The Dinosaur Hunter

by Homer Hickam

  As to Pick, he was apparently shaken by Ted Brescoe’s threats. He had gone very quiet and somber around the fire pit. To cajole him out of his funk, Laura and Tanya were being extra solicitous with him, getting him another drink, making sure he had his favorite food (a cheeseburger), telling stories about what a great dinosaur hunter he was, and urging him to tell some stories of his own. Finally, toward late evening when the rest of us were thinking about our sleeping bags, Pick seemed to snap out of it. “I’ve been thinking about what’s up there,” he said, “and I think I understand part of it.”

  Laura and Tanya smiled at one another and sat back. Seeing their reaction, I did, too. Pick was about to tell a story as he had of Big Ben. The others, including Jeanette, waited politely.

  “We have a family,” Pick said. “The bones tell me that much. But something happened, maybe more than one thing. I’m studying more than the bones. I’m studying the dirt.”

  He let that hang, although Laura cocked her head. Pick went on. “Understand where they were. They lived by a tributary of a vast, inland sea. There were islands, beautifully green like emeralds in the bluest ocean you can imagine. The air was filled with oxygen, more than we have now. Every breath provided streams of energy to all the creatures who lived. The meadows of ferns were an extraordinary green. There were many open spaces. The Triceratops and Hadrosaurs saw to that, eternally grazing on endless pastures, overlooked by rolling highlands. A shallow river ran through the countryside. Butterflies flitted in the ferns and the bromeliads and orchids that coated the land. It was a splendid place for a family of Tyrannosaurs to live.”

  “You make it sound like paradise,” Philip said.

  “It was,” Pick said, “except, even as big and thick-skinned as these Tyrannosaurs were, they needed always to be wary of creeping things with teeth and poison.”

  “I can’t imagine anything could threaten them,” Jeanette said.

  “Oh, there were many threats, Mrs. Coulter,” Pick replied with a significant look. “And among them would have been other T. rexes. Rogues. I think there were rogues.”

  I noticed Jeanette was now watching Pick with intense interest, almost as if it was the first time she’d ever seen him.

  Pick went on. “The mother of this family would have been a big dominant female. We haven’t found her bones and maybe she isn’t here. What we have found is evidence of two adult males and one juvenile or infant. But let me speak for the moment of the mother T. Tyrannosaurs, I believe, had a matriarchal society, the females leading each family. I’ve seen her clearly in my thoughts and dreams and, for that reason, I think we will find her. She must be under Blackie somewhere.”

  Laura said, “I notice you’ve been reading Robert Bakker again, Pick.”

  “I have,” Pick replied. “He makes a great deal of sense to me.”

  Laura looked around our little group. “Robert Bakker first postulated that dinosaurs were fast, smart, adaptable, and warm-blooded. He also did some groundbreaking work on nesting Allosaurs demonstrating parental care.”

  Jeanette leaned forward in her chair. “What was the mother T. rex like, Pick?”

  Pick regarded Jeanette for a long second, maybe thinking that if there ever was a matriarchal society, it was the Square C. Then he said, “The mother T would have been bigger than the males. When she walked, it was on her tip-toes, three phalanges on the ground with long curved claws that could tear through armored hide an inch thick. Her teeth were shaped like serrated steak knives and her jaws were strong enough to crunch massive, heavy bones into swallow-size chunks.”

  Amelia shivered and said, “She sounds so scary.”

  Pick nodded, then said, “To us, she would have been. But to her family, she was the symbol of security. This much I think is true. Although she was fearsome to behold, I think she had the capacity for love. And joy. She could also feel pain and sadness. Her intelligence even allowed her to mourn, the curse of the evolved predator’s mind.”

  “I hope she was happy sometimes, too,” Amelia said.

  “Oh, yes,” Pick replied. “There were a few simple things I’m certain made her happy. She liked to drink cool water from the river. She liked to squat in the meadow on her pubis bone and rub her belly across the smooth ferns. She liked when the birds jumped down from the trees and pecked along her back for the beetles that burrowed into her skin. And I think she liked to rub her neck along the neck of her mate. We think Tyrannosaurs could make a humming sound and I bet she made it when she was happy. When he hummed back, she would close her eyes and perhaps her heart sang. But I think most of all, she liked to look at her children and delight in their existence. That was the love she felt.”

