“What’s that little curved piece?” I asked, pointing at something I’d spotted in the box. “Like a hawk’s claw.”
“A claw, indeed,” he said, “but not from a hawk. From a T. rex.”
“How come it’s so small?”
“It belonged to a baby. So does this phalange.” He touched a brown object that looked more or less like a thin twig about an inch long. “By phalange, I mean a toe or finger bone. Although it doesn’t fit this particular claw, it could still be from the same animal. These bones are very interesting. A baby T. rex this young has never been found before. We don’t know much about them. If the entire skeleton was nearby…”
“What would it be worth?” Jeanette interrupted.
Pick had his mouth open to complete his sentence but he closed it, mulled over Jeanette’s question, then said, “I don’t know. A lot. But to science, well, you can’t put a price on it.”
Jeanette leaned back against the counter and crossed her arms. “Dr. Pickford, on a ranch like this, every dollar counts. How do I find somebody who’ll buy these fossils?”
Pick hesitated, then asked, “Do you lease BLM land?”
Whether he knew it or not, he had just lurched onto a touchy topic in the Montana ranchlands. BLM stood for Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency that owns a great deal of the western states. A rather large portion of that property is leased out to ranches and there is always some consternation about those leases for one reason or another.
“Everybody up and down Ranchers Road has BLM leases,” Jeanette replied.
“Did your husband spend much time on your lease?”
“Of course he did. Our cattle graze there. That’s why we have it.”
“If any of these bones were found on the BLM, then technically they aren’t yours. They belong to the government.”
Jeanette’s face clouded over. “Listen,” she said, “the Coulters have been taking care of that damn land for a century. The government can claim it all it wants but our blood and sweat says otherwise.”
Pick’s reply was gentle. “Mrs. Coulter, I fully understand. I didn’t come here to cause any trouble. I have a federal collecting permit, approved by the BLM, but I wouldn’t go out there without your permission.”
Before Jeanette could reply, he pulled a map from one of his many shirt pockets. I recognized it as a BLM-produced map, which included not only federal land but all the ranches up and down Ranchers Road. The map was a grid of squares, each one representing a square mile. BLM land was identified by a bright yellow color, private property was in white, state-owned land in blue, and the adjacent Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in a sturdy green.
Pick used the duckbill’s ossified tendon to trace a path along a dotted line on the map, which went past a prominent land feature called Blackie Butte to just inside Jeanette’s BLM lease. “This is the area I’d like to investigate. Its terrain features indicate to me that it’s an outcrop of the Hell Creek Formation. A remnant of the Cretaceous.”
“And if you find anything?” Jeanette asked.
“I would take it back to the university for further study.”
“Which university?”
“I work through the University of California in Berkeley.”
“Bunch of far-lefties out there,” Jeanette said.
Pick shrugged. “I’m not political in any way. My mind is fixed on what happened sixty-five to three hundred million years ago. What I like to call deep time.”
Jeanette took that snippet of news under advisement, looked up at the ceiling, and then back at our visitor. “If you find something, even if it’s on the BLM, I want to know about it.”
“Agreed.”
Jeanette took another moment, then said, “Mike, I’m going to let this fellow go out there. You get him squared away.” In full boss lady mode, she turned back to Pick. “You understand we can’t be paying much attention to you. You’ll be on your own. How long do you think you need?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “If I don’t find anything, I’ll probably be gone in a week.”
“You’re not going to find anything. I’ve been all over the Square C and our lease, too. Never saw the first thing that looked like a dinosaur. Likely, Bill picked up everything that was out there.”
“You’re probably right, Mrs. Coulter.” He stood up, his chair scraping on the scarred linoleum floor. “But I appreciate you letting me look, anyway.”
“We’ll see how it works out,” Jeanette curtly replied. She picked up the bones, put them in the cardboard box, and headed upstairs with them while I ushered the young paleontologist out to his truck, opened the gate to the Mulhaden pasture, and pointed out the tire ruts cutting through the grass, which he needed to follow. “Here’s a strict rule of the ranchlands,” I told him. “You find a gate open, leave it open. If it’s closed, leave it closed.”