“Can we?” Amelia asked, eagerly.
“Yes,” I answered before Laura could say a word, “but first I’ll have to explain what we’re doing here and why.”
Laura laughed and said, “Mike is already an expert dinosaur digger. Come on up. Let him teach you what you need to know.”
They parked their vehicles and came up and I essentially repeated the lecture Laura had given to me. Laura added some instruction on the careful use of the tools, assigned them a large bone to work on together, and then let them settle down to it. After a while, Laura said, “If you get hungry, food’s in the mess tent. Fix what you like.”
Over the next week, we fell into a rhythm of up early, breakfast; Laura, me, Ray, and Amelia at work on the Trike; Pick and Tanya going off somewhere and returning in the evening with full packs. They seemed as tired as we were at the end of the day, so cocktails for those who wanted it, dinner, and to bed after a little conversation around the fire pit which we’d dug to burn cedar in to chase away the mosquitoes.
Of all of us, Amelia seemed to be having the most fun. She loved it all, the picking, scraping, and brushing. She overflowed with questions on our Triceratops and Laura patiently answered them all.
One night around the fire pit, Amelia said, “I’ve decided to be a paleontologist.”
Pick said, “I think you’d be a good one. But I have to tell you there’s not much money in it.”
“I don’t care,” Amelia replied. “I like it. Anyway, it’ll get me out of this place.”
“What’s wrong with this place?” Ray demanded, then said, “Never mind. I’ve heard it all before.”
“What’s wrong with this place,” Amelia said precisely, “is that it’s like living inside a cage. We’re stuck, Ray. Can’t you see that?”
“All I see is this ranch, which I think is a fine place to live. I don’t think I’m in a cage at all.”
“Well, good luck,” she answered. “I’m out of here after graduation.”
“Sure. Good luck to you, too,” Ray grumped.
Laura and Tanya, recognizing a lover’s spat when they heard one, stayed out of it. Pick wasn’t so smart. “I can give you recommendations,” he said to Amelia. “There are several excellent institutions you could attend, including Montana State.”
“Thank you,” she said, smiling at him. I looked over and Ray was gritting his teeth. I felt sorry for him but there was nothing I could do. Ray sat there for a few more minutes, just staring at the fire, then got up and went to his tent. Amelia pretended not to notice. Before long, we all made our way to our sleeping bags. I slept like a rock except I was awakened once by a distant grumble of an engine. It sounded too guttural for a four-wheeler but sound can play tricks in the badlands. I would have thought about it more except I couldn’t keep my eyes open. My last thought before I went back to sleep wasn’t the odd engine noises but Jeanette. What was she doing back on the ranch? Did she miss me? I knew in my heart she didn’t, except for the work that wasn’t getting done, but I wondered just the same.
The second week didn’t change much except I ran out of gin. That meant beer in the evening. Nice, but not the same. Ray, Amelia, and I dug out the Trike with either Laura or Tanya supervising. We had exposed a femur and a tibia and a number of vertebrae. Laura said she was sure we were going to find a sacrum. Part of the skull had also been exposed, including the frill but Laura had decided to go after it last. “The rest of this animal we can move bit by bit,” she said. “But the skull is going to be huge. I have no idea how we’re going to move it.”
Mostly, I loved the evenings. Tanya, Laura, Ray, Amelia, and I shared cooking duties, our meals simple but nutritious. Afterward, we retired to the fire pit, drinking beer (Ray and Amelia got soft drinks) and talking. Both Laura and Tanya were full of stories—mostly with Pick as the hero—of their expeditions in Mongolia, China, Argentina, and Tunisia. In almost every story, they arrived at their foreign destination, were escorted to the happy dinosaur hunting grounds, realized they had been taken to a place where it was all hunted out, and Pick went on to make a dazzling find. At the end of one such story, told by Tanya and featuring an adventure in China where they had given their escorts the slip and discovered a new feathered dinosaur only to have it taken away before they could present it to the world, I asked, “Tanya, what’s your story?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean, how did you become a paleontologist?”