The Dinosaur Feather

by S. J. Gazan

  Clive started buying Jack presents. New scalpel blades and a pair of binoculars with Jack’s name engraved on them. He gave him reference and activity books, he let Jack have his scientific journals when he had finished with them. When they were out in the woods, Clive looked after Jack. He would help Jack across the stream, he would lend him his hat if the sun was blazing and Jack had forgotten his own; he only gave the boy challenges he could meet, and he listened to his answers. The boy deserved to be looked after properly when he was with Clive. Once in a while, he would clutch Jack’s chin and turn his face to his to emphasize something it was important for Jack to understand, or grab his arm if Jack was fidgeting and losing concentration. Obviously Clive never hit him, but it was essential Jack stay focused or he would never find the strength to break free from his background.

  “Would you like to dissect a larger animal?” Clive asked. Jack was now so skilled at dissection that hares and hedgehogs no longer represented much of a challenge. It was early one Sunday morning and the mist lay thick under the rising sun. Clive carried a spade, and he had a flask of hot chocolate and some sandwiches in his backpack. Jack nodded unconvincingly. They began by building a trap in a clearing. Clive concentrated on the construction of the trap, and how they would lift up the animal once it had fallen in. Suddenly he became aware that Jack had stopped. He was standing a little distance away, and he didn’t look happy.

  Clive went over to him and knelt down on the path, making their eyes level.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, softly.

  “I don’t like always having to kill the animals,” the boy said. Clive embraced him.

  “But nature’s like that,” Clive said into Jack’s hair. He smelled innocently of forest and sweaty child.

  “Then why don’t you do it?” Jack said, wriggling free. Clive let go of him.

  “We’ll do something else,” he said.

  “Okay,” Jack said, relieved.

  They walked further into the woods.

  “I wish you were my dad,” Jack said out of the blue.

  Clive smiled.

  “Well, we can always pretend,” he said, lightly.

  The weekends passed and weeks became years. When Jack turned thirteen, Clive’s present to him was a tree house in the woods. Clive had built it in secret and, on Jack’s birthday, he suggested they celebrate the day by camping in the woods. Jack was up for it. They packed provisions, a camping stove, sleeping bags, comics, and torches and off they went. Jack looked puzzled when Clive suddenly stopped and dumped his backpack on the ground beneath a huge tree. Then Clive pointed out the cleverly concealed pegs he had hammered into the tree trunk to serve as steps. Jack obediently climbed up and disappeared inside the foliage. A cry of joy soon followed and Clive smiled as he climbed up. When he reached him, Jack was sitting on the narrow walkway in front of the entrance to the tree house, dangling his legs over the edge.

  Clive had put up two shelves inside for their luggage and, at the end of the walkway, he had constructed a screened enclosure, so it was possible to pee over the edge in private. Inside the hut Clive had put up pictures of Jack and Clive. A friendship spanning eight years, where a child had become a boy and a boy had become a man. You could see it in their faces. The softness had left Clive’s, who was now twenty-eight years old, but it was more noticeable in Jack’s. His gaze was intelligent, his face slimmer, and his hair longer. The little boy was fading away.

  That evening, they fried sausages in a pan Clive conjured up from his backpack and, for dessert they shared a bar of chocolate, which turned out to be cooking chocolate, but it tasted good all the same. They huddled together to keep warm and heard the owls hoot and the wapiti deer roar.

  Early the next morning, while the moon still hung suspended in the sky, a nightingale sang very close to them. Jack was asleep and Clive looked at the boy’s lips, which were sharply outlined in the moonlight. He wanted to reach out and touch Jack. At that moment, Jack turned over in his sleep and was now facing Clive. Clive could smell his breath; it was strong and alien, and he was hit by an unfamiliar surge of arousal. Not like the feeling he got when he thought about Jack’s mother or the girls from college, but something infinitely deeper, as if unbridled lust had risen in him like an atoll from the sea. Clive struggled to breathe calmly and inched himself closer toward Jack’s warm, sleeping body.

  Jack jerked upright and moved away.

  “What is it?” he murmured. “What’s wrong?”

  The light inside the tree house was still gray. Clive said nothing and pretended to be asleep. He was wide awake, but it wasn’t until it was daylight, at least an hour later, that he stretched out and said he hadn’t slept this well in a long time. Jack was already sitting on the walkway surveying the forest. They made oatmeal on the stove before they packed up and walked home. They said good-bye to each other by the garden gate outside Clive’s house, and Clive could feel his legs shake. Jack moved in to hug Clive, like they always did, a brief meeting of their chests and a friendly pat on each other’s back meant thanks for today and see you later. Clive shot out his hand to stop him. A surprised Jack shook it.

  “You’re a man now,” Clive said. “Thirteen years old.”

  Jack beamed with delight, and his surprise evaporated. Clive picked up his backpack and walked down the path.

  “See you,” he called out over his shoulder.

  Clive couldn’t sleep that night. Breathless, he lay in his bed, his body throbbing.

