by Homer Hickam
After we got back on the Square C side of the fence, I let my four-wheeler drop behind Jeanette, planning on telling her my machine was running rough if she asked. She didn’t ask, mainly because she never looked back, just kept going until she went over a rise and out of sight. I circled back to where our poor bull was still dead, searched out the busted shovel, found it beneath the junipers where Jeanette said it was, and brought it out into the sun to inspect it. It was well-used, its handle shiny and smooth and the edge of its working end worn. It could be the shovel of someone who dug up fossils for a living, but then I recalled Pick said he didn’t dig. But, then again, Pick probably meant the big excavations, not the little digging around a fossil bed like the Triceratops he’d found. And there were sanitary considerations, too. There are no flush toilets on our BLM and number two has to go somewhere, usually a little hole. As for why I didn’t see his shovel, I could have missed it among the boxes of supplies in the back of Pick’s truck, or it might have been somewhere else. I should have asked Pick about it but I wasn’t in detective mode and didn’t plan on getting into it any time soon. Just to keep the prairie clean, I strapped the remains of the shovel to my four-wheeler with a bungee cord kept in its storage compartment and motored on back to the ranch, repeating the gate experience several more times. Stop. Get off. Open gate. Get on. Drive through. Get off. Close gate. Get on. And so forth. I bet more than one cowboy quit just to get away from those damn gates.
Back at the house, there was no sign of Jeanette. I did a few more things, then retired to my trailer, there to fix myself a gin and tonic and lounge a bit on the verandah. Yeah, I actually do that. Not every day but it seemed like as good a day as any to relax.
I sat there in my lawn chair beneath my tattered trailer awning and watched a hawk circle lazily in the sky until it made a sudden dive, leveling out before disappearing near an outcrop of sand beside a weathered butte. Likely, a rabbit or mouse was its target. Whether the hawk got a meal, I don’t know but I would put money on it. Considering how hard it is to make a living in this country, predators around here don’t like to waste energy. That’s why they tend to go after sure things.
Which brought me to thinking about our bull. People are different than natural predators. They kill for lots of reasons, not just food, so the purpose of applying deadly force to the bull by a human could have any number of explanations. Consider the little boy or girl with a magnifying glass killing ants. He or she is having fun. Perhaps our bull had been killed just because some warped individual thought it would be a fun thing to do. I started a mental list. Our bull was killed for fun.
Or maybe the bull was murdered because somebody was afraid of it. Fear often causes a human to kill. If, say, a tourist of some sort had been on our property and he was confronted by our bull, could he have panicked, knocked out the bull, then completed the job with a knife? Not logical but feasible so I kept it on my list.
Anger, envy, or revenge were also possibilities. Maybe Jeanette or Ray or even I had done something to irritate somebody and he had taken it out on our bull. This one seemed a long shot. Cows were respected in Fillmore County. You didn’t just kill a cow without there being some really good reason and I couldn’t think of one. OK, I did think of one. What if, say, a certain husband of a certain mayor found out a certain Square C cowboy had been tapping his wife? As I mentioned, Ted Brescoe was a nasty piece of work but, on the other hand, if he’d done it, then why did he also go off and kill one of Aaron Feldmark’s cows and leave that stupid note? That didn’t make sense.
Finally, I thought of the possibility that maybe that note wasn’t stupid at all. Maybe environmentalists in the spirit of the old Monkey Wrench Gang of the 1970s were not only still around, they were here. In that case, if environmental activists were targeting the cows along Ranchers Road, we were going to be in a world of hurt in a county without a sheriff. The state probably wouldn’t do much about it, either. Their troopers were spread thin arresting speeders on the Interstates. As for the federal government, the BLM wouldn’t care and any bureaucratic agency higher up on the totem pole likely would side with the monkey wrenchers, anyway.
All this thinking required another gin and tonic and I was also starting to think about supper. Rice, beans, and pasta were on my menu. I’m a vegetarian, as I think I mentioned earlier. I love the work and I love the cows. I just don’t care to eat them.
