The Dinosaur Hunter(90)

Anyway, I opened my backpack and gave Tanya my presents, the ribbon I’d bought her in Jericho and Ray’s short-barreled .22-caliber pistol. She loved the ribbon but wasn’t sure about the gun. “This little pistol probably won’t kill anybody,” I told her, “but it might stop them long enough for you to get away.”

“Mike, you’re scaring me.”

“Good. Sometimes, being scared is what keeps us alive.”

She took the pistol and I gave her a quick basic course which was pretty simple like the gun itself. It had a safety and a trigger. It was already loaded. Keep the safety on until time to use it. Then aim and pull the trigger. Nothing to it. Tanya put it in one of the voluminous front pockets of her cargo pants and I felt compelled to remind her once again about the safety.

We went back to work pedestaling, jacketing, and hauling. It took us two long days but the rest of the bones of the two T. rexes were removed from the dirt and carried or slid down Blackie Butte. To get the giant leg bones and skulls down the hill, Ray and I rigged up a pulley system using the winch on the tractor to inch them down. We had a few pinched fingers and toes but, otherwise, the work was done without mishap. Of course, there were strained muscles, damaged backs, and a variety of abrasions and contusions but, as Laura said, that’s why God made ibuprofen. When we laid them all out, the big white jackets reminded me of tombstones in a cemetery.

When the top T’s skull, which required a block of plaster the size of a refrigerator, was lowered, we stood around it feeling a sense of awe at what we had accomplished. Inside its jacket was not just the bones of the skull but quite a bit of the matrix in which it was found. The thing had to weigh at least a ton. Pick said preparators in the laboratory that would work on the skull preferred to include the surrounding rock and dirt because they could use their specialized tools to remove it without harming the bone. This made sense but it also raised the question (to me at least) as to where the two T. rexes and the crushed baby T were going after we finished our field work.

I found Jeanette sitting in the dirt of Blackie Butte, her back braced against a boulder of sandstone, her eyes closed, and her brow knitted in pain. This was the prevalent rest posture of dinosaur diggers. I picked a nearby boulder to sit on and waited patiently until she at last opened one eye and took note of my presence. “So,” she said, “you deign to speak to a fallen woman?”

“I was just wondering where these bones are going?”

“Pick said we ought to move them to our barn after we finish,” she said.

“I guess we can make room.”

“We? Are you still working for the Square C?”

It was the perfect opportunity to make my quitting official but, to my disappointment, I found I couldn’t do it. “I don’t know. Am I?”

“What would I do without you, Mike?”

“For one thing, you’d have to hire a cowboy and pay him some decent wages.”

She thought that over, then said, “How about a ten percent raise if you stay?”

I felt the urge to tell her where she could put her 10 percent raise but instead, I said, “Sounds good. So, the bones are in the barn. What then?”

“Well, Pick says we can negotiate with a university or museum or maybe even the Smithsonian to take the bones and prepare and study them. He’d work with them, of course. After that, the bones would be ours to sell. It would take a few years but he thinks we’re looking at several million dollars.”

I gave Jeanette a hard look. “Laura says if any of the bones end up in private hands, their value to science will be lost forever.”

“Well, that’s why they’ll go to the Smithsonian or somewhere like that first.” She looked at me. “Mike, these are my bones. Just drop it.”

I had done my best for science. I don’t know why I was arguing about it, anyway. Hell, for that matter, I didn’t know why I had agreed to keep working for the Square C. I was a pretty confused puppy at that point. And tired. That was it. I took a breath, then said, “OK, but how about this? To keep your bones safe, maybe we ought to go ahead and take them to the barn. I could bring in the big truck and load them up with the tractor and then Ray and I could go back and forth until we got them moved.”

“I suggested that very thing to Pick,” she said, “but he said he doesn’t want to take the time now. He says it’s best to forge ahead.”

I didn’t think that was the best strategy and said so but Jeanette was also tired and waved my objections away. “I’ll sit Pick down and talk to him about this later,” she said. She studied me for a moment and then said, “Mike, I want you to know what you said in the surgery about how you feel about me, well, that meant a lot.”