Читать книгу Dinosaur Fever - Marion Woodson - Страница 9

Several people were gathered around a campfire, some standing, others sitting at picnic tables.

“This is Adam,” Jamie announced. “He’s an old friend of mine and a terrific artist. He draws dinosaurs like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Hi,” Adam said.

The others looked up, called greetings, waved.

A young woman was seated at a table. “This is Bonnie,” Jamie said. “Bonnie, meet Adam.”

“Hi, sweetie. Welcome to Digsville.” Bonnie waved two fingers, sized Adam up, probably decided he was too young, or too short, or too something, and called to Jamie’s father. “Al, while you’re up, would you bring me a little drink of something. Maybe orange juice? There’s a pet.”

Bonnie was a paleontology student at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. She wore cowboy boots and a knee-length smock over cotton leggings. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail with a bright pink silk scarf.

“This is Kanga and Baby Roo,” she said as she picked up a large stuffed kangaroo with a baby in its pouch and hugged it to her chest. “Aren’t they adorable? My sweetie-pie uncle brought them back from Australia. He always brings me nice things. Doesn’t he, Kanga?” She kissed the top of the furry head.

“Here’s your drink, Bonnie girl.” Mr. Jamieson set a glass in front of her.

This was a pretty democratic group, Adam thought. Al was the only paid person here. As well as supervising the field work, the preparator had to put it all together after the digging was done — make skeletons out of bits and pieces of bones. And he seemed perfectly willing to get Bonnie drinks.

A man who was sitting on the end of a table started to strum a ukulele and sing a song about a woman named Bobby McGee. A cowboy at a dinosaur dig? He certainly looked and acted like a cowboy. Talked like one, too. Even had a cowboy name.

“That’s Slim Hardisty,” Jamie said.

Small wrinkles fanned out around Slim’s eyes, giving him a squinty look. He seemed about fifty years old. His horses were called Old Spike and Giddyup. Slim talked about his horses and his wife. Giddyup’s name was really Napoleon, but he wasn’t the fastest thing on four legs and it was a lot easier to say “Giddyup” and be done with it than yell “Giddyup, Napoleon.”

Slim’s wife got three and a half a day. “Three meals and half a bed,” he explained, and everybody laughed.

His wife looked like a cowgirl — fringed shirt, white straw Stetson hat, cowboy boots — but she didn’t speak like one. She talked like a paleontologist — about the Judith River Formation and fossil fauna and habitat influenced by rising western mountains. Her name was Denise. “Have you known our Jamie long?” she asked.

Adam’s palms began to sweat, and he felt a tightening of his jaw. “Um, not too —”

“We were at the Banff School together last spring,” Jamie interjected quickly. “Come and meet Sy.” She pulled Adam away.

Sy was older. A lot older — seventy-five at least. Both his first and last names began with an S and had a lot of consonants and not many vowels. He was tall and thin-faced and wore a green cotton work shirt and a Panama hat. Adam expected him to say, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” as he reached out to shake hands. What he did say was: “Just call me Sy.”

Sy crossed his legs, clasped his hands around one knee, and commenced to tell the story of his life, or so it seemed to Adam. He was a retired geologist and had done a lot of exploring in “the oil patch” for one of the big companies. That was how he’d become interested in fossils and artifacts.

“Sy has enough old bones to start his own museum,” Jamie said.

“Have a care now,” Sy said with a grin. “Just be careful what you say about my bones.”

Slim sang a song about staying around and playing some old town too long, and Adam wasn’t sorry when Mr. Jamieson said, “I think I’ve stayed around and played around this campfire long enough. Good-night, all.” He left, and the others followed.

Adam decided it was worth the trouble of lowering the camper table level with the two side benches to form a bed, rather than sleeping in the low space over where the truck cab should be. What luxury! He could see a few stars through the open overhead vent and part of the Big Dipper through the side window.

