The Dinosaur Hunter

by Homer Hickam

  I reentered the surgery and went down on one knee beside her, grabbed her, and kissed her full on the mouth. “Now, that’s love, honey,” I said. “Ask your dino hunter to kiss you when you’re covered with shit.”

  27

  When I got to camp, I saw Pick was back on his sandstone perch over the dig, looking for all the world as if nothing had happened. I considered the best way to kill him and determined there was no best way, only the most fun way. That was going to my tent, getting the .30-06 rifle with the scope, propping it on a boulder, and picking him off like a prairie dog sitting on the lip of his burrow. Like the prairie dog, Pick would fall into his hole or, in this case, on top of his damn dinosaurs. Oh, there would be some consternation and some wailing from Laura and Tanya and maybe even the others but, what the hell, I would have saved us all from Pick’s stupid concept of deep time. Then, maybe we could just dig up the damn bones, sell them legitimately or on the black market, make some money, and go home. Of course, I might not have a home. Likely, I no longer had to quit because I was fired. Then I thought, since I was going to murder Pick, home might not be a problem for me. State Prison in Deer Lodge. That’s where Montana keeps its death row.

  Thinking of Deer Lodge and the executioner gave me some pause. There weren’t yet enough Californians in Montana to keep the good and gracious citizens of the Big Sky state from occasionally extracting a life for a life. So while I was pausing, I took stock. I looked up where Pick was sitting and realized he might have had sex with Jeanette but to him it probably didn’t mean that much The only thing that meant anything to him was back in the Cretaceous.

  So, instead of killing Pick, I did the next best thing and got myself a beer and sat on one of the lawn chairs around the fire pit and silently talked to myself. It’s sad when you need to talk to someone you can trust and the only person who falls into that category is yourself. But that was my situation and I needed to think through all that had happened and all that I had uncovered to see if there was anything I had missed. It also kept my mind off Jeanette and our dinosaur boy wonder.

  I started with Toby. According to the evidence of the note in his pocket, Toby had killed our bull and the cows. This was for reasons unknown but OK, I could believe he was the cow killer. So, ergo, if Toby was the cow killer, then Cade Morgan knew it and maybe had helped. Why? I didn’t know but they were both idiots so maybe Toby did it because he needed to kill something every so often and, when Cade thought it might be him, Mr. Morgan suggested, “Hey, Toby, why don’t you kill that bull and those cows?” Yes, I know that didn’t make sense but, as I said, I was trying to come up with the motivation of idiots.

  If I accepted Toby as our cow killer, then what? Somehow, probably, maybe, perhaps, the Haxbys found out about it. How was that? Well, Toby got drunk and talked, or maybe the note in his pocket fell out and somebody saw it, or maybe Cade let it slip. There were a lot of ways Toby’s guilt could have been exposed and, in Fillmore County, you didn’t murder cows without someone getting even. So why the bashed head and slit throat? Well, the Haxbys were decidedly an eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth bunch so it would be just like them. Of course, there was nothing in the history of the Haxbys to suggest they were cold-blooded killers but that was true of most cold-blooded killers. Yes, all right, OK, I decided the Haxbys had done ol’ Toby in, probably in that little copse of trees behind the marina, then dragged him down to the lake and tossed him in. That made me wish I’d searched that little copse of trees but never mind. I reminded myself for the umpteenth time I was no longer a detective and I had no business investigating this or any other crime. So why was I going through all this in my mind? Well, why not? It beat dragging my tired butt up that hill and, like I said, thinking about Jeanette and Pick. I needed another beer.

  Now I came to thinking abut Tanya and Ted Brescoe. Why had they spent the night together at the marina the night of the dance and Toby’s murder? And who was right about what happened? Ted or Tanya? At least a certain part of me believed Tanya because, after all, I’d taken her to my bed last night without a thought of Ted. This, I believe, is not normal behavior for a male human being. If another man has been with a woman, a certain amount of time has to pass before we male creatures consider the woman clean enough to screw. OK, that probably has a direct correlation with a man’s age. Teenage boys would mate a knothole, no lie, even if King Kong had just finished with it. We older guys get a mite more discriminating or so we like to think.

