by Homer Hickam
After I limped over to the fence to lean against it for three seconds of rest, Jeanette swung by long enough to remark, “Lucky she didn’t kick you anywhere it mattered.”
I almost replied, “I adore you.” I know, I know. I was sick when it came to Jeanette Coulter.
Edith also swung by. “You hurt, honey?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She whispered in my ear. “I hope the best part of you didn’t get itself bent.”
She sidled away while from the corner of my eye, I saw Cade Morgan slither out of the shadows (actually, he was sitting at the picnic table drinking lemonade). Edith walked past him and I almost missed what she did. A flick of her hand, just trailing for an instant across his shoulder. Now, what the hell did that mean? I might have walked after her to ask but my balls hurt too much.
Ray came by. “Need anything?”
“Ibuprofen and two weeks off.”
“I can get the pills,” Ray said, “but you’ll have to ask mom about the time.”
A couple of hours later, when all the cows and calves were happily reunited and released to pasture, I lounged at the picnic table, gone to beer and ibuprofen with the prospect of a g&t later on. Jeanette was touring Pick, Laura, and Tanya through the barn. Edith had left in her pickup, and Aaron and Flora had finished their catering chores, cleaned up, and likewise departed. Amelia had also left with her dad, leaving Ray so depressed he was changing the oil on his mother’s tractor even though it didn’t need it. Cade Morgan was still around, for no good reason that I could discern, although he was entertaining Jeanette’s bum calf, reaching in its stall and allowing it to chew on his fingers. This surprised me. I would have thought him more squeamish than that. He gave the calf a pat on its head, then nonchalantly strolled in my direction, got a beer out of the cooler, and sat down at the table across from me. He took off his fancy straw hat, wiped his brow with his shirt sleeve, and said, “I learned a lot today. Maybe I’ll get me some cattle yet.”
“Around here, Cade, we say cows, not cattle,” I instructed, adding, “Red angus. They’re small, they’re docile, and they market well.”
“I’ll try to remember that,” he said. “Or maybe I could just hire you to buy them for me.”
“Sorry. I already have a job.”
“Working for peanuts for Jeanette and living in a rented trailer without a telephone?”
“Or a computer or the Internet,” I added. “But I do have a refrigerator and a microwave.”
“And probably a lot of good books,” he said.
“Yes. A lot of good books. It’s all a man really needs.”
“Some men.” He took a long swig of beer. “Me, I need my comforts.”
This comment from the Californian kind of interested me. “Then what the hell are you doing at the end of Ranchers Road?”
He smiled. “I have a nice place.”
“Yeah, but it’s not the Ponderosa.”
“Close enough.”
There was a burr under my saddle that I didn’t even know was there until it came out. “What’s between you and the mayor?”
Cade smiled. “What do you mean?”
“She’s not as strong as she makes out to be, Cade.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do. I was there, where you are now.”
This made Cade think and I could tell he didn’t like what he was thinking. Finally, he said, “What I like about Montana, Mike, is we all mind our own business.”
He had me there. I guess we had run out of things to say because for the next few minutes, we both just sat there, drinking our beers. Then Jeanette, Pick, Laura, and Tanya, finished with their tour of the barn, trooped up to the table. Jeanette threw open the cooler and handed out more beer. “When do you think you’ll start digging up your dinosaur?” Cade asked Pick after they’d all settled down at the picnic table beside us.
Laura said, “We’ve already begun.
“Mind if I come watch?” Cade asked.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Pick replied. “It’s best to minimize the number of people around a dig. You could contaminate it.”
“Too bad,” Cade said.
“Well,” Tanya said, “it’s just a lot of dirt, anyway.”
Cade nodded, retrieved the keys of his Mercedes from his hip pocket, and stood up. Even though there was a trash can only a few feet away, he left the empty beer bottle on the table, confident, I suppose, that someone would take care of it. Like me. “Guess I’ll be off,” he said and when no one said or did anything to stop him, he made good on his plan.
Laura was shooting eye-daggers at Pick. “Pick, what’s wrong with you? The man was offering to help.”