He was here. On the inside of the fence. And he could stay ... for a while, anyway. The people seemed nice enough, so why wasn’t he feeling exultant, elated, thrilled? Was it because all his planning, hoping, and working toward the moment had been so intense that a letdown was inevitable? Was it because he was worried about his artwork measuring up, or doing or saying something stupid in his role as an “old friend” of Jamie’s? Was it because he didn’t know how to avoid being stodgy? How could he possibly hope to turn into Mr. Personality all of a sudden?

Things looked brighter in the light of early dawn.

“Digsville,” as Bonnie had called it, boasted tents, trailers, campers, a couple of trucks, a Jeep, an old Volkswagen Beetle, and several bicycles.

An Atco trailer served as a cookhouse/dining room, and that was where Adam was heading when he heard running footsteps behind him and felt a slap on the back.

“Hi, guy! Put her there, man! Mike’s the name, micropaleo’s the game.” An exuberant young man with longish dark hair tied back with an elastic band clasped Adam’s hand and shook it vigorously.

“Micropaleontology?” Adam said. “So you study the —”

“Yeah. The micro sites, the little guys — frogs, bugs.”

“Uh ... nice to meet you.”

“Ditto.” Mike scrutinized Adam with a puzzled frown. “So you’re the famous artist. I thought you’d be older. Anyway, catch you later.” He headed in the direction of the toilets on the run.

The activity in the cookhouse reminded Adam of a large family of kids getting ready for school. People were eating, slapping lunches together, grabbing fruit and juice boxes from the fridge, sorting through water canteens in the freezer, and looking for misplaced backpacks.

A young man who reminded Adam of Mike, except he was blond with short hair, paused with a cup of coffee in one hand and a slice of toast in the other. “Hi, I’m Hans. You must be ...?”

“Adam. Nice to meet you.”

Hans balanced the toast on his coffee cup and offered his left hand for a shake.

“You from around here?” Adam asked. He had decided to try to keep all conversation focused on other people.

“No. University of British Columbia. Excuse for a second. I better grab something for lunch.”

“Hans is a sedimentologist,” Jamie said. She was kneeling on the floor, fitting food and drink around various tools in her pack. “He’s working on a thesis with a long name — about rocks.”

Adam didn’t have much difficulty fitting lunch around his supplies — two sketchbooks, twelve pencils in a case, and a small pencil sharpener. He was just closing the door of the camper, ready to leave with the others, when Bonnie came running across the road with a camera.

“Hold it, sweetie. I need a picture for my album. Smile! Say ‘sex’! Gotcha!”

At 6:30 a.m. a party of ten set out for the dig. Cowboy Slim didn’t go. His role, as far as Adam could see, was to provide support for his wife, amuse and entertain with stories and song, and be the gofer — take the water barrels to Warner and fill them up every second day, run into Raymond for groceries, make an overnight trip into Calgary for glyptal, a preservative, and plaster of Paris.

In addition to the people Adam had already met — Mr. Jamieson, Jamie, Bonnie, Denise, Sy, Mike, and Hans — there were two new faces.

“You must be Adam. I’m Lois.” A short-haired, healthy-looking woman of about forty transferred a pencil from her right hand to her left, which held a notebook, and shook his hand. She and Denise walked together, and Adam overheard snatches of conversation about rose mallows, brown-eyed susans, and sunflowers. They seemed to be absorbed in identifying wildflowers and plants.

“Hi, there! Welcome aboard. I’m Herbie.” A small dark young man fell into step beside Adam.

“Thanks. I’m Adam. Are you from around here?”

“Yes, from the University of Alberta.”

“Paleontologist?” Adam asked.

“Uh-huh. I’m working on the digestive systems.” He had a slight lisp and pronounced the words digethtive thythtems. “I classify coprolites.”

Adam looked puzzled.

“Droppings,” Herbie said.

“Oh ...”

“I understand you’re going to be our resident artist for a few days.” Herbie bent down, picked up a stone, and turned it over. “Do you do book illustrations or gallery work or what?”

Adam tried to make his face appear normal, but his lips felt tight as he shook his head. “Not really. Mostly just private stuff.”