  “How did she give birth?” Amelia asked.

  “She laid eggs, as birds do, and reptiles,” Pick answered. “I’m hoping we’ll find evidence soon of egg shells. If Tyrannosaurs nested like other theropods, I think the eggs would have been laid in a circular pattern, two by two, each egg arranged around the center like petals on a flower.”

  He looked out past us, into the badlands. “I have built another circle of stones out there,” he said. “I did it last night. The circle is the universe’s signal to us that there is no beginning and there is no end. The natural world loves the circle and reproduces it whenever it can. If any of you like, I will take you to it. You may want to make your own circles with the stones we’ve cast down from Blackie Butte. These are powerful symbols and will help us in our quest to understand how this family lived.”

  “But why did they live?” Brian asked. “For that matter, why do any of us live?”

  We all turned as one to Pick for the answer, as if he had one. It’s amazing to me how smart a little alcohol can make a philosopher.

  Pick leveled his gaze on Brian. “Oh, that’s been answered to my satisfaction, Brian,” he said. “They lived because they could. Nature, God, the Creator, whatever we may call Him, Her, or Them, had the blueprint of life and desired to use it. But when it comes to humans, we are the more complicated question in terms of why we exist.”

  “Wait, what are you saying?” Philip nearly exploded. “It sounds like you believe in God! How can a rational scientist believe in a supernatural God? What about evolution?”

  “I am giving you a philosophical answer to a philosophical question,” Pick said, “and therefore open to many explanations and interpretations. The truth is as you deem it to be, and that’s the way it will live in your soul. But I must warn you. Believe in nothing and you will be nothing.”

  “I believe in Mother Earth,” Philip said, drawing himself up in his chair.

  “And not the universe?”

  “I can’t protect the universe. I can only protect my planet.”

  “Then by all means do so,” Pick replied. “But know this: We are on the leading edge of deep time. That which you see now will pass away because nothing can resist the clock. This, of course, gets us back to my answer concerning why we humans exist. What’s interesting about us is that we have more intelligence than we need. For instance, here we sit in this circle talking philosophy. Any animal that can talk philosophy rather than using its intelligence to feed itself, or procreate, has too much brainpower. Therefore, the only conclusion is we are smarter than we need to be. There is but one possible reason for that and that is we are what we are, established at this time and place to look back over deep time and understand it, and marvel over it. In other words, we are observers, sharing our observations with ourselves and anyone or anything that will listen. Maybe the authors of the Bible had it right. God was lonely and wanted to share His universe with someone, anyone, even such low creatures as ourselves. He wanted to be appreciated for what He’d done.”

  There settled over us a thoughtful silence. Jeanette was looking into the fire pit. Amelia’s eyes were glued on Pick and Ray was surreptitiously watching Amelia, no doubt torn with jealousy. Laura and Tanya had leaned back during Pick’s discourse and I think both of them were lightly napping
. They’d heard it all before, of course. Brian and Philip wore tense expressions as if trying to force feed themselves Pick’s words and reject them all at the same time. Doubtlessly, they were both impressed and distressed. I was, too. In my opinion, I’d never heard such utter and total bullshit so well spoken. Of course, maybe it wasn’t bullshit but most likely it was. I mean, who knows what any of this means? It’s fun to think about but tomorrow it wouldn’t move a molecule of dirt. We’d have to get our butts up that hill and take it down, rock by rock, by the sheer grit of our determination. Then, I thought, maybe that was Pick’s point. Why were we willing to do that? Why sweat and grunt and bleed and tear our muscles and bruise our skin if not for knowledge of deep time? Then I thought, Wait a minute! Jeanette is doing it to make a buck. Instantly, I felt better. That was a motivation I understood. I was still understanding it, I guess with my eyes closed, when Laura gently prodded me on my shoulder. I blearily looked around, surprised to see all the other chairs empty.

  “Time for all sleepy cowboys to go to bed,” she said.

  “Let’s go,” I replied, still half asleep.

  She chuckled. “Not tonight. My bones are creaking. They don’t need to be jumped on.”

