Bones of the Earth (9 page)

“And then?”

“Then I explained about my fossil. I told them that this meant that birds were not descended from dinosaurs, but from animals that existed before dinosaurs evolved. That birds were at best a sister clade to dinosaurs. And I capped it by declaring, ‘Dinosaurs are extinct
again!
' They ate it up and licked the spoon afterwards.”

The musky smells of the dunes, with their hints of cinnamon and bayberry, took on a darker tinge of sulfur and rotting vegetation. They'd come to the edge of the salt marsh. The trail divided here into two barely-visible tracks, one leading into the marsh and one into the woods. “We head inland here.”

Cycads and low conifers rose up to either side of the trail. They passed into green shadow, walking single file and listening for predators.

Salley wondered how much it would cost to put a Global Positioning System in place. Then anytime a researcher used an animal trail, it could be automatically tracked and recorded, and dumped in a database for analysis back in the twenty-first century. The only trouble would be how to identify which individual trails were made by which animals. But that was grad student work again, and it was easier to get grad students when you didn't have to arrange funding to take them out into the field.

“How would you handle it today?” Monk asked abruptly.

“Handle what?”

“Your feathered fossil. If you had it to do all over again.”

She pretended to think, briefly, though she'd gone over the scenario in her mind so many times it almost felt as though it had already happened. “Well, today I've still got a touch of residual fame, so I'd call a press conference instead of working the phones. I'd get myself all glammed up to help ensure they gave the story some coverage. And this time I'd make sure I had a
real good
specimen. The one I had was too fragmented. They said it was a mosaic of different species jumbled together. They said the feather trace was just dendrites. I should've gone back out and dug until I found something complete. Something flashy. Something that nobody could deny.”

“That's the key, then?”

“A killer specimen. You got it.”

The trail twisted, and there ahead of them was the blind. The walls were made of small tree trunks lashed together, and the roof was thatched with cycad leaves. It sat at the edge of the woods, overlooking a browse plain that had recently been eaten clear by sauropods and now held only low vegetation. “Last man-made structure for 7,900 miles,” Salley said. “Lydia built it herself with a hatchet and a ball of twine.”

Lydia Pell was sitting in her blind, knitting and reading a book propped up on the shelf beneath the window slit. She put down her knitting and turned off the book when they came in. Salley introduced her to Monk, and then said, “Tell him what you're up to here.”

Lydia was round-faced and plump, in a middle-aged way. She opened up two camp chairs for her guests, and said, “Well, it's quite a story. I was making my rounds and, among other things, I had in mind to check up on a widow fisher whose nest I had found, when—”

“Widow fisher?” Monk asked.

“
Eogripeus hoffmannii
. It means ‘dawn-fisher.' Named after Phil Hoffmann because it was one of his students who identified it as a basal spinosaur, maybe even the node taxon for the clade.” She put a finger to her chin and smiled so he would understand that the student was herself. “A great big thing with a narrow little snout like a crocodile's. Out in the field, we just call them fishers. This particular fisher was a widow because her mate had been eaten by allosaurs a couple of days before.”

“Ahh. I see. Go on.”

“Well, anyway, I spotted an allosaur behaving oddly. I thought at first she was injured because she was moving so awkwardly. Like this.” She stood up and leaned forward, arms tucked up and butt thrust out backward, and made a few comically clumsy steps. “I quickly realized that what I had here was a gravid allosaur—one that was heavy with eggs. But what made her movements so strange wasn't the fact that she was pregnant, but that she was peering around like this.” She swung her head back and forth, in a furtive and guilty manner. “Believe it or not, she was
sneaking around!
”

Salley laughed and, after an instant's hesitation, so did Monk.

“Well, exactly. An eleven-meter-long carnivore trying to look inconspicuous is one funny sight. But also an interesting one. Just what was she up to? Why was she sniffing and searching around like that?

“It turned out she was looking for the fisher's nest. When she found it, I thought she would eat the eggs—which would've been intriguing in itself—but instead, she squatted down over them and with surprising delicacy deposited one egg of her own. And then she left.”

