The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  The museum dinosaurs of Ulaanbaatar had been crudely restored and posed. There were anatomical gaps in the skeletons; the rods and wires were as obvious as old-school braces on crooked teeth. Tuvshin seemed to find all of it glorious. After stopping by the prep lab to introduce Eric to his friend Otgo, he suggested that they “go Gobi.”

  In hard numbers, the Gobi Desert measures 1,000 miles long and, at its broadest point, 600 miles wide, with a total area of half a million square miles. A few paved highways now ran through the desert, though the harsh weather extremes made them hard to maintain. The surface of the moon is smoother than a Mongolian road, through no fault of the builders: the cycles of freeze/thaw taffy the asphalt and resettle it like peanut brittle. Given all that could go wrong with an impromptu trip to the desert, Eric didn’t see how it was possible to pull it off. Tuvshin wanted to go eight hours out, a gamble considering how often motorists blew tires or got stranded by sudden changes in the weather. By now it was Saturday morning; Eric’s flight departed on Monday afternoon at four. But he wanted to see the Gobi and couldn’t say no.

  Ulzii drove Eric and Tuvshin. They took Tuvshin’s Land Cruiser south, out of the city, crossing a stream where the first crusts of winter ice were forming. Whenever they came to an ovoo, a cairn altar to the spirits of mountains or rivers or trees or stars, Tuvshin stopped and added tugriks to the prayer ribbons and stones. The grass disappeared. They passed through a light snow. In a village, they stopped for lunch, the restaurant a cold-storage room containing a half-butchered horse. Eric had always liked foods that other people hated—airplane food, cafeteria food—and now he found that he liked mutton, especially in buuz, dumplings.

  After lunch, their young waitress joined them on the trip, with no explanation. The desert ran hard and bare. Twin ruts guided them for long miles over wiry grass and marmot holes, pushing toward the long line of the horizon. The ruts sometimes crossed and converged with other ruts, in some unspoken agreement about routes. The roads were always changing because the weather was always rearranging them. Conditions allowed for high speeds in one place, barely a crawl in another as the vehicle skirted a distortion that from the air must have had the embolistic appearance of a snake swallowing a goat. Nighttime magnified the remoteness, the darkness cut only by the limited reach of the headlights.

  Late that night they came to a ger, which Eric was excited to see. The word was pronounced gair; another word for it was yurt, but that was the Russian term, and Mongolians did not use it. All gers were alike in that each was a portable, round, windowless room framed with a collapsible latticework supported by flexible wooden poles and covered in canvas or felt. On the landscape a lone ger might resemble a mutant mushroom cap or vanilla cupcake. The roof has a center hole with a stovepipe up through it. The lower flaps of the felt or canvas can be raised and lowered like a window shade to control heat and ventilation. All gers face south, toward the best sun. Each has a short wooden door, usually painted a cheerful color like orange. The stove burns dried camel dung, argal, for cooking and for heat. Families often use old tires and ropes and lumber scraps to hold down the roof against the Gobi wind. A ger can be disassembled in minutes, packed onto camels or lorries, and moved easily as the herders shift their animals to better pastures. A lot of gers now had satellite dishes and generator-powered radios, TVs, and electricity. The left side of the ger is the “man’s” side and holds items like tackle; the right side is the “woman’s” side and holds items like cooking utensils. A narrow bed lines either wall, and it is okay for a guest to sit on the bed, even if someone is sleeping in it. The most important area in the ger is the space directly opposite the door, behind the stove, where a painted chest holds the family’s treasures.

  Eric had read enough to know that there were all kinds of ger rules—leave your hat on; never step on the threshold; always accept what you’re offered. Ducking through the doorway, he saw that the man of this ger was tall and skinny and younger than him, with a mustache. To his surprise, he was wearing a University of Florida sweatshirt. He and his wife had two young children. Another guest was sitting on the floor by the warmth of the stove; Eric heard his name as Batta, but it could have been Baht or Bat. Eric, Tuvshin, and Ulzii joined him on the floor and were offered bowls of suutei tsai, salted milk tea, which Eric drank to be polite. Then came the national favorite, airag—fermented mare’s milk, sour and intoxicating. Mongolian families kept a large barrel of it inside their ger and took turns pumping the liquid with a large wooden paddle, to keep the cultures alive.