Pick ignored her and looked over in my direction. “Mike, I appreciate you volunteering to work with us.”
This was news to me. Jeanette said, by way of explanation, “I volunteered you, Mike. The cows are all where they need to be, things have slowed down on the ranch, and I figured you’d enjoy it.”
“I was thinking about going to Vegas in a couple of weeks,” I said, which happened to be the truth. Every so often, I still needed a bright light or two.
Jeanette didn’t think much of my vacation plans. “I’d appreciate it if you helped Dr. Pickford,” she said, pointedly.
“Then I guess I’ll do it,” I answered, the Las Vegas strip blinking off in my head like a busted street light. I sometimes surprised myself with how eager I was to please the queen of the prairie. Every man has to have a weakness. Of course, I had no idea it would almost get me killed and I guess Jeanette didn’t, either. I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt on that one.
10
I didn’t go out to Pick’s camp for another four days. Jeanette might have said we were caught up but I knew even as she said it, it wasn’t true. The Big Man in the Sky had turned off his faucet. The Square C was drying out, which meant we needed to stir the cows around to put them on some pastures that hadn’t been grazed for a while. This fell mostly on me and Ray, Jeanette worrying over the plans for the Independence Day celebration.
Then word came of another murdered cow, this one south of Jericho on one of the Brescoe ranches. The modus operandi was the same, right down to the note from the Green Monkey Wrench Gang, which, come to think of it, we didn’t receive with our murdered bull. I wondered if maybe the note had blown away or maybe the cow murderer hadn’t come up with the idea of writing us a missive when he was on our land. When she heard about the new dead cow, Jeanette worked the phone, talking to the mayor and folks up and down the road on whether the state police ought to be called. I asked Jeanette what the consensus was and she said, “They’d send some kid up from Billings who wouldn’t even know where to start. We’ve decided we can handle things just fine.”
I started to remind her of my police background but shut my trap. Jeanette had not asked for my help, which was tantamount to her saying she didn’t need it. So I told her I was heading out to the dinosaur diggers. At the time, she was sitting at her kitchen table with a legal pad full of notes, a ledger, a calculator, and a telephone. “I’m glad somebody gets to have fun around here,” she said as if going out there was my idea.
I went back to my trailer and packed a cooler of veggies, then grabbed two bags each of beans and rice from my stores, a couple bottles of gin and tonic water, and the usual toiletries. I scrounged around until I found an old duffel bag and stuffed it with underwear, socks, work shirts, T-shirts, an extra pair of jeans, old running shoes, and a bandana. I found the old tent and sleeping bag Bill Coulter had given me when I’d first arrived on the Square C for the infrequent times I needed to stay overnight out on the far fringes of the ranch. I also retrieved a five-gallon water can from beneath the trailer and filled it. I loaded my favorite four-wheeler with all my stuff and headed out. Ray opened the gate that led to the BLM. “I’ll be out there pretty soon,” he said.
“How about Amelia?”
He shrugged. “Who cares about her?”
“You do.”
He frowned, then shook his head and said, “You’re right. What do you think I ought to do about her, Mike?”
“I’d kiss her if I was you, Ray. And tell her how you feel.”
“But I don’t know how I feel. Not exactly.”
“Well, just kiss her, then. It’ll do for now.”
My advice to the lovelorn accomplished, I drove straight to where the bull had been killed, thinking to look around for a note just in case the wind had blown it somewhere. The odds of finding it, even had it existed, were slim and I knew it. Sure enough, I poked around, found nothing, and gave it up and drove on out to the BLM.
When I arrived at their camp, I saw Pick and his ladies had constructed quite the complex. There were three of what I took to be personal tents, and two big canvas wall tents. Not only that, there was a windmill atop an aluminum tower about thirty feet tall. No one was around so I peeked into the wall tents to see the secrets of professional paleontologists. The first one contained bags of plaster, jerry cans of water, a variety of potions and chemicals, and also picks, shovels, trowels, saws, hammers, ice picks, and other standard tools. The other wall tent held cans of food, breakfast cereal, flour, corn meal, powdered milk, and rice in plastic containers. It also had a refrigerator with room for not only my veggies but my tonic water. I followed its cord outside and found that it was attached through a box to the windmill.