“Nest parasitism?” Monk asked.

“Yes. Just like a cuckoo. I picked out a good site, built this blind, and hunkered down to observe.”

“Show him the nest,” Salley suggested.

Obligingly, Lydia Pell handed Monk her binoculars. “Straight out,” she said, “where the land begins to rise. You see that little stand of cycads? Good. Right in the middle of it, there's a darker green spot, and that's the widow. Can you make her out?”

“No.”

“Be patient. Keep looking.”

“I don't … whoah! She just sat up.” A bright streak of blue rose up from the cycads—the silvery underbelly of the fisher. She craned her neck to its utmost, peering anxiously into the woods. Then, with a clumsy surge, she stood. Her narrow snout turned one way and then the other. “What's she doing?”

“She's looking around for her mate. A fisher is not a brilliant animal, I'm afraid. Just look at those big-mama hips! All butt and no brain.”

“Her back blends in with the shrubs perfectly.” He returned the glasses. “But why is her belly that color?”

“A fisher spends a lot of its time crouching over the water,” Salley said promptly. “The light belly makes it less noticeable to the fish.” To Lydia Pell, she said, “Tell him the rest of your story.”

“Oh, yes. Well, eventually her eggs hatched. The poor widow had to go fishing to feed her hatch-lings, and that meant leaving them alone several times a day. Life is not easy for a single mom. Still, it was convenient for me. I was able to monitor the nest on a daily basis.

“The allosaur hatched a good two days later than the others. It was a little bigger than its siblings, and it seemed to me—though I wasn't close enough to be sure—that it got more than its share of fish.

“The next day, there was one fewer hatchling in the nest.”

Monk whistled.

“Cain-and-Abel syndrome, exactly right! Every day since, there's been one fewer fisher hatchling. Like clockwork, one fewer every day. Now there's only the one overfed allosaur chick and still the poor misguided widow fisher keeps bringing it fish. How long will the hatchling keep working this scam? Will the widow ever wise up? It's quite a soap opera, you've got to admit.”

“How much longer does it have to run?”

“Well, fisher chicks normally leave the nest three weeks after they hatch, so not very long I expect. Unfortunately, I'm expected to be back at Columbia tomorrow, prepping for this year's classes. Which is why I asked Salley to take over here for me.”

Monk looked sharply at Salley. She said, “You'd think it would be just as easy to return you to the opening of the school year two weeks from now as it is today.”

“That's exactly what I said. But would they do it for me? No. Bureaucrats! ‘One day home time for every day deep time. No exceptions.'”

“I hate that kind of thinking. I hate dishonesty. I hate deception. Most of all, I hate secrecy. If I were in your position, I'd hunker down and make them drag me away.”

“Well, that's you, isn't it, Salley? Not all of us are such terrible rebels. My things are packed and waiting by the time funnel. This time tomorrow I'll be facing a campus full of freshly-scrubbed, vacuous young faces. I—well! No use dragging things out. It's time I left.” She slapped her knees and stood.

They followed her outside.

“Have I left anything? Hat, water bottle … You can have the camp chairs. I see you're collecting archies again. Jorgenson doesn't appreciate you, Salley.”

“Is there anything I need to know?”

“The widow leaves her nest three or four times a day. Wait until she's out of sight—you'll have at least twenty minutes before she returns. You only need to check on the nest once a day, I expect. When the allosaur leaves, write up your notes and ship them forward. I'll see you get second credit on the paper.”

“I look forward to it,” Salley said.

Lydia Pell gave Salley a quick hug. “I'm so grateful,” she said. “This work means so much to me, and I wouldn't trust it to anyone else.”

At last, she left.

“Okay,” Salley sighed. “Now we wait. Switch on your machine. We might as well make the most of it.”

Hours passed. The interview droned on.

“Where did you find the fossil in the first place?”

“I acquired it at a mineral and fossil shop. On the drive home from a summer dig. I stopped off in—well, never mind where—and struck up a conversation with the proprietor. Naomi was an amateur fossil hunter, and she asked me to identify a batch of specimens she'd picked up, and this was among them. I asked where she'd acquired it, and she got out the maps, and promised to lead me to the spot in the spring.”

