The Dinosaur Hunter

by Homer Hickam

  I crawled out of my tent. It was that same stupid engine noise. I was pretty much convinced now it was coming off the lake and said so. “I don’t think that’s right,” Ray said. “I think it’s not more than a mile away.”

  “Nothing we can do,” I said, stretching and yawning.

  “We could go out and look for it.”

  “Ray,” I said, “whatever is out there has been out there for at least a month. It doesn’t seem interested in us. Let’s just let it be.”

  Ray took my advice and went back to bed. But I looked out in the darkness, listening and thinking. If there was a two plus two to add up, I couldn’t figure out what it was. I wearily climbed back into my tent. My sleep was restless, my dream a nightmare. I found myself back on that night of the storm when Jeanette cut open the little heifer. Instead of a calf, only entrails spilled out of her, nasty and flopping and hissing like snakes. When I looked over at Jeanette, she wasn’t there. Instead, it was old Bill Coulter. He looked at me, held up his bloody scalpel, then nodded back at the heifer. When I looked down at it, it wasn’t the heifer at all but Toby grinning at me with two grins, one below his chin.

  25

  It took us the rest of the week but we got most of the top of that butte down to just a few feet above where bones had already been found. When we got there, we all stood around, covered with dust and sweat, looking for all the world like soldiers who’d just finished a battle. In a way, I guess we were the veterans of the battle of Blackie Butte. Finally, the story of what had happened to these creatures lay just below our boots. At least, that was the hope. The only way to find out was to dig some more, this time without the jackhammers. Laura said this had to be much finer work, digging one scoop and one scrape at a time because the baby bones were so tiny. I could see days were going to tick by before we got everything uncovered, days that might give Toby’s people time to get here if they were coming. It was a big if and there was nothing I could do about it, anyway. If they did—well, we had the guns. If they didn’t, then we’d bag our dinosaurs and get the hell out of the badlands. After that, I would tell Jeanette I quit and go cowboying somewhere else. I would miss Ray but that was about it.

  So we scraped and scooped and scraped some more until we found more bones. And what incredible bones they were. There were both big and small bones, the smallest of them—Kentucky Fried Chicken size—were exhumed and folded inside paper towels and tissue paper and then wrapped in aluminum foil. The larger bones, the tibias, femurs, pelvises, and caudal (tail) vertebrae of two adult Tyrannosaurs were exposed. Then we slowly followed a trail of dorsal vertebrae of one of the adults. These bones were big as coffee cans and Laura was excited to find them articulated, meaning they were lying there in the same order they had been in life. We also found ribs. Our digging revealed that the other T. rex disappeared beneath the one we were working on. Laura called them the superior and inferior T. The one on top was superior.

  “Why is one lying on top of the other?” I asked Laura but it was Tanya who answered.

  “We don’t know, Mike. Maybe their skulls will tell us why they are in these positions.”

  “I heard Pick say skulls were often washed away,” I recalled. “Something about the neck attachment.”

  “That’s true,” Laura replied. “For most dinosaurs, we have hundreds of specimens but just a very few skulls.”

  “I think we’re going to find these skulls,” Tanya said, then revealed a surprise. She held up what looked like a brown tusk, then handed the thing to me. It had to weigh a couple of pounds. “What is it?” I asked, somewhat in awe.

  “It’s a T. rex tooth. I’ve found six so far,” she said, patting a cloth bag on her hip.

  Laura said “Tanya is very good at finding teeth,” then went on to tell us a few things about the T. rex dental plan. “Their teeth were serrated with razor-sharp edges,” she said, “and were biggest in the middle of the maxillae and dentaries. The teeth in the premaxillae—that’s the front teeth, Mike—were smaller, probably for scraping bones.” Most likely, she said, the T’s ate meat by the chunk, swallowing it whole like sharks and lions. The teeth in the upper jaw were also especially sharp and pointed, in effect a combination of butcher knives and daggers. Laura said, “Tyrannosaurs also had an endless supply of teeth. When one was lost, another grew back in the socket. We think they changed out all their teeth at least once a year.”

