The Dinosaur Hunter by Homer Hickam
She was squeezing my hands so hard they hurt but I didn’t say anything. I needed her to keep talking and she did. “When he walked away, I watched him and before he got far, a man came from behind the marina building. They stopped and talked and then they walked into the trees. It was the government man. Ted Brescoe.”
This, as they say, was a jaw-dropping moment. “Say that again,” I said.
“Ted Brescoe and Toby went into the trees together.”
Well, that at least cleared up why Ted and Edith’s marriage wasn’t exactly made in heaven. Tanya fell silent, so I prompted her by saying, “But the next morning, you were in Ted’s room.”
“Oh, Mike. It wasn’t his room. It was mine! I had reserved it, hoping you might join me that night.” She took her hands away. “But I saw at the dance that you only had eyes for Jeanette. I am not blind so I went to my room alone.”
I saw no need to deny my love for my lady boss. I put my brain in fast rewind. What had Earl, the marina owner, said when I asked him about Ted? He’d said, “Ted’s in room thirteen.” He didn’t say it was his room, only that he was in it. A good cop would have asked a follow-up question or two. Of course, I’m not a good cop, not anymore, anyway. “But the next morning Ted was in there with you,” I said.
“When I came outside in the morning—the mist coming off the lake was so beautiful—I found Ted curled up on the deck. He said he’d slept there all night. He was filthy and his clothes were torn. I knew nothing about Toby’s death so I let him come in to wash himself and go to the bathroom. I swear, Mike. That’s all that happened.”
“So…” I let the word hang for a long second but I didn’t have a finish for it. So what? Had Ted murdered Toby? But, if so, why the knock on the head and throat cut the same way the bull and the cows had been killed? Would Ted do that and did that mean he’d also killed our bull and the cows? He was an unpleasant fellow, make no mistake, and him murdering the Russian wasn’t entirely impossible, but killing cows? A Brescoe from Fillmore County? And what about the fact that Ted’s truck was in the marina parking lot all night. Why hadn’t he just driven home? “Curiouser and curiouser,” I said. Then, I actually asked a cop-like question. “That morning, when you let him into your room, did you see any blood on Ted?”
“No. Did you?” I confessed I hadn’t until I’d beat him up, and she said, “Later, I asked myself did Ted kill Toby? My answer is I don’t know.”
I pointed out the obvious. “Ted was the last man seen with Toby before he turned up dead.”
“As far as we know,” she said.
“As far as we know,” I agreed.
Well, this was all a fine howdy do. Even with these revelations, I didn’t know much more than before. It didn’t even prove that Ted and Toby had decided to play kissy-face or kissy-whatever in the woods, only that they’d gone into them. For all I knew, they went in there to discuss the latest stock averages and whether the Yankees were going to win the pennant. Then again, Toby had next been found floating face down in the lake. Then again, Ted curled up on the deck of the marina motel the next morning didn’t indicate a strong need to run from the scene of his crime. Then again, why didn’t Ted drive home that night, in any case? Then again, Ted was an idiot. Then again, I still didn’t have a clue who had done what to whom. Then again, why did I care?
The answer to that last one was I still had a suspicion that a load of coprolite (so to speak) was about to be dumped on all our heads because of Toby’s murder or maybe for some other reason I had not yet discerned. “What are we to do?” Tanya asked.
“Wait for further developments,” I said. This turned out to be a stupid answer. What we should have done was jumped in our trucks and four-wheelers and run like hell. But who knew? I should have but I didn’t. Maybe I thought we were so well armed we could handle anybody who wanted to do us harm. Or maybe I was just too stupid and tired to think straight. Probably a little bit of both. This, folks, is how things like the Alamo or the Titanic happen. So far, so good, and then, well, you know. Here come the angry Mexicans or the iceberg.
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
“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.”
“I’m glad it did, Jeanette,” I said.
Since I didn’t want to talk about that, I stood up and took a step down the hill, stopping when I heard her giggle. It was a giggle that turned into a laugh. In fact, she started laughing so hard there were tears curling through the encrusted dirt on her face.
She looked at me looking back at her in shock. “Oh, Mike, I’m sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her filthy hand. “But kissing me with that cow shit on my face…every time I think about it, I can’t help but laugh.”
“Well,” I said, “I guess I can’t be too mad. I’m always saying you don’t laugh enough.”
She chuckled a few more times, then her smile faded. “I never loved Bill Coulter,” she said, “but I respected him. I decided early on to become the woman he deserved.” Her eyes turned soft. “He never loved me, either, but he knew he’d found a woman who could help him build the Square C into a profitable, modern enterprise. When we had Ray, we knew we had a partnership that only death would end. Still, I confess sometimes I missed being loved. Until you said it, Mike, no man ever told me he loved me. I’m sorry it happened on the day it did. You should have told me earlier.”
“What was the point?” I asked, my voice small even in my ears.
She pondered my question. “Maybe it’s this heat or maybe because I’m so tired or maybe it’s because I’ve been listening to the crazy things Pick says but here’s what just popped into my mind. Could it be that everything that’s happened, from the moment Pick arrived, was so you’d have to tell me you loved me? Does that make sense to you?”
“No,” I said. Then, after a moment of reflection, I said, “That would be something, wouldn’t it?”
“A domino falls so that all the other dominoes fall, too. But there are dominoes we can’t even see. All leading to love.”
“I wouldn’t try to float that one at the next Cattleman’s Association meeting, Jeanette.”
She nodded. “Anyway, Mike, thank you.”
A man expressing love to a woman who replies with an expression of gratitude is not going to be happy. That was me at that moment. Although I knew she was through with me, I had another thing to say. “What would you think if I had someone move into my trailer?”
The surprise on her face was palpable. “Tanya?” she asked.