  Around midnight, Tuvshin stood abruptly, pointed to a spot on the floor, and told Eric to sleep there. Then he and the waitress spent the night in the Land Cruiser with the engine running.

  The ger was so cold, Eric could see his breath. All he could hear was the occasional hiss of the stove and the wind. At one point he got up to relieve himself. The custom, as he understood it, was to walk a reasonable distance away from other people and just go. He couldn’t find words to describe the Gobi darkness, even with the backlight of his camera to guide the way. The stars hovered as they do in deserts, in one silvery panoramic sweep. Once his eyes adjusted, he could make out some sheep, but otherwise the Gobi on a moonless night was like entering negative space, a not-unpleasant dimension of nothingness.

  In the morning, the guests were served tea and mutton. When Eric went outside with the men, he could see that they were in a landscape of sand dunes and low grasses. In addition to sheep and horses, there were goats and camels. Someone asked Eric if he wanted to ride a camel and while it embarrassed him to act like a tourist, he said yes, so they put him between humps and one of the children led him around by a rope.

  Tuvshin announced that the family would now slaughter a sheep in their American guest’s honor. Eric would have rather this not happen, but again he deferred to custom. Mongolians used almost every part of the animal, the way Native Americans used every part of the buffalo: they ate what was edible; made clothes, felt, and ger coverings of the wool and skins; and burned the dung for heat and cooking. A couple of the men chased down one of the sheep, wrestled it to the ground, then carried it back to the ger by its legs. As they pinned it on its back, Eric braced for a gory death. One guy held the sheep while another pulled out a knife and cut an incision in the abdomen. The sheep said nothing. The man stuck his hand inside the animal and, it looked to Eric, pinched an artery near the heart. Instantly, the sheep was dead. The men left the carcass with the wife to be butchered and went driving.

  Eric now realized his host was one of Tuvshin’s diggers. They were in the Djadochta Formation, which encompasses the Flaming Cliffs, he later figured out by looking at maps. The digger showed everyone a Protoceratops skull that he had failed to excavate because it was so badly weathered, then showed them an equally crumbly hadrosaur pelvis. By the time they returned to the ger, the hunter’s wife had boiled the flesh of the sheep along with some of the organs, and everyone ate together out of a communal bowl, their fingertips and lips shining with grease.

  That afternoon, the visitors got back into Tuvshin’s Land Cruiser and headed for Ulaanbaatar, stopping only to drop off the waitress in her village. Tuvshin drank vodka the whole way home and rambled about a brother who had died in a car crash. It was well past midnight when they reached the city. Eric wanted to talk business before leaving, but the next morning he waited and waited at his hotel and no one ever came. Just as he decided to find a taxi, Ulzii showed up and drove him to Tuvshin’s apartment, where Tuvshin was still passed out from the night before. Bobo woke him, but he was too drunk to talk, so Ulzii drove Eric to the airport. He made it onto the plane just before the gate closed.

  As photos of more dinosaur bones arrived, Eric organized them into files and folders on the family iMac in Gainesville. “Galli skeletons” and “big ankylo skull” and “tarbo arms,” he slugged them. In some of the photos, Tuvshin posed with the bones like an angler with a trophy fish. He now agreed to sell to Eric, but refused to ship d
irectly to the United States, preferring to route everything through Europe or Japan.

  Eric didn’t see the problem with direct shipments or with the preferred terminology. He adopted certain known semantics and rationalizations. Why not call fossil dinosaurs “reptiles” on customs forms? Was that not what they were? Why not cite the value as, say, $10,000? It was the prep work that added value. Whenever he pressed Tuvshin about the export permits he’d mentioned, Tuvshin said he was working on it. “It was difficult, but Tuvshin had connections,” he said later. “I had no reason to think he couldn’t get them.”

  Eric briefly considered making up with Hollis Butts, to have a shipping partner in Japan. Then a friend suggested partnering with Chris Moore, a well-liked veteran hunter who lived in southern England and was well known at Tucson and Denver. Eric approached him and Moore agreed to go in.

