The Dinosaur Hunter(79)

I pulled on my clothes and crawled outside into our campsite or, as it might more accurately be called at that point, a swamp. I stood up, took a step, and fell down, the dirt beneath the grass already well on its way toward gumbo. I sat there, quietly cursing, and considered the other tents. I neither heard nor saw movement within any of them. I guess they were probably enjoying the gentle sound of the rain on their tents, just as I had until I realized Montana’s little game. It was called a gentle rain, a very long, drowning gentle rain. I had seen them go on for days.

I woke up Laura and Tanya. “I’m going up to check on Pick,” I told them after explaining about the rain. Then I crawled up the hill to the dig site and found Pick beneath a tarp that Laura had rigged for him. He was in his sleeping bag between two big slabs of sandstone. He was gently breathing, apparently unaware of the disaster unfolding below. I shook the paleontologist. “Pick, wake up. We have a problem.”

He blinked awake. “What is it?”

“It’s raining.”

“So?”

“I’ve seen this before. It’s going to rain all night and probably all day, too.”

Pick grasped what was about to happen. “Mike, we have to protect the dig. Let’s shovel dirt over it, then put tarps on.”

I will say one thing for Pick. He could work when he had to. Beneath the steady rain, we shoveled dirt fast and furious. Then Laura and Tanya came crawling through the gumbo and rock to help us. They had brought tarps and after we’d put as much dirt over the bones as we could, spread them over the site, using sandstone blocks to weigh them down. After that, there was nothing to do but slip and slide down Blackie Butte to the camp. We looked like mud people when we got there.

It rained all night. Then it rained all day and the gumbo swamp got deeper, which meant a lot of falling down. By the next nightfall, we were all coated with the nasty stuff and thoroughly miserable and stayed that way until Tanya said, what the hell, and broke out the vodka. By then, even Ray and Amelia needed a little v&t and Jeanette gave them permission. In the mess tent, we huddled together for warmth and began to sing old campfire songs and Tanya, in a nice voice, sang some Russian folk songs. Her voice wasn’t that great but she sure did look good doing it. I thought to myself that at least nobody was going to be able to get to us in this gumbo. Not until the place dried out, anyway. This was a comfort.

When the sun finally burned through the clouds, and the gumbo firmed up enough for us to walk on it, we had a look around. We were like dazed survivors of a slow-motion flood. Everything that was in our personal tents was soaked so Ray and I rigged up some clotheslines. Pretty soon, the Blackie Butte camp looked like the base camp of Mount Everest with all those colorful flags fluttering. Our flags, however, were not tributes to the gods, just our laundry. But I thought all those flapping clothes kind of made the place look cheerful.

It took another day before we could dig again because the ancient mud just refused to dry. We used the time to inspect and repair the jackets of the plastered bones, check their field numbers against what Laura had logged, and generally spiff up the camp. By the way, every bone, even the smallest one, was labeled with its own field number and location on the quarry. They were also photographed in situ and a notation made in Laura’s field notebook. We had also done that with Big Ben, our Trike.

Hauling plaster and water up that hill was killing work but we did it, one bag and one bucket at a time. By the time we had plastered and moved the collective tails, tibias, and femurs of both dinosaurs, and a partial pelvis and the dorsal vertebrae and ribs of the T. rex on top, we were a bunch of exhausted puppies. I went to Pick sitting above the work, musing over what lay below him, and occasionally reaching down to sift the soil through his hands. “Pick, we need a day in town to clean up and get a good night’s sleep.”

Pick gave my suggestion approximately one millisecond of thought. “There’s no time for that. We can’t leave this dig for even a minute.”

“We’re worn out,” I insisted.

“No. I will not leave this dig.”

I went to Jeanette and gave her my idea. She was on her hands and knees at the time, helping Tanya plaster a long thin bone Laura said was an ischium. “Here at this juncture,” Tanya said when I knelt beside them, “is where the femur—the upper leg bone—fit. There was a big triangular sheet of muscle that was attached to the ischium, the pelvis, and the femur, which made the upper leg very powerful.”

“Great,” I said. “You ladies ready for a day in town?”

Both women, dirty, sweaty, eyes heavy-lidded with fatigue, sat back. “I would give anything for a shower,” Jeanette said.