“You told her how valuable it was, of course.”

“Of course.”

“But she just gave it to you, anyway.”

“Yes.”

“You must've hit it off pretty well.”

They'd set up business at a table in the enclosed porch in back of the shop—Naomi lived in back and upstairs of the store—going through shoe boxes and coffee-cans of fossils, and slabs of rock wrapped in newspaper. After two hours, with almost everything classified, Salley leaned back in her chair and, staring through the screens, saw a few cottonwoods, a car up on cinder blocks, and the empty gravel parking lot behind a shabby roadhouse some distance down the highway.

Naomi returned from the kitchen with a teapot, and saw her glance. “Not much to look at, I'm afraid,” she said. “It gets pretty lonely out here sometimes.”

“I'll bet.” Salley held a rock up to the light and put it down with the other miscellaneous crocodilian scutes. “How'd you get stuck here?”

“Oh, well, you know.” Naomi wore a sleeveless top and a loose skirt that brushed against her ankles. She was a lean woman with sharp features, angular and nervous, with large brown eyes. “See, I bought this place with a friend, but she …”

Salley unwrapped one final slab. She took one look, drew in her breath, and stopped listening.

The bones had fossilized in a disarticulated jumble, and then been further damaged by Naomi's clumsy extraction. But they were still readable. One fragmentary ulna was broken open, revealing a hollow interior. The skull had held together better than might be expected, and showed avian hallmarks in lateral aspect, including what might be a modified diapsid condition. There was a fragment of jaw nearby with distinctly unavian teeth.

And winding through the matrix, like a halo around the mangled remains, was a dark feather trace.

“Where did this come from?” she asked, hiding her excitement.

“Up Copperhead Creek, there's a Triassic out-cropping. It's one of my favorite fossiling sites. I could take you there, if you like.”

Salley, bent low over the fossil, said, “Yes, I'd like that very much.”

“You would? You can? Really?” Naomi set down her cup so rapidly that Salley jumped at the sound. She looked up, expecting to see it shatter.

Their eyes met.

Naomi blushed, and turned away in confusion.

My God, Salley thought. She's flirting. With me. Well, that explained those big, googly eyes. That explained her nervousness. That explained any number of odd things she'd said.

In a sudden flash of insight, then, she saw exactly how it must be for Naomi. This poor, lonely woman. Still carrying a torch for the friend who'd saddled her with this business, and then left. And now a hotshot young vertebrate paleontologist comes breezing through her life, bronze-skinned and windblown from a summer spent digging up
Elasmosaurus
skeletons, with a rusted-out old Ford Windstar crammed with fossils and a head full of sacred lore. Small wonder she'd be infatuated.

This kind of empathy was not typical of Salley, and she resented experiencing it now. It made her want to do something for the poor cow. It almost made her wish she were the type who'd feel obliged to give the woman a mercy fuck on the way out.

But she wasn't. And what a mess that would be if she were. Salley didn't believe in an irrational emotional life—not since that mess with Timmy. She firmly believed that if everyone were ruled by self-interest, there'd be a lot less human misery in the world.

“I have to be back at Yale by Tuesday,” she said carefully.

“Oh.” Naomi stared down at her hands, clasped about the tea cup.

“Still … maybe this spring?” Despising herself, she looked the woman direct in her eyes and smiled. “I bet it's lovely out here in the springtime.”

Those eyes lit up with hope. Next time, they said, she would surely be bolder, braver, able to seize the opportunity. “Of course,” she said. “I've got camping equipment, a tent. We could spend a few days.”

“Good. I'd like that.” Standing, Salley reached out and squeezed Naomi's hand. The woman actually shivered. Oh God, Salley thought, you've got it bad. She picked up the fossil.

Casually, she said, “Mind if I borrow this? I'll return it next time I'm through.”

None of which she told Monk, of course. He'd've put it in his book—and where was the science in
that?