About then, Ray showed up and he didn’t look happy. “Want me to fix you a g-and-t?” I asked. It was a facetious question since the boy didn’t drink.
“No, thank you,” Ray said, politely.
“There’s beer in the fridge,” I told Ray. “Help yourself.”
Ray went inside and came out with a can of cola, as I knew he would. He dragged a lawn chair from where I stored several beneath my trailer, set it up beside me, and sat down. “Amelia gone?” I asked.
“Yes,” he answered. “She cleaned up Dusty and took off.”
I let that settle for a bit, then said, “She sure is a pretty girl. Amelia, I mean. I mean Dusty’s not bad but…”
“Don’t patronize me, Mike,” Ray interrupted.
“I wasn’t,” I swore, even though I was.
“Is there a problem?”
Ray took on the thoroughly miserable expression that only a teenage boy in love can exhibit and said, “Amelia hates Montana and can’t wait to leave. I want to stay. So when I asked her to the Independence Day dance, she said she’d love to but we don’t have a future. Hell, what does our future have to do with it? I just wanted to dance. What’s with girls anyway, Mike?”
“A very good question,” I said. “A very, very good question.”
When I didn’t say anything more for a few minutes, Ray said, “Well, aren’t we gonna talk about it?”
“Talk about what?”
“What’s wrong with girls!”
“I don’t think so, mainly because it wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans. They’re females, that’s all I know.”
We sat for a little longer, then Ray said, “What’s with that busted shovel?” I had pitched the one that had killed our bull beneath my trailer and I guess he’d seen it when he got the lawn chair out.
“That’s the one used on our bull,” I said.
“Mom told me about finding it.” he said. “Could hitting a big old bull on the head with a shovel really kill him?”
“He died of a cut throat,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, but to cut his throat, you’d have to knock him senseless. Could a shovel really do that? Anyway, I didn’t see any big dent in his head when Amelia and I stopped to look at him.”
I gave Ray’s observation some thought, recalling that time when one of our bulls had run head-on into a concrete post. After a shake of his head, he had barreled on, none the worse for wear. “You have a point, Ray,” I admitted.
“I know,” he rejoined and had himself a swig of cola.
Ray left soon after and I sat there, contemplating that “from the mouths of babes” thing. I also recalled that his mom had made a similar observation when I’d reported the bull’s death to her. Our bull could not have been knocked out by that thin-handled shovel unless something else had happened to it first. That’s when I knew it was time to get the tractor out. There was more to this dead bull than had yet been seen.
8
The day after we’d been out to see his Triceratops, Pick drove in, saying he needed to call his crew. Jeanette and Ray were out and about so I let him into the house to make his call. Afterward, he didn’t seem to want to stick around so I opened the gate for him and off he went on the rutted track back to the BLM. This time, he turned the correct way.
It was three days before I got the time to go out to bury the dead bull. That morning, after we’d done everything else, I got Ray to help me put the scoop on the tractor. Jeanette saw what we were doing and came over. “What are you doing with my John Deere?”
I answered, “Ray and I are going to bury that dead bull.”
She nodded, then said, “I’ll follow on a four-wheeler, then go on out to the BLM. I’m wondering about our dinosaur hunter.”
“Well, wonder no more,” I said, “because there he is.”
And there he was, indeed, opening the gate of the Mulhaden pasture to drive his pickup through. He did so, got out, closed the gate, got back in, spotted us, and drove over. “Hello,” he said, getting out of his truck. “Have you seen my crew?”
Jeanette said we hadn’t and Pick replied, “They should be here today.”
“You hungry?” Jeanette asked, which I thought was kind of astonishing. She never asked Ray or me if we were hungry and she rarely, if ever, cooked. Ray did most of it, far as I knew. Of course, I was always on my own. Jeanette roundly disapproved of what she considered my vegetarian quirk. I never told her it had started with the bullet that curtailed my promising LAPD career. It’s hard to eat meat when there’s a hole in your colon. Maybe I should have told her that was why I stopped eating meat, but I liked being a little “Hollywood” around her, don’t ask me why.