  All this, I thought, was pretty cool. “Did they eat anything besides meat?” I asked. Me being a vegetarian and all, of course I’d wonder about that.

  “We don’t think so,” Laura answered. “They were what we call hypercarnivores, on an exclusive meat diet. Oh, another thing about their teeth. They were more conical than most theropods like the raptors or even Giganotosaurus. Since conical teeth are best for crushing bone rather than ripping flesh, that’s one of the reasons Jack Horner hypothesized that T. rex was mostly a scavenger. Nobody knows if that’s so but it’s interesting, nonetheless. We love to argue about things like that at SVP conferences.”

  Pick called down from his perch. He had taken to sitting over us on a slab of sandstone like some potentate overlooking his kingdom. “They were both predator and scavenger,” he said, then disappeared back into deep time or wherever he went when he was watching us work. Laura chuckled.

  Tanya took the tooth back from me and put it in her hip bag. “Are these teeth from the top T or the bottom T?” I asked.

  “Probably the superior T,” Laura answered. Then glanced up at Pick. “Pick will figure it out. He sees everything we do. He will make sense of it.”

  After another day of work in the heat, which climbed into the low one hundreds, most of us came down the hill, our bones creaking, our muscles feeling like they’d been torn into little, bloody shreds, our eyes filled with grit, and our fingernails torn and raw. Pick stayed up there, studying the day’s results. Laura and Tanya took turns carrying him food and water. Even after dark, he was there, studying with a flashlight what we’d revealed. I wondered if he was telling himself a story made up from the bones.

  The next day, we reached the neck vertebrae and cervical ribs of the superior T. We also found the same bones of the bottom T mixed in which made for a confusing jumble. Pick called a halt to our digging and said we’d best jacket the bones we’d exposed and move them down the hill. This took another week of backbreaking work. Then Montana, after so many hot but otherwise calm days, decided to be Montana, just as I kept fearing she might.

  Our beloved state first revealed her plan with a clap of thunder. I was in my tent, having just gone there after dinner and our usual nightcaps. Everyone else, except Pick who was at the dig, were bedded down, too. I waited for more rumbling skyward but that was it. I took that as very strange, then heard the pok of a raindrop on my tent. Then, another pok and another and another. The drops of rain increased until there was a steady staccato of them. I relaxed. This was not going to be a big storm, just a nice little rain. Maybe, I hoped, it would cool things down. I slid off into dreamland, waking a couple of hours later. The staccato of rain was still there, neither increasing or decreasing. That was when I knew we were in trouble.

  I pulled on my clothes and crawled outside into our campsite or, as it might more accurately be called at that point, a swamp. I stood up, took a step, and fell down, the dirt beneath the grass already well on its way toward gumbo. I sat there, quietly cursing, and considered the other tents. I neither heard nor saw movement within any of them. I guess they were probably enjoying the gentle sound of the rain on their tents, just as I had until I realized Montana’s little game. It was called a gentle rain, a very long, drowning gentle rain. I had seen them go on for days.

  I woke up Laura and Tanya. “I’m going up to check on Pick,” I told them after explaining about the rain. Then I crawled up the hill to the dig site and found Pick beneath a tarp that Laura had rigged for him. He was in his sleeping bag between two big slabs of sandstone. He was gently breathing, apparently u
naware of the disaster unfolding below. I shook the paleontologist. “Pick, wake up. We have a problem.”

  He blinked awake. “What is it?”

  “It’s raining.”

  “So?”

  “I’ve seen this before. It’s going to rain all night and probably all day, too.”

  Pick grasped what was about to happen. “Mike, we have to protect the dig. Let’s shovel dirt over it, then put tarps on.”

  I will say one thing for Pick. He could work when he had to. Beneath the steady rain, we shoveled dirt fast and furious. Then Laura and Tanya came crawling through the gumbo and rock to help us. They had brought tarps and after we’d put as much dirt over the bones as we could, spread them over the site, using sandstone blocks to weigh them down. After that, there was nothing to do but slip and slide down Blackie Butte to the camp. We looked like mud people when we got there.

