The Dinosaur Hunter(29)

“How about Amelia?”

He shrugged. “Who cares about her?”

“You do.”

He frowned, then shook his head and said, “You’re right. What do you think I ought to do about her, Mike?”

“I’d kiss her if I was you, Ray. And tell her how you feel.”

“But I don’t know how I feel. Not exactly.”

“Well, just kiss her, then. It’ll do for now.”

My advice to the lovelorn accomplished, I drove straight to where the bull had been killed, thinking to look around for a note just in case the wind had blown it somewhere. The odds of finding it, even had it existed, were slim and I knew it. Sure enough, I poked around, found nothing, and gave it up and drove on out to the BLM.

When I arrived at their camp, I saw Pick and his ladies had constructed quite the complex. There were three of what I took to be personal tents, and two big canvas wall tents. Not only that, there was a windmill atop an aluminum tower about thirty feet tall. No one was around so I peeked into the wall tents to see the secrets of professional paleontologists. The first one contained bags of plaster, jerry cans of water, a variety of potions and chemicals, and also picks, shovels, trowels, saws, hammers, ice picks, and other standard tools. The other wall tent held cans of food, breakfast cereal, flour, corn meal, powdered milk, and rice in plastic containers. It also had a refrigerator with room for not only my veggies but my tonic water. I followed its cord outside and found that it was attached through a box to the windmill.

I unloaded the rest of my traps off the four-wheeler, then motored on to the Triceratops site. No one was there but there was evidence it had been worked over based on two piles of dirt heaped at the base of the hill. There was also what I took to be bones contained in three foot-locker-sized lumps of white plaster sitting in a small meadow of sparse grass beside the women’s truck. I went over and pushed on one and it didn’t move. Getting these things on the truck, if that was the plan, was going to take some heavy lifting.

Carefully so as to not disturb anything, I climbed up beside the dig. Littered around were ice picks, paint brushes, trowels, knee pads, and small plastic bottles containing an amber liquid. Looking closer at the dig, I could see the outline of what appeared to be a bone, brown as tobacco. Whatever the bone was, it was big. I looked back at the trucks and the three big plaster casts and wondered how it was possible to get a bone like that out without busting it up.

“Halloooo!” came a yell and I spied Pick climbing out of a drainage. His shirt was soaked with sweat and his pants were filthy. “Come to help at last!” he said as he reached the trucks.

“Just tell me what to do,” I replied.

He got a bottle of water from the back of his truck and drained it. “Laura will do that,” he said. “She’s in charge of the dig.”

“Where is she?”

“I gave her and Tanya a little time off,” he said, “so they went prospecting. That’s what paleontologists most love to do, look for something new.”

“Have you found anything new?”

“Well, when they get back, we’ll ask them,” he said, leaving unanswered whether he’d found anything. I didn’t push him about it.

Pick sat in the shade of the truck and I joined him. “This is the life,” he said. “This is what I live for, the thrill of digging into the past, the anticipation of what might be found, and every day something new and wonderful.”

“I went to Bozeman one time,” I said, “and stopped in at the Museum of the Rockies. They have a couple of Triceratops skeletons there as I recall. What good does it do to dig up another one?”

Pick looked shocked at my question. “What good does it do to read another book if you’ve already read a couple?” he demanded. “We’re dealing with more than sixty-five million years, Mike. Those Trikes in Bozeman may have been separated by a thousand generations and evolutionary pressures may have changed their design a great deal. We learn something new with not only every skeleton but every bone if only we care to look. I’m one of the few paleontologists who really, truly looks at every detail of every bone. A lot of them just go for the big picture but not me. I hold the bone and study it until I know the animal. It talks to me. Sometimes, it even comes to me in my sleep, tells me of its life and its death.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, which to tell the truth sounded genuinely squirrelly, so we sat quietly for a while until he said, “This big old Trike. I think it was a bull. That means it was a defender of the herd and fought all its life against predators. There are growths on his bones that indicate battle scars.”