  I hadn’t meant it that way but I was pleased that at least she’d entertained the thought. I stood up and got a hug and a kiss on my grizzled cheek.

  I was thinking pleasant thoughts about dirty dino girls on the way back to my tent. To get there, I had to pass Bob and saw that Jeanette had rolled out her sleeping bag in the back. “Good night, boss,” I said but she didn’t answer. She wasn’t asleep, I didn’t think, but maybe she was. Funny thing, when I crawled into my sleeping bag, I was thinking about that, whether Jeanette had deliberately ignored me, and not all the marvelous philosophy Pick had spouted or the fact I’d been kissed earlier by a young and very pretty woman. “You sure are perverse,” I told myself and myself agreed but only briefly because I was soon asleep. No low, guttural engine noises from the far BLM woke me up, either. Maybe I was getting used to them.

  18

  After another morning of doing our best to knock off the top of old Blackie Butte, we headed for town. Jeanette drove Bob, Amelia sat beside her, and Ray and I rode in the back. Laura drove their truck with Pick sitting beside her, Tanya and the Marsh brothers behind to hunker down from the wind and dust. I pondered the sky as we careened down the road to Jericho. It was crystal clear. Not even a wisp of a cloud in it. I felt more foreboding. Montana was being entirely too nice to us. What was she up to, I wondered.

  Once we were in town, I checked in at the Tellman’s Motel, which was owned by Mori and Titus Philips, Mori being a Tellman. Mori met me in the tiny office that was actually a back room of her house with a separate door. The sign on the door said IF YOU WANT A ROOM, SORRY WE’RE ALL FILLED UP PLEASE HAVE A NICE DAY. It was too impolite in Fillmore County to just say no VACANCY.

  “You look like you need a shower, Mike,” Mori said while I filled out the cards for the rooms. “Jeanette rationing water at the Square C these days?”

  Mori was a fine young woman who made a habit of winning the walleye tournaments held annually on the lake. Nearly all Fillmore County women hunt and fish and look good doing it and Mori was decidedly no exception. She had big brown expressive eyes that just looked inside a man, right down to his soul. I was kind of hiding my soul these days so I kept my head down and focused on the card I was filling out. I did answer her, though. “Been dinosaur digging these past weeks. Severe lack of showers out in the BLM.”

  Of course, she already knew that and said, “Yeah, I was just teasing ya. I heard that Ted Brescoe went out there and caused a big stink. What are you going to do about that?”

  I took the three keys she had placed on the counter. “Nothing for me to do,” I told her. “I’ll leave that to Jeanette and the dinosaur hunters.”

  “We all got a big laugh about it here in town,” she said. “There’s nobody more puffed up than Ted. When he doesn’t get his way, his lower lip starts to tremble, then he cries. Of course, I’m remembering him that way from grade school.”

  That was another thing about the county. Most of the folks out there of the same age had gone to school together from the first grade through high school. Ted Brescoe apparently had been a whiny brat. This did not surprise me.

  I asked Mori about Titus and the children, then picked out a room and went in and took a shower. Refreshed and wearing clean clothes I’d brought with me—jeans, plaid shirt, boots, and my town cowboy hat—I sought out Laura to give her a key to one of the rooms. I found her holding court with Tanya in the Hell Creek Bar, both of them knocking back beers as fast as Joe the bartender could deliver them. There were a half dozen empty Rainiers on their table and one each in their hands. Both Laura and Tanya gave me surreptitious winks when I handed over the key for the room they were to share. I thought I might be in trouble—too-many-women trouble—but it was kind of thrilling trouble so I sat down, had a beer with the ladies, then went looking for Jeanette.

  I found her where she said she was going to be, in an upstairs conference room of the county courthouse with the other Independence Day organizers. The courthouse was built of stone around the turn of the last century and it’s quite an impressive structure, reflecting the certainty of that era of a solid future based on cows and petroleum. Only the cows were still around, the oil fields played out, so the courthouse was now a monument to another time. Pick’s ideas of deep time rattled a bit through my brain as I climbed the steps of the now mostly empty building. It represented a busy, prosperous future the men who built it had expected but that had not occurred. In their heads, they had gone to a time that did not exist but was very real to them, else they wouldn’t have bothered building such a fine and expensive courthouse. In our time, we saw they were wrong but since they never knew, what difference did it make to them? They had enjoyed our time, in effect, a lot better than we were.