Jamie, the rescuer, had apparently overheard, because she immediately joined them. “Watch your step as we climb the hill,” she warned. “The caliche can be tricky if you step on it the wrong way.”

“Caliche?” Adam asked.

“Yeah,” Jamie said. “The little white stones. They can send you skidding along the sandstone on your butt quicker than you can say calcium carbonate.”

“Or into a cactus,” Herbie added. “And that’s not an adventure without peril.”

Adam grimaced. “I guess.”

The countryside was stark and inhospitable. Great expanses of prairie grasses — spear grass and wheat grass — were interrupted by eroded patches of rock and dirt. A few oil well pumps bobbed their grasshopper heads up and down, up and down. The morning sky was clear, and the wind hadn’t started to prowl yet. On the dry southern slope of Devil’s Coulee grew prickly pear, cushion cactus, sagebrush, yellow violets, and prairie onion.

“John Palliser sure got it right two hundred years ago when he said this country wasn’t fit for human habitation,” Adam said.

“Oh, like really? Did he say that?” Jamie gazed around. “I guess it does seem kind of barren, but I like it.” She put her hands behind her back and shoved her pack higher.

“Oh, yeah, it’s nice in a way,” Adam said quickly. Actually, the ambience was improving. There were surprises in the sear landscape — patches of bright yellow buffalo beans, golden asters, bluebells. Ground squirrels popped beady-eyed heads out of dens, peered around with quick movements, then crept cautiously out to sit up straight and swivel their necks to search for danger.

“Isn’t it just the most perfect thing?” Jamie shaded her eyes with a hand and gazed up at the coulee. “Only a tiny fraction of dinosaur remains are ever fossilized and here we have whole nests right in our own backyard.”

Adam tried to think of something un-stodgy to say. “Yeah, funny, isn’t it? All this time they’ve been finding fossils of adults but no kids. They just weren’t looking in the right place. I mean — right church, wrong pew.”

“You got it,” Jamie said. “The duckbills laid their eggs in upper coastal plains where there was good mud-pie stuff for nests.”

“And I think the most amazing thing of all is that they cared for their young.” Mr. Jamieson had joined them. “Evidence from the Montana site indicates the little guys were fed by one or both parents for several months.”

“So they weren’t the big clumsy lummoxes we’ve been led to believe,” Adam said. “I always suspected as much.”

“Right, Mr. Einstein,” Jamie said with a teasing smile.

On the northern slope of the coulee there were larger shrubs and a few trees. Saskatoon bushes hung with purple berries, wild roses stored the sun in rosy hips, buckbrush and kinnikinnick spread thick branches over the ground.

“Listen ...” Jamie said. “That’s why radios are banned. So we can hear the birds.”

Mourning doves cooed, and horned larks added clear, high-pitched voices from overhead.

As they climbed the bare sandstone bluff, Mr. Jamieson stopped to point out bones and parts of eggs eroding out of the hillside.

“Wow! That’s incredible!” Adam said, crouching beside Jamie’s father. “They’re sure hard to see.”

This fossil-hunting business wasn’t as easy as it sounded. There were no signs saying BABY BONES HERE, and no pointing arrows stating FOSSILS THIS WAY.

“Here’s the femur from a baby dinosaur,” Jamie said, pointing at a tiny stick protruding from the rock. It was less than two centimetres long. “The same leg bone in an adult would be over a metre long. Pretty small babies for such big animals, eh?”

Adam whistled. “Yeah, really.”

The wind had started to blow again, and his hair was the wrong length. He hated to admit it, but Jamie was right. Everybody, men and women, wore their hair very short or tied back in a braid or ponytail.

He must look like one of those plastic troll dolls his little sister collected. He wore shorts, gym shoes, and a T-shirt. His orangey freckled face, legs, and arms were slathered with sunscreen; his reddish hair spiked around his head like cushion cactus; and he peered through his double layer of eyeglasses like a squinty-eyed mole.