Anyway, Pick said that he might indeed be hungry and Jeanette invited him in for breakfast, promising him some scrambled eggs, ham, and buttered toast. All Ray and I could do was gawk and wonder what alien had taken over Jeanette’s body.
“We’re ready to go out to the bull,” I said but it was to Jeanette’s back since she was leading Pick toward the house.
Ray and I looked at each other again, then mutually shrugged. “Heck, she don’t even know where the frying pan is,” Ray said, then dropped the subject.
I wasn’t surprised when Amelia arrived in her daddy’s truck. “What are you doing?” she asked Ray who was greasing the hinges on the scoop we’d just attached. “Nothing,” he said.
“What are you going to do with that scoop?”
“We’re going to bury that dead bull,” I told her when it was clear Ray was intent on ignoring her.
“Can I go?”
That was, in my opinion, a lovely response. After all, where can you find a beautiful teenage girl who would be thrilled at the prospect of seeing a dead bull buried? Not too many places but Fillmore County. Or maybe, she just wanted to be with Ray.
With Ray driving the tractor, Amelia sitting beside him, and me riding shotgun, we ran on out to the bull. When we got there, we only had to follow our noses to find it. Nothing had bothered it as far as I could tell except the flies and time. I guess it stunk too much for even the coyotes. I took the controls and maneuvered the tractor to get its scoop under the deceased animal but rather than pick it up, I turned it over instead.
“What are you doing?” Ray asked when I got off the tractor and walked up to the bull.
“I need to see its other side,” I answered. While Ray and Amelia wisely kept their distance, I got up close and personal with a very nasty corpse. What I expected to see was there. At the base of its neck was a bullet hole. I got out a hunting knife I’d brought along and cut into it.
It was a thoroughly nasty job but eventually, my arms covered with decay, slime, gore, and maggots, I found the bullet. It was a .30 caliber, which didn’t tell me very much except that our bull had probably been shot first, then hit on the head with a shovel, then its throat cut. It was only a little more than I already knew.
While I was pondering all this, Ray and Amelia had fixed our cut fences. Then, Ray got on the tractor, scooped up the bull, and trundled over to a coulee not too far away on the other side of the road, dumped the bull, then shoved some dirt on top. He was just finishing the job when a little convoy arrived. It was Jeanette on her four-wheeler, then Pick’s truck followed by another pickup with two women in it.
The two women got out. They were young and, by the lights of this old cowboy, good-looking. One was a brunette, the other a blonde. Both were dressed in the same fashion as Pick—hiking boots, cargo pants, multi-pocketed shirts, and flat-brimmed hats with colorful hatbands. I guessed these were Pick’s assistants. Pick introduced the brunette to me and Ray as Tanya, and the blonde as Laura. I didn’t shake their hands or even get too close. I stunk too much of dead bull. Ray had a grin that just wouldn’t go away. Amelia looked sort of doubtful.
Tanya proved to be Russian and had an accent that made me think of Moscow nights on the Volga or something. Laura was a farm girl, probably out of Iowa or Nebraska. She had that all-American beauty and no brains look about her that was quickly dispelled when she said, of our now buried dead bull, “It would be interesting to come back in a million years to study the taphonomy of your bull. I imagine the quality of preservation will be remarkable.”
Pick smiled and said, “Laura means the bull should fossilize well.”
I took Jeanette aside and told her about the bullet wound. She wrinkled up her nose at my odiferous presence while considering my information, then said, “Then it must have been a hunter who did it.”
“Jeanette, we don’t have hunters this time of year.”
She shrugged. “A poacher, then. Some guys can’t wait for the season. You know that.”
I showed her the slug I’d dug out of the bull, then gave her a little speech. “Look, that note Aaron found didn’t come from a poacher. There’s something going on around here and we’d better come to grips with it.”
Her expression was cool. “Mike, you’re looking so hard at this because you used to be a policeman.” She shook her head. “If there’s a cow-killer along Ranchers Road, we’ll find him and make him wish he never came out this way. Stop worrying. And good lord, you stink!”