  So, OK and anyway, why had Ted and Tanya been together that morning and was that somehow tied in with Toby’s death? If the Haxbys had done it, and I had decided they had, then no, it didn’t. Basically, to clear this up, I needed to ask Tanya. But if I did, I might hurt her feelings. I was sure she wanted to put that night behind her. The truth is, I did, too. Another beer. That’s what I needed.

  Now I needed to think about Cade Morgan. What was up with Cade? He had visitors at his ranch who came in a dark limousine. Dark limos did not necessarily mean Russian mobsters. Since he made skin flicks, maybe he had brought in a bevy of gorgeous girls. In fact, I hoped he had but that’s also a never mind. My working theory was the limo passengers were connected with Toby. For all I knew, maybe ol’ Cade had been exterminated by now and the boys in the limo had departed the county. I could only hope.

  Then there was Edith, our fair mayor. Was she connected to all this? I just didn’t know. And what about Jeanette? And Pick? After all, most everything Pick had told us had been proved a lie. And now he and Jeanette were lovers. Was there something I was missing? I shook my head, finished the beer, and tossed the bottle into the fire pit on top of the others. The truth was I hadn’t solved anything. My conjectures on the cow murders, Toby’s murder, the Haxbys, and Cade Morgan could all be wrong. I got up and, carrying my pack with the Glock in it, climbed the hill, got my ice pick and trowel, and went back to work on the Cretaceous. Deep time was all that made sense on Blackie Butte.

  Jeanette didn’t come out until the next day. I was glad she’d come, mainly because I got to studiously ignore her, which I did with a vengeance. By then, we had most of the exposed bones of the top and bottom T’s jacketed and carried or slid down the hill. All of us, even Brian and Philip, were getting to be very good at digging, pedestaling, and jacketing. We had almost made an assembly line job of it. A few more tiny baby T bones were found, a femur, Laura said, and a couple of vertebras, so tiny they were almost missed. “What we need to do when we’re finished with these big ones,” she said, “is to bring in a screen and go through all the spoil matrix to find the rest of this little guy.” Great. That sounded like hot, backbreaking work, just like all the other work on the dig.

  So now it was time to see what remained of the front parts of the two big T. rexes. What we found first was the upper neck of the top T. This part of the neck of a Tyrannosaur, it turns out, is a very complex series of bones. The neck bones themselves were each about the size of the fist of a professional heavyweight boxer. Attached to each on opposing sides were sharp prongs that reminded me of tent pegs. These were the neural spines and below them was the neural arch or pathway of the spinal cord. Atop this arrangement were somewhat rectangular-shaped bones that acted as stops to keep the neck from bending too far. According to Laura, this whole crazy combination of bones in the neck allowed it to be flexible. “Although,” she said during a rest break, “the neck of the T. rex, if we just look at the bones, is much too thin to support their massive skulls.”

  Ray asked the salient question. “Wouldn’t that mean they would be walking around with broken necks?”

  “Don’t be silly,” Amelia countered. “If their necks were broken, they wouldn’t be walking around.”

  “You know what I mean,” Ray shot back.

  “I never know what you mean, Ray Coulter,” Amelia spat.

  It was nice to see the kids were still getting along.

  Anyway, Laura cleared the mystery up, explaining that the neural spines were attachment poin
ts for extremely powerful muscles that stretched all the way to the back of the skull. She also said that as we approached the skull, we would see some long rib-like bones that nearly wrapped around the throat. These, she said, were to provide places to connect muscles and also probably to protect the windpipe although why such protection was needed, she didn’t exactly know. What creature in the late Cretaceous would be able to or want to bite a T. rex neck?

  Having watched plenty of science-fiction movies, I thought I had the answer. “Another T. rex,” I said.

  Pick, who I thought had fallen asleep on his perch, suddenly opened his eyes and said, “Mike, you are exactly right.”

  The next day, we found more teeth mixed in with the top T’s neck vertebrae and ribs. This meant, Laura said, another T, probably the one below, had locked on its throat. The next thing we found was a short, heavy bone that Laura said was the humerus of a Tyrannosaur arm. It was so small I had trouble believing it really belonged to the massive skeleton but Laura shrugged, saying, “Growing bones and muscles takes energy, you know, and life is inherently lazy.”