I unloaded the rest of my traps off the four-wheeler, then motored on to the Triceratops site. No one was there but there was evidence it had been worked over based on two piles of dirt heaped at the base of the hill. There was also what I took to be bones contained in three foot-locker-sized lumps of white plaster sitting in a small meadow of sparse grass beside the women’s truck. I went over and pushed on one and it didn’t move. Getting these things on the truck, if that was the plan, was going to take some heavy lifting.
Carefully so as to not disturb anything, I climbed up beside the dig. Littered around were ice picks, paint brushes, trowels, knee pads, and small plastic bottles containing an amber liquid. Looking closer at the dig, I could see the outline of what appeared to be a bone, brown as tobacco. Whatever the bone was, it was big. I looked back at the trucks and the three big plaster casts and wondered how it was possible to get a bone like that out without busting it up.
“Halloooo!” came a yell and I spied Pick climbing out of a drainage. His shirt was soaked with sweat and his pants were filthy. “Come to help at last!” he said as he reached the trucks.
“Just tell me what to do,” I replied.
He got a bottle of water from the back of his truck and drained it. “Laura will do that,” he said. “She’s in charge of the dig.”
“Where is she?”
“I gave her and Tanya a little time off,” he said, “so they went prospecting. That’s what paleontologists most love to do, look for something new.”
“Have you found anything new?”
“Well, when they get back, we’ll ask them,” he said, leaving unanswered whether he’d found anything. I didn’t push him about it.
Pick sat in the shade of the truck and I joined him. “This is the life,” he said. “This is what I live for, the thrill of digging into the past, the anticipation of what might be found, and every day something new and wonderful.”
“I went to Bozeman one time,” I said, “and stopped in at the Museum of the Rockies. They have a couple of Triceratops skeletons there as I recall. What good does it do to dig up another one?”
Pick looked shocked at my question. “What good does it do to read another book if you’ve already read a couple?” he demanded. “We’re dealing with more than sixty-five million years, Mike. Those Trikes in Bozeman may have been separated by a thousand generations and evolutionary pressures may have changed their design a great deal. We learn something new with not only every skeleton but every bone if only we care to look. I’m one of the few paleontologists who really, truly looks at every detail of every bone. A lot of them just go for the big picture but not me. I hold the bone and study it until I know the animal. It talks to me. Sometimes, it even comes to me in my sleep, tells me of its life and its death.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, which to tell the truth sounded genuinely squirrelly, so we sat quietly for a while until he said, “This big old Trike. I think it was a bull. That means it was a defender of the herd and fought all its life against predators. There are growths on his bones that indicate battle scars.”
Pick didn’t say much more, mainly because he soon fell asleep. I sat with him, relaxing, reflecting on the ancient animal that lay quietly above us, listening to the gentle wind, watching a hawk scouting for rabbits, and a rabbit with only its head out of its hole, watching for hawks. There was the smell of fresh sage in the air. I discovered I was enjoying myself immensely, sitting beside the dozing paleontologist while cottony clouds floated across the vast sky.
This was Montana, I thought. The real Montana.
Before long, the women arrived. They were wearing backpacks which looked to be heavy and I wondered if they were filled with bones. I stood up as they rounded the back of the truck. They were wearing the same kind of multi-pocketed shirts Pick favored, plus cargo shorts, snake gaiters, and hiking boots. I noticed Laura had nice legs but Tanya’s were spectacular. In fact, she oozed sexuality like so many young Russian women.
“Wondered if you were coming out,” Laura said, stripping off her backpack and putting it in the back of the truck. Tanya provided me with a shy smile as she unloaded her pack on the truck beside Laura’s. Both women were careful not to disturb Pick who was still snoozing. “He is like a little boy,” Tanya said.
