The Dinosaur Hunter(19)

Agreeing with me, I think, Jeanette said, “You’re a piece of work, boy,” then turned to me. “You think we should go looking for tracks to see if we can find what those motor sounds were that Dr. Pickford heard?”

I considered it, then said, “We’re not exactly Indian trackers. We’d likely drive over the lip of a hidden coulee as find anything.”

“I’m going to dig up this Triceratops,” Pick said, ignoring the fact that Jeanette and I were having a conversation. “It’s an excellent specimen. If we just leave it, it will weather out and turn to dust in a couple of seasons.”

“Well, Dr. Pickford,” Jeanette replied, “as you made clear, you have a BLM permit so I guess I can’t stop you.”

“True,” he said, “but it would be easier if I could cross your land with my supplies and equipment. I’ll need to call in a couple of my associates for assistance and they’ll need to bring their vehicle as well.”

I could almost see the picture bubble over Jeanette’s head that showed open gates that should be closed and closed gates that should be open. To my surprise, she said, “All right, Pick. Bring your folks by to see me, let me give them the rules, and you can have your Triceratops.”

That was when I first realized Jeanette had a favorable opinion of Pick. Since Bill had passed, I’d never observed her giving a fig about any man but maybe it was her motherly instinct. Certainly, Pick looked like the type of fellow who needed a little mothering.

Pick was pondering Ray and Amelia. “Would you two like to help me dig? I can’t pay you but you might learn something new.”

Amelia immediately said she’d like nothing better. Ray glanced at his mom who raised an eyebrow. “I have a lot of work on the ranch,” he said.

“After branding, maybe,” Jeanette said. She looked at Pick. “That will be in about a week.”

“Excellent,” he said.

And so, just like that, in a place where the cycle of ranching and farming was the only constant, something else was about to happen. I thought this was just fine. We needed something to shake up our lives every so often. But then I thought of the murdered bull and Aaron Feldmark’s murdered cow and the odd note from some wackos claiming responsibility. We didn’t need that kind of change, no.

Once back on our four-wheelers, Jeanette and I drove around for a while, just poking about until I waved her down. “Pick told me he had a shovel in his truck,” I said, “I looked and didn’t see one. Didn’t see one at that dinosaur, either.”

“So?”

“So there’s a busted shovel by our dead bull.”

She frowned. “You think Pick killed our bull?”

“I’m just doing addition, Jeanette. Two plus two equals four.”

“I think you’d best leave the math to me,” she said and powered on, leaving me to eat her dust.

God, how I loved that woman.





7




After we got back on the Square C side of the fence, I let my four-wheeler drop behind Jeanette, planning on telling her my machine was running rough if she asked. She didn’t ask, mainly because she never looked back, just kept going until she went over a rise and out of sight. I circled back to where our poor bull was still dead, searched out the busted shovel, found it beneath the junipers where Jeanette said it was, and brought it out into the sun to inspect it. It was well-used, its handle shiny and smooth and the edge of its working end worn. It could be the shovel of someone who dug up fossils for a living, but then I recalled Pick said he didn’t dig. But, then again, Pick probably meant the big excavations, not the little digging around a fossil bed like the Triceratops he’d found. And there were sanitary considerations, too. There are no flush toilets on our BLM and number two has to go somewhere, usually a little hole. As for why I didn’t see his shovel, I could have missed it among the boxes of supplies in the back of Pick’s truck, or it might have been somewhere else. I should have asked Pick about it but I wasn’t in detective mode and didn’t plan on getting into it any time soon. Just to keep the prairie clean, I strapped the remains of the shovel to my four-wheeler with a bungee cord kept in its storage compartment and motored on back to the ranch, repeating the gate experience several more times. Stop. Get off. Open gate. Get on. Drive through. Get off. Close gate. Get on. And so forth. I bet more than one cowboy quit just to get away from those damn gates.

Back at the house, there was no sign of Jeanette. I did a few more things, then retired to my trailer, there to fix myself a gin and tonic and lounge a bit on the verandah. Yeah, I actually do that. Not every day but it seemed like as good a day as any to relax.