  It rained all night. Then it rained all day and the gumbo swamp got deeper, which meant a lot of falling down. By the next nightfall, we were all coated with the nasty stuff and thoroughly miserable and stayed that way until Tanya said, what the hell, and broke out the vodka. By then, even Ray and Amelia needed a little v&t and Jeanette gave them permission. In the mess tent, we huddled together for warmth and began to sing old campfire songs and Tanya, in a nice voice, sang some Russian folk songs. Her voice wasn’t that great but she sure did look good doing it. I thought to myself that at least nobody was going to be able to get to us in this gumbo. Not until the place dried out, anyway. This was a comfort.

  When the sun finally burned through the clouds, and the gumbo firmed up enough for us to walk on it, we had a look around. We were like dazed survivors of a slow-motion flood. Everything that was in our personal tents was soaked so Ray and I rigged up some clotheslines. Pretty soon, the Blackie Butte camp looked like the base camp of Mount Everest with all those colorful flags fluttering. Our flags, however, were not tributes to the gods, just our laundry. But I thought all those flapping clothes kind of made the place look cheerful.

  It took another day before we could dig again because the ancient mud just refused to dry. We used the time to inspect and repair the jackets of the plastered bones, check their field numbers against what Laura had logged, and generally spiff up the camp. By the way, every bone, even the smallest one, was labeled with its own field number and location on the quarry. They were also photographed in situ and a notation made in Laura’s field notebook. We had also done that with Big Ben, our Trike.

  Hauling plaster and water up that hill was killing work but we did it, one bag and one bucket at a time. By the time we had plastered and moved the collective tails, tibias, and femurs of both dinosaurs, and a partial pelvis and the dorsal vertebrae and ribs of the T. rex on top, we were a bunch of exhausted puppies. I went to Pick sitting above the work, musing over what lay below him, and occasionally reaching down to sift the soil through his hands. “Pick, we need a day in town to clean up and get a good night’s sleep.”

  Pick gave my suggestion approximately one millisecond of thought. “There’s no time for that. We can’t leave this dig for even a minute.”

  “We’re worn out,” I insisted.

  “No. I will not leave this dig.”

  I went to Jeanette and gave her my idea. She was on her hands and knees at the time, helping Tanya plaster a long thin bone Laura said was an ischium. “Here at this juncture,” Tanya said when I knelt beside them, “is where the femur—the upper leg bone—fit. There was a big triangular sheet of muscle that was attached to the ischium, the pelvis, and the femur, which made the upper leg very powerful.”

  “Great,” I said. “You ladies ready for a day in town?”

  Both women, dirty, sweaty, eyes heavy-lidded with fatigue, sat back. “I would give anything for a shower,” Jeanette said.

  “You’re the boss. You could make it happen.”

  Jeanette glanced up at Pick who was furiously writing something in his journal. “I saw you talking to him. What did he say?”

  “He didn’t like my idea.”

  Jeanette mused a bit, then said, “What would Bill do, I wonder?”

  I was tired enough that I reminded her again that her late husband wouldn’t be facing this particular problem. Then, I said, “But I recall him saying one time that a tired man will make ten times the mistakes a rested one will.”

  She studied me. “Did he really say that?”

  He hadn’t, but I said, “Yes, Jeanette, he did.”

  She glanced back at Pick, then said, “I’ll have a word with him.”

  Just as she promised, Jeanette had that word. She and Pick were in the supply tent and the rest of us were moping around in our camp chairs and could hear every word. The last words were, of course, Jeanette’s. “We’re taking a day and a night off. That’s it.”

  Pick stomped out of the tent. Jeanette came over to us. “We’re going to take tomorrow off.” She collapsed into one of the chairs. “Mike, you got a v-and-t for me?”

  I did and we all had one ourselves except Ray and Amelia who were sitting beside each other, holding hands. Jeanette saw them. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “We’ve agreed to disagree,” Amelia said. “He’s hardheaded and stupid but I’ve decided to forgive him.”

  Ray shrugged. “She’s not so bad for a girl.”