“Yes. If she wants to. I don’t know that she does.”
“I don’t think that would be a good example for Ray.”
“You’re right,” I admitted. “Maybe I can get a place in town.”
“That would be a long drive and I wouldn’t have you to help me at night.” She gave it some more thought, then said, “Have you considered marrying the girl?”
“Not really.”
“I think…” She gave herself a moment, then said, “I think you need to discover how you feel about Tanya before you take the next step, Mike. When you know that, we can talk.”
“Fine,” I said and walked down the hill.
29
The next morning, the mayor of Jericho arrived, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, jeans, shirt, and field boots. Edith walked among the tombstone-jacketed bones, having herself a good look, then climbed the hill. There she found us tunneling into the embankment. No one greeted her. We were too busy. She watched silently while Ray and I shoveled and picked. Behind us, Tanya crept forward on her hands and knees, sifting through the disturbed matrix to find any little bones that might be hiding there. Occasionally, I would catch Tanya’s eye and she would smile and I would smile and then we’d go right back to work. Above us, Laura, Jeanette, Brian, and Philip were removing another layer of sandstone. Jeanette finally took note of Edith and walked over to her while the rest us of took a break. At Jeanette’s greeting, Edith said, “Ted’s sick so he asked me to come out and represent the BLM. My purpose is to observe, not to interfere.”
Jeanette said, “This is Square C land, not BLM.”
“Yes, of course,” Edith answered. “But Ted says until the survey is done and the map is updated, the BLM boundary is unclear. I have to support my husband on this, Jeanette.”
Jeanette, ever agreeable, replied, “Get off my property, Edith.”
Edith didn’t budge. “The old BLM line is right over there. If I went there, I could still see what you’re doing.”
Jeanette absorbed that, then waved her hand. “Be my guest.”
“Please be reasonable,” Edith said. “Ted’s very sick but he has a job to do. I promised him I would do it.” Her eyes sought me out. “If you’ll let me stay, I’ll help you dig. Would that be all right, Mike?”
The way Edith looked at me, so beseechingly, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. All right, I’m an old softy, especially when it comes to a woman who had clawed her way up from being the poor daughter of a detested chicken-and-pig farmer to mayor of the county seat. Inside, I sensed she was still that frightened little girl who’d run away from home. Also, of course, she had always been decent to me. “I guess that would be all right, Edith,” I allowed. “But it’s up to Jeanette, not me.”
“Please, Jeanette,” Edith implored. “Let me help you dig. I won’t be any trouble.”
Before Jeanette could answer, Pick said, “We can always use another hand. I think we may have more rock to move than I thought.”
Jeanette glared at Pick, then nodded down the hill, a gesture which meant she and Pick should meet and discuss the situation and then she would tell him what he was going to do. Pick gave up his catbird’s seat and joined her below. They disappeared inside the cook tent. To this day, I’m not certain what Pick told her but, to my surprise, when Jeanette came back, she said, “All right, Edith, but if you’re here, you’re here. You have to stay until we’re finished with our work. Did you bring what you need?”
“I have everything in Ted’s truck including a tent.”
Jeanette said, “OK.” And Edith responded with a grateful smile.
For the rest of the day, we dug. Edith pitched her tent, and then climbed up to us to join Amelia, Laura, Brian, and Philip on the sandstone cap. She worked so hard during the next hours, I heard Laura caution her to slow down or she would go into heat exhaustion. That was one of the things I really admired about Edith. It didn’t matter the job she took on, she worked diligently to see it through.
For all our work, nothing was found and Pick finally called it a day. We dragged ourselves down the hill and collapsed in various poses of exhaustion all over the camp. I stretched out beside my tent until the ants started to bite, then sprawled in one of the chairs around the fire pit. Gradually, everyone gathered there. Edith showed up, her face coated with dirt and dried sweat. “I brought beer in my cooler,” she said. “Enough for everyone.”
“Bless you,” I said to her since every drop of gin, vodka, tonic, and beer was by then drunk up. Edith went off with Brian and Philip to carry the cooler. After a while, she returned with a bottle of Rainier for me and told the others that cold ones were waiting for them in the cook tent. Off they went, leaving me and Edith alone. We clinked our bottles and I considered just going with the flow but what remained of the detective inside me made me ask, “What’s wrong with Ted?”
“Just a bug. Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried. I think you know I don’t give one fig about your husband. It’s you I can’t figure out. Why are you really here?”
She didn’t reply to that and we silently drank our beers as the others filtered back to the fire pit. Tanya came over. “Mike, if we don’t cook the steaks tonight, I’m afraid they could spoil.”
“Steaks!” Ray cried. “I could sure use one of those!” Others around the fire pit also cheered the prospect of eating the juicy tenderloins Laura had stocked. My muscles ached and my bones creaked but, for the morale of the troops, I was willing to be the cook even though it meant I would be preparing something I couldn’t eat. Being a vegetarian was never so hard as that evening when I smelled those steaks cooking over the charcoal. Fortunately, while Tanya and I barbequed, Laura and Amelia made biscuits and some fantastic potato salad, and Jeanette tossed a green salad so I had great food to eat, too. Ray, Brian, and Philip set up the tables and chairs. Edith, of course, supplied the beer. We were a good team. Pick was somewhere wandering. I didn’t much care if he got lost. He apparently was learning his way around, however, as he showed up in time for dinner.
After the meal, everybody else went to bed but I sat with Tanya at the fire pit. I really enjoyed her company. We talked about this and that, but then I asked her, “After this dig is finished, where do you go from here?”
She looked me over. “Where do you want me to go, Mike?”
My heart fluttered, then demanded to speak. I let it. “Wherever I am.”
She leaned over and kissed me. “I love you, you know,” she said.
I checked with old brother heart and he gave me a thumb’s up. “I love you, too.”