“Mike, do you want to know what we do on a dig?” Laura asked and I told her I would be happy to be educated. She drained a canteen, removed a salt shaker from her backpack, sprinkled some in her hand, licked it off, and gestured for me to follow her up to the site. We settled around it on our haunches and she got busy telling me in some detail how a dig was photographed, mapped, and everything collected, even the smallest scraps. “You’d be surprised how some of those wizards in the lab—we call them preparators—can fit scraps of bone together like a jigsaw puzzle.”
Laura glanced down at Pick, still sleeping, and Tanya who was removing some plastic zipper bags from their packs and placing them in a large plastic storage box. It occurred to me that maybe Laura was in the business of distracting me. If she was, I couldn’t imagine why. I didn’t much care what they found.
Laura started up again, explaining how her specialty was crafting an excavation plan and how the Hell Creek Formation was pretty easy to work in comparison to some where jackhammers were required.
“How about a backhoe?” I asked. “Or dynamite?”
She considered my question. “A backhoe would definitely help if the bones were deep,” she said. “I’ve never used dynamite but some of the old-time dinosaur diggers did. Barnum Brown, maybe the most famous of them all, was quite happy to use it. He found the first T. rex, by the way, about thirty miles from here in 1906. Just think of it. No one knew there was such an animal. To see that skull come out of the rock and mud must have been astonishing. I sometimes wish I’d lived in those times. There were virtually no laws or regulations about digging and the ranchers didn’t care. In fact, they helped Brown a lot by taking him to sites they knew about. He dug up the bones, carted them away to New York, and nobody said a word. Maybe because there wasn’t a lot of money in it back then. In fact, hardly anyone would give a cent for dinosaur bones. Everything was done in the name of science.”
“Have you ever sold bones?” I asked.
“No,” she said, “I wouldn’t do that, even if I was starving.”
“How about Pick?”
“Only to support his research. I’ve forgiven him for it. Once you get to know Pick, you realize he’s a genius even though he’s got his peculiarities. There’s n
obody like him when it comes to finding dinosaurs, that’s for sure.”
Laura looked down at Pick who had come awake, yawning and stretching. Tanya was sitting beside him, quietly talking, then she offered him water. He accepted her canteen, licked salt from her hand, then pulled his hat over his eyes, and settled back against the tire. “Is Tanya his girlfriend?” I asked.
“No, and neither am I,” she said. “Pick is never in the moment, if you know what I mean. He’s always a million miles away, or I should say sixty-five-plus million years away. He mostly lives in deep time.”
I’d heard that phrase a couple of times now. “Explain ‘deep time,’” I said.
“Well, think of it this way,” she said. “The more we understand time, the more we realize how connected it is. It’s like a deep ocean. The water at the bottom is the same as at the top except they’re in different places. But there’s nothing to keep the water from changing places and sometimes it does, usually because of temperature or salinity changes or the pressure of the overlying water. Anyway, the important thing is that it goes from water we can see and touch to water beyond our reach. That’s like present time turning into ancient time and vice versa. It’s all connected. Pick sort of lives closer to the bottom of the ocean of time than we mere humans.”
“OK,” I said. “All this is too deep for me.”
Laura laughed. “And for me. Maybe Pick will explain it to you. He’s better at it than I am. I probably screwed it all up.”
Laura showed me how to use the ice pick and trowel to carefully work around a bone and how to use the amber liquid in the plastic bottles, which was a glue called vinac, to harden the bone before it was removed. “If we have a stable bone, like a horn or a claw,” she explained, “we just wrap it in aluminum foil and number it. If it’s fractured, we apply a plaster cast. If it’s a big enough bone, we dig around and under it, leaving just a little pedestal for the bone to sit on. Pedestaling is what the technique is called, as a matter of fact. We wrap it with aluminum foil and wet paper towels, put strips of burlap in plaster, and lay them across the bone at a variety of angles to give the cast strength. After it hardens, we can flip the bone over and finish up. After that, it’s ready for the lab. Of course, getting it there, heavy as the bones and the jackets are, is always a chore but we get it done, one way or the other.”