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked.

  “Just what I said. To evolve away from some physical characteristic takes work at the cellular level, maybe even below it. Unless there’s some compelling reason to do it, the animal will stay the same. In this case, the T. rex got bigger because it needed to be bigger to eat the animals it ate. Its arms, on the other hand, just stayed the same size because they weren’t useful. Anyway,” she waved her hand in a dismissive gesture, “we don’t know why their arms were so small. They just were.”

  Then we found our first skull or at least part of it. It was, based on its size, the bottom T’s lower jawbone which was missing some teeth. Then we found the upper jaw and other bones of the skull. Laura explained T. rex skulls didn’t come in a unit but were a complex maze of bones and hollow spaces. “We’ll jacket them in their matrix,” Laura said. “Otherwise, they could get damaged.”

  Laura found an exposed socket in the jaw and tried some of the teeth we’d found in the top T’s neck. One of them fit perfectly. Pick came down and knelt over our find and we all waited for him to make his appraisal. “They were fighting,” he said, “and the inferior T got a good bite onto the superior’s throat. But I don’t think it killed him. Keep digging and we’ll find out what did.”

  “We must map everything first,” Laura insisted.

  Pick sighed. “Of course, you’re right. Map, map, map.”

  “And jacket.”

  He waved his hands tiredly, not that he had done any real work. “All right. Jacket.”

  We mapped and jacketed, then dug like crazy people. Yes, we were careful, but we dug as fast as we could. I forgot all about Toby and the cows and all the rest of that mystery, which seemed unreal compared to the mystery we were solving right before our eyes. Then we found the other skull. It was oddly posed, the neck contorted, the head thrown back. Laura said this was the classic death posture of dinosaurs. As rigor mortis set in, tendons tightened and pulled the head backwards. “Why isn’t the other skull like that?” Ray asked.

  “Because its teeth were embedded in the neck of the superior T,” Pick answered from above.

  We gathered around our latest find. This skull was gigantic, thick, and yet, as we exposed it from the gritty dirt of Blackie Butte, we observed that parts of it were shattered, others parts punctured. And in one of those punctures on a bone that Laura said was the nasal bone, we found a hole too big to be made by the teeth of the smaller T. We also found the animal’s sinus cavities and palate had been crushed into splinters. It looked like a sledgehammer had been used.

  Pick came down and inspected the damage done to the skull. “I think while the inferior T held this T’s neck, another T clamped its jaws on the superior’s head until the bones in the skull were crushed and death ensued.” That was a clinical way of saying the big T had been bitten on the head by something even bigger. And meaner, I presumed.

  “How do we know this skull wasn’t crushed postmortem by the pressure from the burial?” Laura challenged.

  “Mud doesn’t puncture bone like this,” Pick replied. He stood up and fastidiously wiped the dirt from his pants. “When we dig deeper, I think we’re going to find broken ribs. By the posture of the inferior, it had to be beneath the superior’s feet which were equipped with extremely sharp claws. Those claws would have done enormous damage. While the inferior T held onto the superior’s neck, the superior would have been tearing the stomach and intestines out of the inferior. The flow of blood must have been like a river. Yet, this smaller T hung on, giving another T, a big one and probably female, time to provide the death bite.”

  “You’re saying the inferior Tyrannosaur sacrificed his life?” Laura asked.

  “I’m certain of it,” Pick replied.

  Laura was dubious. “Assuming it had the mental capacity for sacrifice, what would be its motive?”

  “I already told you,” Pick replied. “Love.”

  “A nest,” Amelia said. “She was protecting her nest. And her babies.”

  Pick nodded his head vigorously. “Or his babies. And mate.”

  Tanya said, “Then the little skeleton we found was probably a chick that got stepped on during the battle.” Tears began to streak down her dirty cheeks. “That poor little thing. It was just trying to get out of the way.”

  “I think you’re right,” Pick said.

