The Dinosaur Hunter(52)

Ray swung by. “I saw you got a kiss,” he said, a bit sour.

“How about you?”

“Amelia said she’d been thinking and had decided she was too young to get engaged. What does that mean? I never asked her to get married! I just wanted to, you know, make out and stuff.”

“How does she feel about that? Making out and stuff, that is.”

“Who knows?” he replied. “Best I ever got was a little kiss.”

“Well, Ray, I guess a little kiss is sometimes all you need.”

“Boy, it’s been a long time since you were a teenager,” Ray pointed out and went on his way.

Pick came over. “Mike, how long do you think it will take to hook up those jackhammers?”

I looked over to where Laura, Tanya, and the two former Green Planet brothers were already hooking the jackhammers up to the compressors. “About as long as it takes to carry them up to the top of the hill,” I said. “I take it you’ve agreed to take on Brian and Philip.”

“Sure,” he said. “Willing backs who work for nothing but food? Every paleontologist’s dream.”

The chatter of a compressor began and Laura attacked a boulder at the bottom of the butte with the thirty-pound jackhammer. She knew what she was doing and, within a minute, the sandstone rock gave it up and fell apart. Laura handed the jackhammer over to Tanya and raised her hands in victory. Pick looked at the spectacle and smiled. Tanya assaulted another boulder.

After everyone took a turn on the jackhammer to get the feel of it—everyone but Pick who suddenly had a need to work on his journal—Laura called for a break and detailed her plan to move the equipment where it needed to go and how we were going to take down the butte. When she finished, I had to point something out. “It’s July one,” I said. “The Independence Day celebration in Jericho is a big deal. Ray and I are on tap to do some work on it and Jeanette’s one of the prime organizers. I suggest we go in on the evening of the third and enjoy the day. Jeanette always has a few rooms reserved in Tellman’s Motel for the occasion.”

Laura gave that some thought. “A break would be good,” she said. “And I look forward to a shower.”

“I do as well,” Tanya said, giving me a suggestive glance. My heart sped up.

“OK. We’ll go in on the evening of the third to enjoy the fourth,” Laura said. “But the next couple of days, I want to see some work done.”

This was received with good cheer. We were all serious dinosaur diggers, after all. While Ray and I took Bob and the tractor back to the ranch and returned on our four-wheelers, Laura directed the move of equipment. Then, she realized she’d forgotten something. The BLM fence, which ran along the bottom of Blackie’s north side rose like a thin net to catch all the debris we were about to send down on top of it. “We should move that fence, Mike,” she told me.

I considered it, then agreed but explained it would mean another delay because to move it meant lengthening it and we didn’t have either extra wire or posts.

“Then just take it down,” Laura said. “We can put it back later.”

Since none of our cows were out this way, I agreed and went after Ray and Amelia who knew what to do. Within an hour, we had the fence down and it wasn’t more than a minute later that Laura had the rocks tumbling off the butte.

The rest of the day was spent with the hot and dusty task of taking down what was essentially a mountain. Even Pick climbed up and helped pry loose a couple of huge slabs of sandstone, which, when they broke loose, slid and rolled with ponderous majesty down the back side, crashing at the bottom with a jolt that I could feel even standing on top. That night, the v&t was needed just to dull the ache in my bones and I didn’t last long around the new fire pit. I crept to my tent and was out cold almost instantly.

Sometime in the night, I woke, hearing the same low engine noises I’d heard at the Trike site. It didn’t sound nearby so I let it go. The next morning, Tanya came to me while I was eating my breakfast of cold milk and cereal. “Mike, I think I heard those sounds you keep talking about. What could be making them?”

“I have no idea,” I confessed.

“I think it came from the direction of the lake.”

“Yep. That’s what it sounded like to me, too.”

“Will we be near the lake on the fourth of July?”

“There’s a dance at the marina that night. Fireworks, too.”

She smiled. “I would enjoy a dance.”

My heart did its little flutter. “Then I’ll see you there.”

The day boiled on and Blackie got a little shorter. Jeanette showed up driving Bob, which was filled with groceries. She watched the activity for a while, then called me down to talk. “I hate what you’re doing to my butte,” she said.