  Pick chose that tender moment to come back from wherever he’d been pouting after getting his orders from our lady boss. Apparently, he was reconciled with her decision. “I think I know a little more,” he said, sitting down while we all leaned forward to hear his story.

  He said he was going to tell us a story of a rogue. He reminded us that Big Ben, our Trike, had escaped after being bitten by a T. rex adult. That meant, he said, that another T. rex must have scared or distracted the attacking T away. Since the baby bones indicated an apparent nest, Pick said he believed the mighty Tyrannosaurs were homebodies of a sort, which staked out a territory. In this, he said, he thought the analog for a T. rex family was that of a modern set of predators, namely lions.

  “Lions work hard to keep their families intact,” he said. “They nurture their young and devise their feeding strategies to ensure everyone gets plenty to eat. It is a patriarchal family, an alpha male lording it over the females and the other males. With T. rexes, however, we paleontologists think those roles were reversed. All the evidence to date indicates female T’s were larger than the males. The T. rex brain was also quite large, the largest of all the dinosaurs, nearly as large as the human brain and as complex in their own way. There is proof across all vertebrates that the brain that is used more develops more. As an aside, this is why young humans need to study mathematics and the sciences, not because they may necessarily use that knowledge for anything practical, but simply because it makes their brains a better functioning organ.”

  All this was very interesting but I sensed Pick was diverging from his story so I drew him back to it. “What about the rogue?” I asked. Subtle, ain’t I?

  “Ah, the rogue,” he said. “In lion prides, the alpha male eventually drives out the junior males. Some of them go off and form their own prides but others become rogues. I think this was true with the T. rex except the rogues would have been female. I believe the superior T up on Blackie Butte is a rogue female. The inferior T is smaller and, I’m sure when we study it back in the lab, we’ll see that it was a male. Their positions indicate to me a struggle. Both are aimed in the same direction, I think toward a nest. We may be on the cusp of the most important discovery ever made in paleontology, proof that Tyrannosaurs had nests and that they defended them, even against a titanic rogue.”

  Laura asked, “But Pick, isn’t it possible what we’re seeing is simply two T’s who died together? Or even were washed together by a river after they died?”

  Pick shook his head. “There is absolutely no evidence of our dig being in a stream or river bed, no smooth stones, nothing. This nest was probably on the top of a hill or perhaps a big
ledge.”

  “I don’t know, Pick,” Laura said. “You’re making a lot of assumptions.”

  Pick tapped his forehead. “I see it all here,” he said. “I know what is true.”

  When Laura stayed silent, Pick went on. “I’ve been studying the mud around these bones. I think it was transported by a huge flood carrying a great deal of silt from the adjoining highlands. It must have been very sudden, tsunami-like, catching them in a snapshot of time. Sort of like that storm that hit us last week, only much bigger.”

  “But why would these T’s stay?” Laura erupted. “Why wouldn’t they try to run away the moment the water started to rise?”

  “Maybe,” Pick said, “there was something of interest to them that was greater even than survival.”

  “What would that be?” I asked.

  “Perhaps the strongest emotion in the universe,” Pick answered. “Love.”

  It got very quiet around the fire pit. Pick finally broke the silence by saying, “I must find out if what I believe is true. I’m certain it is but I need evidence. That’s why we can’t stop digging.”

  Jeanette remained firm. “Only one day and one night, Pick. A tired man will make ten times the mistakes of a fresh one.”

  “That goes for a tired woman, too,” Laura said, earning her a sharp glance from Pick.

  Philip said, “My crotch is rubbed raw with grit. I’ve got to get it out.”

  “Don’t get it out around me!” Brian exclaimed.

  The rest of us hooted. “Well, that settles it,” Jeanette said. “Tomorrow morning, we’ll get out of here.” When Pick started to object, Jeanette said, “But not into town. We’ll all go to the Square C, get washed up there, and spend the evening indoors. I don’t have beds for everybody but I guess you can camp out well enough in the living room and such.” Jeanette held up her hand. “That settles it, Pick.”