  By now Amanda was six months pregnant with the second Prokopi child, a girl, due in May 2009. The Prokopis joined Facebook. In between posts about children, Earth Day, the March of Dimes Walk, Real Housewives of Atlanta, and fried Christmas goose, they marketed Florida Fossils and Everything Earth. They had sold the first flip house for a nice profit and now lived at Serenola, where the renovations were coming to an end. Recently, they had put in a swimming pool shaded by expensive Canary Island date palms. Eric hadn’t swum competitively in well over a decade, but still loved the water. He hoped his own children would become swimmers, just as he hoped they would love fossils. Rivers Prokopi was born on the fourth of May, with the white-blond hair of her mom and the brown eyes of both her parents. She left the hospital wearing a tiny bracelet of good Virginia silver.

  Eric and Amanda installed a gravel playground and a CedarWorks jungle gym. Amanda joined the Junior League. They hosted swim parties and barbecues. Amanda dressed Rivers in hair bows, and bought her a rainbow of tutus. Eric, bare chested and tanned, rode a four-wheeler through the yard with Greyson in his lap, teaching him how to steer. “I mean, how cute is that?” Amanda said as she filmed them on “the digger,” a machine used to remove scrub. “Father and son, digging up trees! Grey has the coolest daddy ever!” The Prokopi cameras were always on. They captured Grey’s fears of the dark, sharks, sleeping alone, humans dressed as sports mascots, and University of Florida cheerleaders. They captured Rivers’s fear of nothing. Their days were pumpkin patches, bouncy houses, petting zoos, piñatas, and IMAX theaters. Eric woke the children in their cribs—“Good morning!”—and Amanda soundtracked the first years of their lives. What’s a train say? Are you blowing bubbles? Happy, happy girl. Is today your first day of school? Whoa! Cool! Can you say “shark”? See the butterflies? Are you having fun at the museum? Take a bite of your dinosaur cookie! Is this your first trip on a ferry? Whoa, Grey’s driving the boat! What a cool kid! Are you finding fossils? Did you put your sunglasses on? Touch the turtle! What does a pirate say? Look at the ducks! Grey, is this your backyard? What a lucky guy you are!

  In Grey’s bedroom were an inflatable T. rex, framed dinosaur illustrations, and the dinosaur lamp from Eric’s childhood bedroom in Land O’ Lakes. On the armoire sat a framed I.M. Chait auction catalog cover showing the T. bataar skull that had sold in New York the day Grey was conceived. Rivers’s bedroom was soft cowhide skins, a twinkly chandelier, a daybed fluffed with monogrammed pillows, and an enormous print of a pink octopus.

  Few commercial fossil hunters lived in this sort of comfort. Yet when you looked closer, the Prokopis were still living the feast-to-famine life. They had no significant savings, no health insurance. They maintained a medical savings account and paid out of pocket for everything, including childbirth. Amanda’s father served as the family doctor, her brother as the family dentist. But the lifestyle had been established and now had to be maintained, along with the mortgages, the renovation expenses, and the costs of doing business. In 2008 alone, Eric had spent nearly $71,000 on fossil prep, almost $10,000 on shipping, and over $5,000 on trade show fees.

  A batch of dinosaurs would put everything straight. Tuvshin had emailed shots of a small ankylosaur skeleton; the vertebral column and articulated ribs of a huge unspecified dinosaur in situ; an enormous T. bataar foot; a broken dinosaur egg with a clearly visible embryo; a table laden with Gallimimus skulls and parts; a hadrosaur tail as perfect as the white spine of a catfish picked clean; and at least two nearly complete bataar skeletons. Feeling confident about his new revenue potential, Eric made plans to return to Mongolia.

  Later, once the name Eric Prokopi was synonymous with international fossil smuggling, people would imagine that he had slipped into Mongolia, dug dinosaurs under cover of darkness, and sneaked them across the border. Mongolian officials would speculate that the contraband went out in loads of salt, the least-checked export at customs. “Criminal mastermind” conjured certain clandestine images, which made Amanda snort. She said, “It was more like Harold and Kumar Go to Mongolia.”