Jeanette went back to the group. I did, too, trying to stay down-wind of them. They all loaded up, Ray and I got in the back of Pick’s truck, and headed off to the BLM. Naturally, I got to open and close all the gates.
When we reached the Trike site, I saw a shovel lying beside it. “That your only shovel?” I asked Pick.
“Yes,” he said. “Do you need it?”
I said I didn’t, not then, anyway. I noticed Laura looking me over, her nose wrinkled. “I’ve got a five-gallon jerry can of water in the back of our truck and some dish detergent if you want to wash.” I took her up on her offer.
When I’d finished washing, I came back and found Laura down on all fours and sniffing at the Trike site like a border collie. “You’ve got a good one here, Pick,” she said, finally. “Do you want us to start the excavation today?”
“Tomorrow will be soon enough,” he said. Then to Ray, “Are you going to be able to dig with us?”
Ray looked at his mother and Jeanette said, “After the branding.”
“Can we help with that?” Pick asked. “Branding sounds like fun. I’ve seen it in the movies.”
“Oh, it’s great fun,” I said, allowing my natural irony to drip.
Jeanette snapped me a look. “Be at the barn Tuesday morning. Come around five.”
“In the morning?” Pick asked in an astonished tone.
“Yes, Dr. Pickford. On a ranch, we work early hours. Late ones, too.”
“We’ll be there,” Laura said.
And just like that, we had dinosaur people coming to be cowboys. Pick directed Tanya and Laura to erect a big hangar-like tent to hold all the stuff required to dig up their dinosaur. I was surprised when Jeanette jumped in and started helping, too. Naturally, Ray, Amelia, and I got busy as well. I noticed Pick carrying a few things, none of them weighing very much. I also saw him tamp down one tent peg but otherwise he mostly supervised. By the time we were finished, I was a little irritated at his laziness, enough that I decided to call him over for a chat about it. Before I could say anything, he said, “I know better than try to do much when Laura and Tanya are around. Part of their job description is setting up camp so they want to do it all. They tell me I just get in the way.”
“They do seem to know what they’re doing,” I admitted.
He grinned. “Wait until you see how fast they dig up that big old Trike!”
I changed course. “Pick, when you came out here that first
day, did you see that dead bull?”
He squinted thoughtfully, then said, “I saw it but I just kept going.”
“Did you see anybody else?”
He hesitated a tick, then said, “No.”
“You told Jeanette you have a BLM permit. Do you mind if I see it? We could get in big trouble with the government if you aren’t supposed to be here.”
“It’s in my truck. I’ll show you.”
Pick started off in the wrong direction. I turned him around and then led him along the curve in the hill, crossed a small grassy patch, jumped over a narrow crack, then went along another hill. I looked over my shoulder and saw Pick had stopped and was looking up the hill. “What is it?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he climbed up the slope, mostly on his hands and knees because of its steepness and the loose rock that covered it. Finally, he reached a small ledge, picked up what he was after, then scrambled back down, pebbles and dirt in a little landslide around his boots. He held up his find, a curved brown rock about the six inches wide. When he turned it over, I could see by its striations that it was probably bone. He confirmed it, saying “This is the frontoparietal dome of a Pachycephalosaurus. A very nice one, indeed.”
Before I could ask him what a Packy-whatever was, Pick said, “They were wonderful creatures, like a dinosaur kangaroo with a football helmet. This bone was the top part of the helmet.”
“Did they hop?”
Pick blinked at my question. “Hop?”
“You said they were like a kangaroo.”
“No, I don’t think they hopped. I just meant they looked kangaroo-like. They had large eyes, short front limbs, and muscular hind limbs. Their manus were well-padded but also excellently adapted with a finger-like agility. Their pes had three phalanges, well equipped with ungual phalanxes…”
I interrupted him. “I do believe you’ve lost me.”
He took a moment to rethink what he just said, then cleared things up. “Manus are hands, pes are feet, phalanges are fingers, and ungual phalanxes are claws. We paleontologists have our own language.”