  I looked around. There were lots of tears. Even Jeanette’s eyes were wet. Ray looked away until Amelia’s hand found his and held it tight. Tanya was too far from me to take her hand but I wanted to. Laura was writing in her journal, stopping to wipe her nose with the back of her hand. The two brothers of Green Planet were openly sobbing. Me? Well, I felt sorry for the little tyke but it had been a long, long time ago. Pick soon reminded us of that fact.

  “The way I read the dirt,” he said, “I think this happened in the late Cretaceous, around sixty-five or seventy million years ago. So the question is why have we found them so well preserved?”

  “You’re already told us,” Laura said. “They were covered with mud.”

  “That’s how,” Pick replied. “But my question is why?”

  “I don’t understand,” Laura said.

  “OK, let me put in a different way. Why are we finding these creatures now? Why was deep time flipped on its head to bring them to the surface at this moment?” When Laura shrugged and the rest of us reacted with querulous frowns, Pick said, “I believe it is because the time has come that we—meaning our civilization—learned the lessons these bones can teach us.”

  This was too much for Laura. “That’s crazy, Pick! You’re talking like there’s a big God in the sky who left us a note by arranging these bones this way. I totally reject your hypothesis. Why are these bones here and so well preserved? It’s simply the random result of millions of years and the death of millions of animals. This is just what happens to be. The result of a cosmic roll of the dice.”

  “Einstein said God does not play dice with the universe,” Pick replied.

  “He later refuted that,” Laura growled. “You’re going too far.”

  “If you’re right, Pick, what is the lesson?” Jeanette asked, cutting to the chase.

  “I don’t yet know,” Pick answered. “But we’re getting close.” He pointed at the unexcavated dirt. “The answer lies there.”

  We crept forward—our shovels, our ice picks, our trowels at the ready. “No you don’t,” Laura said. “We pedestal and jacket the rest of these bones before we move a teaspoon of any more dirt.”

  “That will take days!” Tanya protested.

  “It will take what it takes,” Laura said as Pick regally climbed back on his perch.

  28

  We were up at first light and, as soon as we got some coffee and breakfast under our collective belts, went back to work. As we pedestaled and jacketed and moved the bones down the hill, I kept marveling over the cru
shed skull of the big T. rex that lay atop the smaller one. Stuck in it was a tooth over a foot long. Whatever animal had planted that tooth through three inches of solid bone had attacked with enormous force, energy, and passion. But why? Self-defense was my instinctive answer but Pick was hinting it was more. The answer, as always in paleontology, was in the dirt.

  Blackie Butte was more than the pyramidal peak we had taken down to a stump but actually several connected outcrops, smaller hills, and peninsulas. When we eased up for lunch, Tanya asked me to meet her on a narrow dirt bridge which had several small cedars perched on it. I agreed, making a detour by my tent for something I wanted her to have. Well, two things. I settled beneath one of the cedars on the earthen outcrop and enjoyed the view until she arrived with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and sports drinks, the latter to replenish the lost salts caused by our labor. She also had a salt shaker and suggested that I sprinkle some on my hand and lick it off. Of course, I would have preferred to lick it off her hand, as I’d seen Pick do once, but I did as I was told. We sat there quietly, enjoying our meal. When we were finished, she put her hand on my knee. “Thank you for our night together, Mike,” she said. I thought it was me who should thank her and was about to say that very thing when she said, “That night Toby was murdered, I am ready to tell you about that now.”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything,” I said, even though I was eager to hear it.

  She smiled. “I think you have a great passion for the truth. Yes, I will tell you this.” She took my hands in hers. “The night of the dance, Toby found me sitting on one of the picnic tables. I was enjoying the music, looking at the lake, and, I must admit, thinking of you.”

  She gave my hands a squeeze, I squeezed hers back, and she kept going. “Toby said he knew I was a whore but since he was a fellow Russian, he did not think he should have to pay me for sex. He said I should go with him into the trees and take care of his urges. When he grabbed my wrists—he was so strong, Mike—I told him I did not understand why he wanted me. There were many men at the dance and I was sure one of them was who he really wanted. If we have sex, I told him, he would only be closing his eyes and thinking of a man. This made him very angry but he did not deny it, either.”