  Three months later, Jack’s mother got a job in another city and they moved. Clive stood behind the window, watching the moving van being loaded. He heard the doorbell ring, he heard his landlady call out for him, and he watched a disappointed Jack walk back to the waiting van. When the van had disappeared around the corner, Clive uttered a deep cry of despair. Then he thought: it’s better this way. Jack had changed recently, the little boy had gone completely. Clive missed him and had no idea what to do with the new Jack. Since the birthday camp out in the forest, Jack had canceled their Saturday arrangement twice, and the previous Saturday he had failed to show. He hadn’t appeared until later that morning, his hair crumpled with sleep and a pimple on his cheek. Clive was sitting on the steps, carving a stick.

  “Sorry, overslept,” Jack mumbled. He was wearing Bermuda shorts and no shirt and stretched languidly. Clive muttered something and carried on carving. He felt as if Jack had died. The boy Clive had protected and looked after was gone, and a young man had taken his place. Jack glanced at him from under his curly bangs, and his downy upper lip pointed at Clive.

  It’s better this way, Clive told himself again long after the moving van had left. The way he felt about the new Jack was forbidden.

  The next time Clive saw Jack, he could hardly believe his own eyes. It was 1993. Clive had married Kay, they had two children, and he had been appointed the youngest ever professor of the department of Bird Evolution, Paleobiology, and Systematics. Clive recognized Jack immediately. He was standing to the left of the entrance, glancing at his watch, a worn briefcase by his feet. He was tall with very dark hair, and he had the face of a grown man, but Clive recognized the sharp line of his upper lip. His eyes were still guarded, and the movement with which he swept aside his hair was the same it had always been. Clive felt flushed all over as he held out his hand to Jack. At first, Jack failed to recognize him, but then his eyes penetrated the soft beard Clive had grown and his face lit up.

  “Clive, right?” he exclaimed, smiling. Jack was taller than Clive and, for a few seconds, they simply looked at each other.

  “What are you doing here?” Clive said, at last.

  “It’s my first day,” Jack said, smiling shyly. It was frightening how much he resembled his younger self. Clive couldn’t help feeling proud. This was his reward.

  “You taught me everything about nature,” Jack said. “Everything I know. I’ll never forget that.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Clive said. “You’ll find a way to pay
me back one day,” he added, laughing.

  Jack completed his biology degree and went on to do a PhD. He focused on the communication of natural science from the Renaissance up to the present day. Clive reviewed Jack’s PhD and felt edgy about it. He had hoped Jack would specialize in ornithology, and he didn’t regard the history of science as a proper subject. However, Jack was determined, and, shortly after his PhD had been accepted, he launched a new Canadian journal, Scientific Today, which quickly became the best-selling natural science journal in North America and soon also in Europe.

  Eight years had passed since Clive and Jack had bumped into each other at the university, and they still met for lunch at regular intervals. They talked about science, they discussed recent university initiatives, they assessed scientific conferences, but they skillfully avoided ever mentioning their private lives, as though by tacit agreement. Sometimes they happened to stay in the same hotel during an out-of-town conference and, after the conference, they might dine together alone or with other colleagues. But it was never like the old days. It didn’t even come close. Clive wondered why he didn’t simply invite Jack and his wife, Molly, to his home for dinner. Kay would love it. She often remarked that they never entertained. But something inside him fought it. What would happen if the easy mood of a social setting loosened Jack’s tongue? Might he tell Kay that Clive had played with him every weekend for years, even though he had been fifteen years older than Jack? That Clive hadn’t had a single friend his own age? That Clive had taught Jack to kill and dissect animals but had never killed or dissected a single one himself? And what precisely did Jack remember about the night in the tree house? Clive shuddered. He had suffered beyond measure when Jack left, but it was all in the past now, and there it would stay.

  In 2001 Clive published his life’s work, The Birds. The day the book came out, he spent a long time sniffing it. He had worked on it for four years, and every single one of his arguments was solid. Soon his opponents—Darren in New York, Chang and Laam in China, Gordon at the University of Sydney, and Clark and his team in South Africa—would be convinced that birds were a sister group to dinosaurs and not their descendants. Most of all, he was anticipating the reaction of Lars Helland in Denmark. The Danish vertebrate morphologist was the opponent who tormented Clive more than anyone else. Helland never attended any of the ornithology symposia held around the world, so Clive had never met him in person, but Helland’s papers were always meticulous and vicious. Every time Clive had published something on the evolution of birds, Helland could be relied on to provide an instant refutation, stating the exact opposite, as though he had nothing better to do than annoy Clive. However, Clive was convinced The Birds would silence Helland. Clive knew the Dane nearly always relied on the evolution of the manus, the bird’s hand, to illustrate the relationship between birds and dinosaurs, and neither Helland nor Clive’s other opponents had given much thought to the evolution of the feather. Consequently, Clive had decided the feather would be his trump card. He had studied the evolution of the feather for years. From now on, no one would be able to argue that feathers on present-day birds had anything to do with the feather-like structures found on dinosaurs.