  For this trip, in the summer of 2009, less than a year after his first, Eric invited his friend Tony Perez along. Tony owned his own welding business near Venice, Florida, where Eric had pocketed that first shark tooth as a child. They had met years ago when their mutual friend Andreas Kerner brought Tony to the Prokopi house in Land O’ Lakes to look at fossils. Tony had a family and sold shark teeth on the side, and he and Eric had become close friends, which mostly involved hanging out at Tucson and pranking each other whenever possible. Once, after Eric teased Tony about being so hairy, Tony manscaped and mailed the fuzz to Eric in an unmarked envelope; Eric kept the hair, and the next time he saw Tony, he sneaked it into the air conditioner vents of his car.

  They booked Mongolia for eighteen days in late June and early July, and got to work outfitting themselves with sleeping bags, tents, GPS-equipped walkie-talkies, ready-to-eat meals, guide books, and a satellite phone. Tony bought a new safari hat and a fanny pack. Eric bought motocross goggles, in case of sandstorms. The night before the flight, he drove to Land O’ Lakes and stayed with his parents, and Doris and Bill drove him to the airport the next morning.

  When Eric and Tony arrived in Ulaanbaatar, Tuvshin was once again waiting at customs, and they were expedited through. Eric double-strapped his backpack and pushed a luggage-laden cart out into the summer night, the red and blue lights of Chinggis Khaan International glowing behind him. The next morning, Ulzii picked them up at their hotel and took them to the mint-green building on Peace Avenue, where the basement was now crowded not only with dinosaur skeletons but also with geodes and shovels and cases of bottled water. Everyone took turns kneeling with bones for photos.

  It isn’t easy to rent a vehicle in Mongolia without also hiring a driver, but Eric managed to secure a Land Cruiser. They packed that rig and Tuvshin’s, and everyone loaded up: Eric, Tony, Tuvshin, Ulzii, Tuvshin’s daughter, and Batta, whom Eric had met in the Gobi eight months earlier. The seventh person was Otgo, the chief fossil prepper at the national paleontology lab. Eric had agreed to pay him fifty dollars a day as a guide, plus all the vodka he could drink.

  Eric had a map of the “Big Gobi circuit”—a loop through the southern desert—and for two weeks most of what they did was drive and take photographs. A gas station. A horse cart. Old men on a purple bus bench. A guy wearing a tweed jacket, a surgical mask, and a white baseball cap branded with a golden spray of cannabis, riding a moped with a hooded eagle on back, the eagle tethered to a tasseled box. The distant glimmer of the Chinggis Khaan Equestrian Complex, a massive silvery statue of the ancient warrior mounted on horseback—Mongolia’s version of Mount Rushmore or Rio Jesus. Flat endless land. Sheep. Blue sky, low clouds. Eric peeing. Tony peeing. Otgo peeing. Tuvshin peeing. A deserted-looking village. Badlands. Sagebrush. A cluster of camel dung that resembled a pile of Idaho potatoes. Every night in the desert Eric erected his new blue one-man tent 25 yards away from Tony’s green one so that he wouldn’t have to hear him snore. Just when they thought there was no one around for miles, they’d see the distant star-point of a passing motor
cycle. The sun rose at five; the Mongolians slept till ten, coverless and pillowless on the hard ground. Tiny creatures crept through the camp at night, leaving tracks in the sand.

  As Otgo and the others stayed in camp, Eric and Tony walked for hours finding nothing much more than endless desert. At an old hadrosaur site they came across broken lengths of femur and the claws of a freshly dead eagle, its carcass still tufted in feathers. Eric and Tony took turns crouching and grimacing over an odd stone the size of a grapefruit, pretending to have shat it. They got stuck in the sand and had to dig out. They blew a tire. They chased a wild camel on foot, for the hell of it. In a village they hosed themselves down at a public well and bought Otgo more vodka; Eric switched from Chinggis brand to something cheaper when he saw how much the old boy could drink.

  Tuvshin’s floral shorts read HAWAII, his baseball cap BOSTON. Eric’s T-shirt read EVOLUTION. They came to a village with deserted Soviet apartment buildings, the windows gaping. They saw a high pile of animal bones. They passed a mummified hedgehog, a Chinese oil well, a man leading a horse across the parched, pale earth. Eric found a tiny lizard and held it in his large hand. They climbed a trail to see a frozen waterfall. They scaled a “singing” sand dune. When they came across roadside tables full of agate and scrap fossils, nomads appeared, as if out of nowhere, to sell Eric a little pile for five dollars.