in a sample.” When he saw my blank stare, he said, “What’s important is what was, still is, or will be. Now, consider this place. What do you see?”

  I saw the BLM. I guess so did the rest of us because nobody said anything. “Look at that hill,” Pick said, nodding toward a steep cone-shaped mound just south of us. “Do you see the layers like a wedding cake? Each tell the story of life and death in a different age. Your fields, Mrs. Coulter, are composed of sediment eroded from all those ages. In other words, your cattle eat the grass that is produced by deep time.”

  While we squinted at the hill, Pick led us farther into his vision. “Those narrow bands of gray, yellow, and dark brown near the top are from what we call the Tullock member of the Fort Union Formation. The Tullock was formed after the dinosaurs so what I would find there, if I cared to look, would be the bones of mammals. Nothing big, mostly prairie dog size. But I don’t hunt mammals, even ones tens of millions of years old. I hunt and find dinosaurs.”

  He said the last five words with a great deal of satisfaction, then continued. “Just below the Tullock on this hill is a thin layer of coal. It’s easily discernable. It is what we call Z-coal and coincidentally in the Hell Creek Formation it marks the K-T or Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. That’s the famous iridium layer you’ve perhaps heard about left from a gigantic meteor that struck what is now the Gulf of Mexico. Above that boundary, there are no dinosaurs. Below, we enter the Cretaceous where once creatures such as this big Triceratops flourished.”

  “I’ve ridden past this hill a hundred times,” I said, “and I never noticed these bones. How did you find them?”

  Pick smiled. “I saw what was. That’s what I do.”

  A silence fell over us, the only sound the mewing of the breeze through the little dry hills, and the distant kee-kee of a red tail hawk. It was a bit eerie, I’ll confess. Finally, Ray broke the spell by saying, “When we found Pick, he was lost. Had no idea where he was.”

  Pick nodded agreeably. “I get lost easily. As soon as I got out here, I went looking. I found this Trike in the first thirty minutes. There’s a Hadrosaur over there, although not much of him. Do you see his bones? There, by those two sandstone boulders that fell down from the top of the hill. When it got dark, I had no idea where the truck was so I just sat out here all night.”

  “You’re lucky the rattlesnakes didn’t get you,” Jeanette said.

  I was thinking of our murdered bull and Aaron Feldmark’s cow when I asked, “Did you hear or see anything else?”

  “Lights,” he said after a moment of contemplation. “And engine sounds.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe over there. Or there. I was thinking about something else.”

  “Dr. Pickford, I really want to know what you were thinking about out here in the dark,” Jeanette said.

  I’d like to say Pick got a far-away, dreamy look in his eyes but the truth is he seemed to nearly always have that look. He said, “I was thinking about the rivers and streams that led to the pond from which this animal drank, and the forest of conifers from which it emerged, and the vegetation that filled the valley where the pond collected, and the slope that eventually led to the sea. I was also thinking about mud. A swollen river created mud to cover and make this Triceratops immortal. Mud also saved it for me. For all of us.”

  It was an interesting little speech and I was impressed. I guess we all were. “How did this thing live?” Amelia asked, which caused Pick to smile in her direction. He liked the question.

  As Pick described the Triceratops I swear those old bones all but rose from the ground, assembled themselves clad with muscles, sinew, and flesh, and came alive. Then, I noticed a circle of stones in a sandy patch nearby. It didn’t look natural and I could see boot prints around it so I asked Pick about it.

  “I built it last night to remind me everything important is a circle,” he said. “The sun is a circle and so is the moon. The eagle, which many societies consider sacred, flies in a great circle. And when we stand on the tallest mountain, we see a circle where the sky touches the earth. When we build camp fires, we build a circle of stones around it. We do this without thinking. It is our inner selves—psychiatrists call it our subconscious and preachers our souls—that does this. Of that ring you see, Mike, can you tell me where the stones start and where they end? Of course not, because a circle is as much end as it is beginning. That is the way it is with our lives and with the universe itself.”

  I could tell Amelia was fascinated by all this because she couldn’t take her eyes off of Pick. Ray looked embarrassed by such talk, more words than he’d probably ever heard from a man at one time. Pick, in my opinion, was off the deep end. Yeah, eagles fly in circles but so do buzzards.

  Agreeing with me, I think, Jeanette said, “You’re a piece of work, boy,” then turned to me. “You think we should go looking for tracks to see if we can find what those motor sounds were that Dr. Pickford heard?”

  I considered it, then said, “We’re not exactly Indian trackers. We’d likely drive over the lip of a hidden coulee as find anything.”

  “I’m going to dig up this Triceratops,” Pick said, ignoring the fact that Jeanette and I were having a conversation. “It’s an excellent specimen. If we just leave it, it will weather out and turn to dust in a couple of seasons.”

  “Well, Dr. Pickford,” Jeanette replied, “as you made clear, you have a BLM permit so I guess I can’t stop you.”

  “True,” he said, “but it would be easier if I could cross your land with my supplies and equipment. I’ll need to call in a couple of my associates for assistance and they’ll need to bring their vehicle as well.”

  I could almost see the picture bubble over Jeanette’s head that showed open gates that should be closed and closed gates that should be open. To my surprise, she said, “All right, Pick. Bring your folks by to see me, let me give them the rules, and you can have your Triceratops.”

  That was when I first realized Jeanette had a favorable opinion of Pick. Since Bill had passed, I’d never observed her giving a fig about any man but maybe it was her motherly instinct. Certainly, Pick looked like the type of fellow who needed a little mothering.

  Pick was pondering Ray and Amelia. “Would you two like to help me dig? I can’t pay you but you might learn something new.”

&n
bsp; Amelia immediately said she’d like nothing better. Ray glanced at his mom who raised an eyebrow. “I have a lot of work on the ranch,” he said.

  “After branding, maybe,” Jeanette said. She looked at Pick. “That will be in about a week.”

  “Excellent,” he said.

  And so, just like that, in a place where the cycle of ranching and farming was the only constant, something else was about to happen. I thought this was just fine. We needed something to shake up our lives every so often. But then I thought of the murdered bull and Aaron Feldmark’s murdered cow and the odd note from some wackos claiming responsibility. We didn’t need that kind of change, no.

  Once back on our four-wheelers, Jeanette and I drove around for a while, just poking about until I waved her down. “Pick told me he had a shovel in his truck,” I said, “I looked and didn’t see one. Didn’t see one at that dinosaur, either.”

  “So?”

  “So there’s a busted shovel by our dead bull.”

  She frowned. “You think Pick killed our bull?”

  “I’m just doing addition, Jeanette. Two plus two equals four.”

  “I think you’d best leave the math to me,” she said and powered on, leaving me to eat her dust.

  God, how I loved that woman.

  7