  When the book was published, it went straight to the bestseller lists in Canada and the United States. Every dinosaur-mad amateur biologist on the planet bought a copy. However, Clive’s fellow scientists ignored it. It received only a few peer reviews in the more serious journals, and, on each occasion, in a rather dismissive tone, as though it was a curiosity to fill column inches rather than an important scientific work. Only Scientific Today allocated it a half-decent amount of space, but even so Clive was dissatisfied. He tried to call Jack to find out why his book had received such minimal coverage and been bounced to page 22, but Jack was unavailable.

  Clive volunteered to speak at every upcoming symposium and carefully rewrote every chapter of The Birds as individual papers that he submitted simultaneously to scientific journals all over the world. He thought about his father. Had his father still been alive, he would have been proud. The reactions came just under a month later. Clive was prepared. He had already drafted his counter arguments because he knew exactly where his opponents would attack: the crescent-shaped carpus, the reduction of fingers, the ascending process of the talus bone, and the alleged feathers.

  Clive devoured the new journals, convinced that his opponents would go straight for the anatomical discussion. However, apart from two responses written by minor scientists, none of his opponents criticized Clive’s anatomical arguments; instead they focused solely on poor editorial control whose lethargy had allowed Clive Freeman’s original contribution to be published, thus causing a deeply regrettable undermining of the general credibility of the journals. The nature of the relationship between birds and dinosaurs isn’t a subject worthy of a serious medium, because there is nothing to discuss. Birds are present-day dinosaurs. The end.

  In thirty-seven different publications.

  Clive was consumed by a boiling rage. They were accusing him of incompetence. They were accusing him, Clive Freeman, a world-famous paleobiologist and a professor at the University of British Columbia, of scientific incompetence.

  The most arrogant response came, not surprisingly, from Lars Helland who, on this occasion, listed an unknown, Erik Tybjerg, as his coauthor. This undoubtedly meant that Helland had told one of his PhD students to write his contribution. But the worst was yet to come.

  The ultimate insult was that Helland’s reaction appeared in Scientific Today.

  Clive called Jack immediately to request a meeting.

  When Clive saw Jack three days later, he was suffering from an upset stomach. They had arranged to meet at a bar across the street from the office of Scientific Today, and Jack was already there when Clive arrived. He was wearing dark trousers and a thin T-shirt, and a newspaper rested on his casually arranged legs. Clive’s stomach lurched when Jack looked up, and he stared at Jack’s lips. Clive slammed the journal on the table.

  “What the hell is this?” he demanded.

  “Clive, there are five other people on the editorial committee besides me,” Jack said quietly.

  Clive turned on his heel and left.

  In the autumn of 2001 Clive was a guest speaker in Chicago. Normally, he kept strictly to material from The Birds, but the American audience was remarkably receptive, and Clive expanded on his feather argument. Asymmetrical feathers were linked to flight in present-day birds, and dinosaurs hadn’t had feathers—obviously—first, because they didn’t fly, second, because they were cold-blooded animals, and third: “Can you imagine Jurassic Park—with chickens?”

  His joke brought the house down. Clive concluded with a challenge: “Show me a feathered dinosaur, and I will personally beg forgiveness from every advocate of the dinosaur theory!” He flapped his arms like a bird trying to take off. The laughter refused to die down.

  That night, Clive drank too much white wine before he staggered back to his hotel room. The next morning, he woke up with a dreadful taste in his mouth and grabbed a soda from the minibar. While he was drinking it, he switched on the television and found CNN. For a fraction of a second, he thought he must be the victim of a cruel hoax. To the right of the anchor was a huge photograph, which, to Clive, looked like a dinosaur with clearly visible feathers.

  At that moment, the anchor cut to a CNN reporter who announced, with cracked lips as though he had trekked all the way to Asia, that he was in the Liaoning Province in northeastern China.

  “This is a sensation,” the reporter panted. “Early this morning farm workers discovered what might be the world’s first feathered dinosaur. Tonight, the first experts have already reached the area, and a few minutes ago they confirmed that the newly discovered fossil is not a prehistoric bird but a predatory dinosaur belonging to the Theropod family. The animal is believed to have lived between 121 and 135 million years ago, and the exciting feature is that it has fossilized but extremely well-preserved feathe
rs running down in a ridge from its head and along its back. The tantalizing questions here in northeastern China are these: were dinosaurs able to fly and were they warm-blooded, or are these feathers astonishing proof that feathers weren’t only used for flying but also for insulation? We’ll know more once the experts have had a chance to examine this thrilling discovery in detail. Back to the studio.”

  Clive stared at the screen for nearly twenty minutes. Then he crushed his soda can.

  Kay greeted him with a nervous smile when he came back to Vancouver. The telephone had rung constantly all morning and please would he call… and she reeled off the names of everyone from his colleagues at the department to national television stations. Jack hadn’t called.

  Clive made himself a sandwich, gave Kay’s cheek a reassuring pat, and went to his study. Calmly, he ate his sandwich. The discovery in China was obviously a prehistoric bird, not a dinosaur. Dinosaurs didn’t have feathers. He downloaded forty-eight e-mails and skimmed through them. With irritation, he opened one from Lars Helland. Typical. The Danish scientist just had to put his oar in, in his usual affable manner, of course, so that it might be mistaken for good-natured banter. Clive deleted the e-mail.