The Dinosaur Hunter(30)

Pick didn’t say much more, mainly because he soon fell asleep. I sat with him, relaxing, reflecting on the ancient animal that lay quietly above us, listening to the gentle wind, watching a hawk scouting for rabbits, and a rabbit with only its head out of its hole, watching for hawks. There was the smell of fresh sage in the air. I discovered I was enjoying myself immensely, sitting beside the dozing paleontologist while cottony clouds floated across the vast sky.

This was Montana, I thought. The real Montana.

Before long, the women arrived. They were wearing backpacks which looked to be heavy and I wondered if they were filled with bones. I stood up as they rounded the back of the truck. They were wearing the same kind of multi-pocketed shirts Pick favored, plus cargo shorts, snake gaiters, and hiking boots. I noticed Laura had nice legs but Tanya’s were spectacular. In fact, she oozed sexuality like so many young Russian women.

“Wondered if you were coming out,” Laura said, stripping off her backpack and putting it in the back of the truck. Tanya provided me with a shy smile as she unloaded her pack on the truck beside Laura’s. Both women were careful not to disturb Pick who was still snoozing. “He is like a little boy,” Tanya said.

“Mike, do you want to know what we do on a dig?” Laura asked and I told her I would be happy to be educated. She drained a canteen, removed a salt shaker from her backpack, sprinkled some in her hand, licked it off, and gestured for me to follow her up to the site. We settled around it on our haunches and she got busy telling me in some detail how a dig was photographed, mapped, and everything collected, even the smallest scraps. “You’d be surprised how some of those wizards in the lab—we call them preparators—can fit scraps of bone together like a jigsaw puzzle.”

Laura glanced down at Pick, still sleeping, and Tanya who was removing some plastic zipper bags from their packs and placing them in a large plastic storage box. It occurred to me that maybe Laura was in the business of distracting me. If she was, I couldn’t imagine why. I didn’t much care what they found.

Laura started up again, explaining how her specialty was crafting an excavation plan and how the Hell Creek Formation was pretty easy to work in comparison to some where jackhammers were required.

“How about a backhoe?” I asked. “Or dynamite?”

She considered my question. “A backhoe would definitely help if the bones were deep,” she said. “I’ve never used dynamite but some of the old-time dinosaur diggers did. Barnum Brown, maybe the most famous of them all, was quite happy to use it. He found the first T. rex, by the way, about thirty miles from here in 1906. Just think of it. No one knew there was such an animal. To see that skull come out of the rock and mud must have been astonishing. I sometimes wish I’d lived in those times. There were virtually no laws or regulations about digging and the ranchers didn’t care. In fact, they helped Brown a lot by taking him to sites they knew about. He dug up the bones, carted them away to New York, and nobody said a word. Maybe because there wasn’t a lot of money in it back then. In fact, hardly anyone would give a cent for dinosaur bones. Everything was done in the name of science.”

“Have you ever sold bones?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “I wouldn’t do that, even if I was starving.”

“How about Pick?”

“Only to support his research. I’ve forgiven him for it. Once you get to know Pick, you realize he’s a genius even though he’s got his peculiarities. There’s nobody like him when it comes to finding dinosaurs, that’s for sure.”

Laura looked down at Pick who had come awake, yawning and stretching. Tanya was sitting beside him, quietly talking, then she offered him water. He accepted her canteen, licked salt from her hand, then pulled his hat over his eyes, and settled back against the tire. “Is Tanya his girlfriend?” I asked.

“No, and neither am I,” she said. “Pick is never in the moment, if you know what I mean. He’s always a million miles away, or I should say sixty-five-plus million years away. He mostly lives in deep time.”

I’d heard that phrase a couple of times now. “Explain ‘deep time,’” I said.

“Well, think of it this way,” she said. “The more we understand time, the more we realize how connected it is. It’s like a deep ocean. The water at the bottom is the same as at the top except they’re in different places. But there’s nothing to keep the water from changing places and sometimes it does, usually because of temperature or salinity changes or the pressure of the overlying water. Anyway, the important thing is that it goes from water we can see and touch to water beyond our reach. That’s like present time turning into ancient time and vice versa. It’s all connected. Pick sort of lives closer to the bottom of the ocean of time than we mere humans.”