Adam forgot whipping hair, whirling dust, and squinty eyes in the excitement of actually seeing the nests and the eggs, flattened like fat pancakes from millions of years under pressure. They were the size of pie plates and were arranged in a herringbone pattern in circles in their rock beds. His skin crawled, and he felt a deep yearning to know and understand the creature that had built this nest. He touched one of the eggs, running his fingers over the pebbly surface.

Mr. Jamieson was watching. “Pretty thrilling stuff, isn’t it?”

Adam nodded.

Devil’s Coulee rose in bumps and ridges at a steep incline, and two flat ledges had been cut into the side hill, providing platforms for the workers. Around the platforms two-sided screens made of metal posts and fine black nylon webbing protected them from the wind and dust coming from the south and west. They also helped keep the nests free of soil buildup.

Jamie, along with Bonnie, Herbie, and Denise, gathered around one of the sites and began to unpack tools: geology hammers, knives, chisels, paintbrushes, whisk brooms, medicine droppers, small dental picks, ice picks, toothbrushes, even a mascara brush. They also each produced a field notebook, a bottle of glyptal, and empty medicine vials for bits of egg shell and other small finds. Then they began to work, two people on one egg, chipping and brushing with meticulous care.

The other group — Lois, Sy, and Hans — had moved to a different site about eight metres away.

“The animals were seven to ten metres long, and that was sort of the pecking distance,” Jamie said. “They had togetherness and still had room to move around. You don’t need other people looking over your shoulder when you’re trying to get your nest just right, now do you?”

“I guess not,” Adam said.

Mike was huddled over his micro site farther up the hill where two wind-eroded hoodoos punctured the skyline. Mr. Jamieson, with his map on a metal clipboard, was as excited as an expectant father, moving from one group to the other, giving instructions and encouragement.

Denise was the fossil illustrator. The site had been marked out with string and stakes into a grid. She carried a large pad, already mapped, with one page representing a square on the grid, and her job, as well as to participate in the digging, was to sketch the fossils as they were unearthed.

“Al uses a camera, too” she explained to Adam. “But it can’t show exact distances, levels, and positions the way my illustrations can.”

Adam’s plan was to sketch several stages of the digging, as well, but he wanted to capture not the scientific data but the feel of it — the coulee, the sun, the distant mountains, and the people. Conversation drifted around him as he sat with his back against a boulder, his sketchbook on his bent knees, and got lost in the scene.

His first sketch showed kneeling, sitting, reclining, and stooping figures, some partially hidden by screens, most wearing gloves, some wearing knee pads, some with hat brims pulled down tightly to shade faces from thirty-five-degree temperatures, one Panama hat. Adam included the paraphernalia that was on hand — toilet paper, bags of plaster of Paris, two small barrels of water, and strips of burlap. Not to mentions bigger tools — shovels, picks, and grub hoes.

He wanted a “before” and “after” series entitled “Now and Then: What a Difference Seventy-Five Million Years Can Make.” But the “before” and “after,” he feared, would more likely apply before and after people found out he was a fake. He was a far cry from the “professional” Jamie had made him out to be.

“Hmm. You have quite a knack for that, son.” Mr. Jamieson was looking down at Adam’s work.

“Thanks. I’d like to do another one. Same place, but with the dinosaurs here building the nests.”

“Sure. Interesting approach. You’ve got a pretty decent talent. It’s funny Jamie’s never mentioned you.”

Adam felt the skin at the back of his neck begin to prickle. Here it comes, he thought. He’s going to ask questions I won’t know how to answer.

But Mr. Jamieson didn’t. He tilted his head back and swept his arms around as though pulling Devil’s Coulee into his chest. “This whole expanse of country was once a rich, lush garden. Just think of it. All those different breeds, each with its own specially adapted teeth, chomping and chomping away.” He made chomping noises with his mouth.

Adam turned the page of his sketchbook and began a “before” drawing. For starters, he had decided to do a distant scene so that the dinosaurs were shrouded in mist and the details wouldn’t have to be perfect.