  Anyway, I found Jeanette in a conference room, naturally sitting at the head of a table and running the show. Edith was there, too, and gave me a bland smile and a nod. Jeanette accepted the motel key to her room and kept talking. She was holding forth on the subject of vendors and where they were going to set up. She looked across the table, her eyes landing on Al Cunningham who had once been a professor at Montana State University but now owned a ranch on the far eastern border of the county. “Al, I hope you’ve got the signs up so the vendors know where to go,” she said.

  “All taken care of, Jeanette,” Al said and I escaped before Jeanette thought of something for me to do.

  In fact, I had something to do but it didn’t have anything to do with the Independence Day celebration. I walked across town and stopped at the county library, a wood-frame building built back in the 1950s but kept in tip-top condition, mostly by volunteer book-lovers in the county, meaning just about everybody.

  I went inside and inhaled one my favorite scents, that of hard-cover books. Fillmore County had a good collection of them, both new and old, and there ordinarily was a steady stream of customers. This being the day before the big celebratory day, however, everyone was apparently staying home and resting. The only person other than me in the library sat at the reception desk. She was Mary Dutton Parker, the librarian and the wife of a rancher down south where the grass was greener and lusher than along Ranchers Road. It didn’t make the ranching any easier but it did allow for fatter cows, always a good thing.

  Mary was also one of those pretty Fillmore County girls, though she was actually born and raised in an adjoining county where they made them about the same—that is lean, pretty, in this case blonde, and perfectly capable of kicking my butt when it came to cowboying. I’d seen Mary on a horse one time when Jeanette and I visited the Parker ranch to consider a tractor they had for sale. While we talked to her husband, Wade, Mary was out on her horse working the cattle. I saw her cut into the herd and she and her horse moved those cows around like they were on wheels and glued tog
ether. Me? I cut into a herd and they scatter in every direction until I wise up and let the horse do the work. More wisdom from Bill Coulter: When in doubt, let your horse do the thinkin’.

  Mary gave me a smile. “What can I do for you, Mike?”

  First, I asked about her kids, a boy named Angus and a girl named Maggie who were very cute and very smart. They were fine, she said, Angus being pure boy and the little girl a true princess. She was doing fine, too, as was Wade and also the ranch was getting along “although we could use some rain.”

  “Your computers up?” I asked.

  “This one is,” she said, nodding toward the one on her desk. “Want to use it?” I did and she very nicely got out of her chair to let me sit down. “Need help with it?” she asked.

  “I need the Internet,” I said and she leaned over my shoulder, clicked the mouse a couple of times and a browser appeared. “I think I’ve got it, Mary,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “No problem,” she said and went into the back to give me some privacy.

  I had several reasons to do some research on the Internet but the top one on my list was to find out something about Cade Morgan. I typed in his name in the browser’s search engine, and got back a number of hits although none of them seemed to be about our man. One was for a baby in Iowa named Cade Morgan, another a fireman in Massachusetts with the same name. I doubted either of them was my Cade Morgan so I typed in “Hollywood” beside his name and searched again. Nothing came back. Whoever he was, Cade wasn’t a Hollywood player, at least not under that name. I considered the possibility that he produced or directed under a different name. Thinking about this, I tried Cade without the Morgan and also “producer” and “director.” Interestingly, a “Morgan Cade” came back. Mr. Morgan Cade, it turned out, was both a producer and director for Shock and Awe Film Studios in the San Fernando Valley. A quick search gave me a return I expected based on the location of the studio. My work for the majors had included a few visits to one or more of the myriad porn studios out in the valley. Most of the people I met out there were nice folks, trying to earn an honest living in their own peculiar way, but there were some fly-by-nighters out there, too. They were run by, shall we say, unsavory characters? Yes, we shall. I had never heard of Shock and Awe Studios and clicked on their Web site, only to have it refused. A little embarrassed, I sought out Mary and asked her, “Is there a filter on the library’s computer?”