“If you’re going to move off the BLM onto the Square C, I think you’d better have a talk with Jeanette,” I said.
“I’ll go over there tomorrow,” Pick promised.
And that was that. The Trike dig was over and we were on our way to Blackie Butte for whatever was there. I couldn’t wait to find out what it was.
14
Laura and I closed down the Trike site and spent the day plastering the bones already pedestaled and wrapping paper towels and aluminum foil around a variety of exposed vertebrae, horn chunks, toes, and other bones too fragmented to immediately identify. Then, we picked and shoveled until everything that remained was covered with at least six inches of dirt. Laura said she hoped Ted Brescoe was going to be satisfied with our clean-up of the site. I told her to not worry about it. In fact, I was thinking maybe I might yet go and kick his butt for no other reason than it would make my day. Then I thought of Edith and let it go.
The base of the hill was littered with plaster casts filled with Trike bones. “What’ll we do with them?” I asked.
Laura shook her head. “I’d like to move them to our old camp site. That way a truck could get to them when we’re ready to take them out. Any ideas on how to do that?”
“Well, we could leave them here and I could use the tractor to make us a road but I don’t think Ted Brescoe would like that very much. Maybe we can use the four-wheelers.”
Laura thought about that and said, “I’m a pretty fair field engineer. Let’s go see what we can figure out.”
We filled our packs with some of the smaller foil-covered bones and hiked back to camp, where, after giving it some thought, Laura came up with the idea of using a wheelbarrow attached to a four-wheeler. For that, I said we’d need to do some welding and Laura said, “We don’t have time for that. We need to move those Trike casts today. I think Blackie Butte’s going to eat up all the time we have left this summer.”
I scratched my head after taking my cowboy hat off, then said, “OK, let’s do this.”
My suggestion was crude but, oddly enough, it worked. We called Pick on the radio, asked for Ray and Amelia, and met them at the Trike site. We grunted each big bone onto the back of a four-wheeler (thank God for young backs), strapped it on with ropes and bungee cords, then, with Amelia or Laura at the wheel and me and Ray walking on each side to keep the four-wheeler balanced, trundled them all, one by one, slowly and carefully back to camp. It required a lot of sweat but we got her done. We had to take a day doing it and Pick managed to wander back to camp that night, frustrated that nothing much had been done on the move to Blackie Butte. “Did you go see Jeanette?” I asked.
He confessed he hadn’t so I climbed a hill and used the handheld radio in an attempt to contact her. Happily, she answered. It was good to hear her voice. I told her what was up, and she said, “I’ll be out there first thing in the morning.”
“Meet us at Blackie,” I said, and resisted telling her I’d missed her. “How’s the ranch?” I asked, instead.
“Your work’s building up but I guess it’ll be waiting for you when you get back.”
“You sent me out here,” I said, defensively.
“And you were more than willing to go!” she shot back.
“Listen…”
I heard a double-click of the transmitter, meaning she had nothing more to say. Frustrated, I stared at the radio. Couldn’t she at least have said something like, “The ranch just isn’t the same without you, Mike,” or something other than my work was waiting for me in a tone that sounded like I was just out here having a good time? Well, that was Jeanette.
That night, Pick came off as a nervous wreck. While the rest of us, not counting Ray and Amelia who went for a walk to continue their various arguments, sat around the fire pit and drank Tanya’s vodka mixed with Pick’s tonic, Pick was pacing back and forth. He just couldn’t sit still. Then he started complaining about losing stuff. It started with his logbook and he tore up the camp looking for it. When Laura finally got up, went to his tent, looked under his inflatable mattress, found it, and handed it over, he said he’d also lost his GPS. Laura found it rather quickly, mainly because it was hanging around his neck. It continued on, the two women finding everything that Pick was certain he’d lost forever, including his socks, and then segued into complaints about how much food had been eaten, how much water had been drunk, how much glue, plaster, and aluminum foil had been used on the Trike, and so forth. Finally, back in their chairs with highball glasses in hand, Laura and Tanya exchanged glances when Pick griped some more, then together in perfect unison, the two women chorused, “Pick, shut the fuck up!”